From Jennies To Jets

A detailed history of the world's major airlines profusely illustrated with full-page photographs of nearly every type of commercial aircraft in use since World War I.

From Jennys to Jets takes you on an All-American adventure. Fly along with daredevil young pilots in the early days of aviation barnstorming, wingwalking, flying through massive snowstorms, landing on jungle airstrips with crocodiles and snakes. The action follows Bill Randall over a 40-year period, from 1918 to 1958. It begins as he barnstorms all over northern California with friends and his bride, Helen. The barnstorming slows in 1926 when Prohibition is in full force. To pay his bills, Bill teaches at a flight school in Oregon that turns out to have a hidden agenda. Later, Bill joins some of his friends flying planes in Howard Hughes epic World War I flying movie, Hells Angels. After the motion-picture adventure, Bill heads to Kansas City to fly the mail between Kansas City and St. Louis. Narrowly missing death in a Christmas Eve snowstorm, Bill and Helen decide to head back to California. When their marriage falls apart, Bill takes a job in Guatemala where he encounters snakes, crocodiles, and other curious creatures in the jungle. After a year, Bill is back in Los Angeles. Now he has to deal with women from an all-girls flying school, mobsters smuggling in Chinese from Mexico, and hookers in the desert. He even makes a special flight to get the famous stripper, Sally Rand, to a court appearance and back to her nightclub act on time. Although Bill was 46 years old at the beginning of World War II, he was still able to join the U.S. Army Air Corps and serve in the South Pacific. His letters home from the Pacific provide new insights into World War II. From Jennys to Jets is a fictionalized account of real-life aviator Bill Randall. Some of the action and many of the characters are purely fictional.

Barely 40 years separate the Wright brothers' flight and those of the first jet aircraft. The World War II pilots who were the first to fly those jets and who would later become the first airline pilots, learned to fly in little cloth and wooden biplanes, the aircraft of the 1920s and 1930s. One such airplane was the Curtiss JN4 "Jenny," known as the "Model T of airplanes" because it was the first aircraft to be mass-produced. The Jenny was built in large numbers during the World War I; after the war, surplus Jennys flooded the market, becoming the airplane of choice for barnstormers and early airmail pilots-and the one in which famous aviation pioneers, from Charles Lindbergh to Amelia Earhart to Bessie Coleman learned to fly. Jenny is the story of this remarkable airplane. Told from the point of view of an early pilot, it imagines the experience of flying a Jenny, and illustrates how an aircraft was made during a time when building airplanes was a craft. Besides being beautiful objects, these little airplanes are simple enough that it is easy for young readers to understand not only how they were built, but how their control surfaces work and how they fly. In later decades airplanes would get bigger and heavier, fly faster and higher, but even the most advanced swept-wing jet traces its lineage back to the earliest little airplanes of cloth and wood.

The story of a pilot that will be treasured by all who long to relive those exciting years of the growth of American aviation.