Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are interested in the history of aviation and how jet transportation forever changed our world, this is the book to read...and even if you hadn't thought about it, check it out. Global air travel is now taken for granted and this book details the trials and tribulations of those who were in competition to shrink the globe by developing the first jet transport.
I took a bit different approach to reading the book, skipping to the end to read about the genesis of the book in the Epilogue. Author Sam Howe Verhovek has conducted extensive research on Boeing, de Havilland and the people who were the visionaries within those companies. He located great resources in libraries and company archives and crafted a history that is very readable. His writing skills allow the technical information on the 707 and the Comet to be interleaved with the personalities of the engneers, test pilots and executives in a way that personalizes the technical nature of the endeavor. The book is broken down into chapters that detail the efforts of both manufacturers, the aviators, the companies and the race itself, and each story is covered nicely.
There is a lot of entertainment packed into 272 pages, I highly recommend taking it along on your next flight to learn how people and planes forever changed our world.
Kent Lewis
Signal Charlie

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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.

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