Overview

The dawn of the jet age—in the late 1950s—forced legacy airlines to upgrade their fleets while selling off ‘big prop’ airliners which were still young in hours, but technically obsolete. It was an era in which scheduled airline services were strictly regulated and the smaller supplemental airlines struggled to survive. For those willing to buy or lease ‘nearly new’ aircraft, there were bargains aplenty. In the United States, travel clubs and affinity groups found loopholes in the CAB’s regulations allowing them to offer charters to their members at prices that were often less than half the scheduled fares. New clubs—sometimes loosely constituted and with minimal finance—sprang up and their brightly coloured aircraft were seen at airports across the continent. Michael Zoeller has minutely researched their history while creating hundreds of illustrations highlighting their varied and often inventive liveries.

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9781914489389

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Michael Zoeller is an internationally renowned graphic designer and print specialist, as well as a lifelong aviation enthusiast. His articles and illustrations have been published in Air-Britain, Airways and Propliner magazines as well as in Air-Britain Books and online. He became interested in US travel clubs in the early 1970s. 'I just liked the mix of old prop-driven airliners and early jet types plus the often exotic names and colour schemes worn by travel club aircraft. The last of the clubs died out in the 1980s but my interest continued and with the help of the internet I was able to discover more and more about the carriers and their operations. My trade as a graphic designer helped me to create drawings of the schemes, especially if good colour photos were lacking. Many are included in my book, Classic Airliners. My aim is to chronicle every club registered in the USA and Canada that fitted into the travel club category, to show illustrations or photos of their aircraft, to give some detail into the exact types operated and, where possible, a short history of the club.'

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