The Airway to Everywhere: A History of All American Aviation, 1937-1953

by W. David Lewis and William F. Lewis, W. David & Trimble

Book Overview

This book chronicles the history of All American Aviation of western Pennsylvania, a commercial airline pioneer. The brainchild of self-styled inventor Dr. Lytle S. Adams and Richard C. du Pont, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822935791
• ISBN13: 9780822935797
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

How An Idea To Benefit Small Communities Become An Airline

Lytle S. Adams, a descendant of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, clearly saw that smaller communiities were at a substantial disadvantage in the emerging field of airmail. The process of landing and take-off of airplanes was so time-consuming that it limited the number of stops an airplane could make to the larger communities with larger airports. So he developed a plan to solve the problem, a problem which was similar to the difficulty of bringing electricity to rural areas (solved by the Rural Electric Administration and the cooperatives it spawned), bringing transportation to rural areas (solved by the U.S. Interstate Highway network), bringing television to rural areas (solved by the laying of cable to them). His plan involved tecnnical ingenuity: the development of a device to hook on to an overhead cable where containers of mail would be be placed, so that mail could be picked up on regularly defined roots without a plane taking the trouble to land to take-off. His idea gained political backing in the Roosevelt Administration and from the New Deal Democrats in Congress, because it fit in with their strategies to integrate isolated communities into the mainstream of American life. Through Roosevelt's daughter who had married into the DuPont family, he met Richard C. DuPont, an aviation enthusiast, who had the money and the skill to develop Adams' idea into a functioning company called All American Aviation. The Adams-DuPont relationship had tragic personal overtones, although it was extremely productive in the long run. DuPont did not give Adams the financial rewards he hoped for,added insult to injury by reworking Adams' technology to make it more effective, and ultimately bought him out as the relationship became increasingly bitter and mutually distrustful. And DuPont's dynamic corporate leadership--he had become head of the corporation at the age of 28-- led him to be offered to take over the U.S. Army's glider program as a special assistant to Army Air Forces Chief Henry H. "Hap" Arnold. In this position, DuPont was testing one of the new motorless airships, when the craft fell into a spin, his parachute malfunctioned, and he fell to his death at the age of 33. During World War II, the company's no-landing pickup system hit its peak in utilization, but it failed to make money and relied on governmental subsidies. After World War II, it faced the additional problem of steadily improving highways, which allowed mail to be picked up faster and cheaper without the no-landing pickup system. With its back to the wall, All-American Aviation was offered a chance to become a passenger airline serving new or under-utilized routes. It leaped at this chance for financial salvation, and evolved over time into Alleheny Airlines and then U.S. Air. The strengths of this book are many: detailed explanations of technology and technological changes, clear explanations of business strategy and the regulatory system, and concise ex