Commercial Aircraft

The book I read to research this post was Commercial Aircraft by Michael J Taylor which is a very good book which I bought from a car boot sale. This book was published in 1983 so is quite dated but is good as a round up of the various fields that comprise commercial aircraft. When this book was published the idea of budget airlines flying to lesser airports and having it subsidized by them and passing it on to the passengers as cheap airfares hadn’t been conceived. Boeing’s offerings had only reached the 767 and air transport worldwide was in decline. Small short and medium range aircraft operating for small airlines were very popular and these companies had loads of orders which is probably still the same. Aircraft like the islander were an example of this aircraft that did very well. The first jet airliner was the De Havilland Comet that even did routes like London to Johannesburg and often reduced the flying time by about 60%. Some of these Comets did have crashes so they were withdrawn and by the time the problems were sorted out the Boeing 707 was released and sold over 900 aircraft which is a huge amount. They only sold 112 Comets by comparison. Another type of aircraft is cargo aircraft and with these it is less important how fast the plane travels. In fact in many cases cargo aircraft are retired passenger aircraft that have been modified. You can have combined passenger and cargo aircraft which are frequently small and you often see this in poorer countries or routes that don’t get many passengers like island routes. Another type of airplane is agricultural aircraft and there is even one with a turbofan although with these speed is usually unimportant and more important factors are rate of climb and manouvreability.  The first airlines were operated in Germany by airships around the turn of the 20th century and of course there was a big accident with the Hindenburg in America when the Hydrogen that made it fly caught alight. The first airlines operated by aircraft were in America and after World War 1 in around 1919 there was a wave of airlines because they were lots of ex airforce pilots looking for work and lots of surplus military aircraft. These aircraft had a very limited passenger capacity but the price of an air ticket gradually got reduced.