Conquest of the Skies

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Carl Solberg’s Conquest of the Skies is a comprehensive, yet entertaining, history of commercial aviation in the United States.  If you are an aviation buff, this book belongs in your library.

The author begins with the Wright Brothers’ famous first flight on the sand dunes of a North Carolina beach in 1903—picking up the story in earnest with the primitive airmail flights of the 1920s.  From there, he traces commercial aviation’s progress through the 1970s.  Along the way, Solberg explores the technological advances of aircraft—much of it spurred by two world wars.  He traces improvements in navigation from the use of Rand-McNally automobile road maps to radio navigation and instrument landing systems.  In similar fashion, Solberg covers the evolutions of the airlines, airports, air traffic control, logistics and support systems, and other facets of commercial aviation.

Throughout the book, the narrative stays fresh and appealing through Solberg’s use of anecdotes, quotes from famous personalities, photographs and a conversational style that engages the reader.  Avoiding a heavy use of numbers and statistics, he uses them only when necessary to support a key point.

Published in 1979, Conquest of the Skies covers the 75 or so years when commercial flying was still something of a wonder—before it became the travel headache it is today. In fact, Solberg concluded his book with this acknowledgment:

The novelty of long-distance flight had ceased to be novel. There was now no other way to go.  The miracle of flight…had been triumphantly turned into a repetitive and unexciting routine.  The adventure was over.

If you’re not much into aviation, you likely will not enjoy this book. But if you are, you will relish every minute you spend with Conquest of the Skies.

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Quotes

[Dean Smith, 1920s airmail pilot]   Above in the haze layer with the sun behind you or sinking ahead, alone in an open cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see.  The upper surface at the haze stretches on like a vast and endless desert, featureless and flat, and empty to the horizon.  It seems your world alone.  Threading one’s way through the great piles of summer cumulus that hang over the plains, the patches of ground that show far below through the white are for earthbound folk, and the cloud shapes are sculptured just for you.  It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic and humdrum.

In all of [their] first year, Pan Am toted only 1,184 passengers.  One of them, nervous and scowling, was Al Capone, on an urgent errand of rum-running, no doubt.  “Better see it’s a safe plane—if anything happens to us, remember, it won’t be so healthy for you,” growled one of the four bodyguards as he dropped a thousand-dollar bill on the ticket agent’s counter.

The jets exerted a particularly powerful pull on the young, who felt none of the old hesitancies about taking to the skies.  With jets the number of young people studying in Europe rose 150 percent; it soon became commonplace for American students to know several continents first hand before they were twenty-one.

Up to 1945, when a Boeing bomber delivered World War II’s final blow upon the people of Nagasaki, 95 percent of all plans ever flown were warplanes.

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