Lufthansa An Airline and Its Aircraft

Germany's national airline, Lufthansa, traces its heritage to the earliest years of aviation. By 1919, when Lufthansa's first progenitor, Deutsche Luft-Reederei, established the crane symbol still proudly carried today, the German public was already airborne: Count Zeppelin's airships had carried more than ten thousand paying passengers before World War I, generating a flying start for Lufthansa's ancestors. During its formative years the airline mirrored the progress of German aviation technology. The all-metal Junkers-F 13 of 1919 was years ahead of its time. Its direct descendant, the Junkers-Ju 52/3m--Tante Ju--was built in greater numbers than any other transport aircraft except the DC-3. The 1926 Rohrbach Roland's box-spar wing & stressed skin heralded the multicellular construction still standard today. And Lufthansa launched other pacesetting types, from the 1938 transatlantic Focke-Wulf Condor to the Airbus family of the 1980s. The author's exhaustive research turned up much noteworthy new material, including a comprehensive genealogy of Lufthansa's numerous ancestors, succinct surveys & adventures of overseas associates & innovative transoceanic experiments with catapult-launched aircraft. As in Pan Am, the first book in this series, Lufthansa: An Airline & Its Aircraft is filled with meticulously compiled tables of vital data; scores of photographs, some never before published; & Mike Machat's superb, painstakingly accurate aircraft drawings.Davies, R. E. G. is the author of 'Lufthansa An Airline and Its Aircraft' with ISBN 9780962648335 and ISBN 0962648337.