Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology
|
Buy Now
Jet Age - The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World (Paperback)
Loot Price: R549
Discovery Miles 5 490
You Save: R74
(12%)
|
|
Jet Age - The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World (Paperback)
(sign in to rate)
List price R623
Loot Price R549
Discovery Miles 5 490
You Save R74 (12%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
The captivating story of the titans, engineers, and pilots who
raced to design a safe and lucrative passenger jet.
In "Jet Age," journalist Sam Howe Verhovek explores the advent of
the first generation of jet airliners and the people who designed,
built, and flew them. The path to jet travel was triumphal and
amazingly rapid-less than fifty years after the Wright Brothers'
first flight at Kitty Hawk, Great Britain led the world with the
first commercial jet plane service. Yet the pioneering British
Comet was cursed with a tragic, mysterious flaw, and an upstart
Seattle company put a new competitor in the sky: the Boeing 707 Jet
Stratoliner. "Jet Age" vividly recreates the race between two
nations, two global airlines, and two rival teams of brilliant
engineers for bragging rights to the first jet service across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1958.
At the center of this story are great minds and courageous souls,
including Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, who spearheaded the
development of the Comet, even as two of his sons lost their lives
flying earlier models of his aircraft; Sir Arnold Hall, the
brilliant British aerodynamicist tasked with uncovering the Comet's
fatal flaw; Bill Allen, Boeing's deceptively mild-mannered
president; and Alvin "Tex" Johnston, Boeing's swashbuckling but
supremely skilled test pilot. The extraordinary airplanes
themselves emerge as characters in the drama. As the Comet and the
Boeing 707 go head-to-head, flying twice as fast and high as the
propeller planes that preceded them, the book captures the
electrifying spirit of an era: the Jet Age.
In the spirit of Stephen Ambrose's "Nothing Like It in the World,"
Verhovek's "Jet Age" offers a gorgeous rendering of an exciting age
and fascinating technology that permanently changed our conception
of distance and time, of a triumph of engineering and design, and
of a company that took a huge gamble and won.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.