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Maverick: The Story of Robert Six and Continental Airlines
This is the story of the extraordinary man behind one of America’s more dramatic business-success stories.
Entertaining, highly readable, and packed with anecdotes, it tells the tale of a self-educated flying enthusiast—and ex-sailor, ex-truck driver, ex-pilot—who built a tiny shoestring airline into an empire.
Robert Six’s career began in the buccaneering days of aviation, when every flight was an adventure, and has continued into the age of jets and supersonic transports. Tough, scrappy and a gambler, Six set out to beat the big airlines at their own game, and made Continental into one of the most profitable and reliable “big little” airlines in the world. The results are almost a legend in the circles of commercial aviation and American business.
Robert J. Serling has done a masterful job of combining history, reporting, and biography. The result is a lively view of the history of commercial airlines in America, and a vivid portrait of a man who helped make that history vital and colorful—Robert F. Six, one of aviation’s last rugged individualists.
Praise for Robert J. Serling:
‘Woven with examples of Six’s fire-eating temperament, sentimentality and nervous emotion’ – Kirkus Review
Robert J. Serling’s career as an aviation writer began as an editor of aviation news for UPI in Washington, D.C., and evolved into full-time book-writing. His complete knowledge of flying and aircraft make his non-fiction books as valuable as they are engrossing, and contributed no little to the success of novels like The President’s Plane Is Missing and She’ll Never Get Off the Ground, both of which were also made into films.
Entertaining, highly readable, and packed with anecdotes, it tells the tale of a self-educated flying enthusiast—and ex-sailor, ex-truck driver, ex-pilot—who built a tiny shoestring airline into an empire.
Robert Six’s career began in the buccaneering days of aviation, when every flight was an adventure, and has continued into the age of jets and supersonic transports. Tough, scrappy and a gambler, Six set out to beat the big airlines at their own game, and made Continental into one of the most profitable and reliable “big little” airlines in the world. The results are almost a legend in the circles of commercial aviation and American business.
Robert J. Serling has done a masterful job of combining history, reporting, and biography. The result is a lively view of the history of commercial airlines in America, and a vivid portrait of a man who helped make that history vital and colorful—Robert F. Six, one of aviation’s last rugged individualists.
Praise for Robert J. Serling:
‘Woven with examples of Six’s fire-eating temperament, sentimentality and nervous emotion’ – Kirkus Review
Robert J. Serling’s career as an aviation writer began as an editor of aviation news for UPI in Washington, D.C., and evolved into full-time book-writing. His complete knowledge of flying and aircraft make his non-fiction books as valuable as they are engrossing, and contributed no little to the success of novels like The President’s Plane Is Missing and She’ll Never Get Off the Ground, both of which were also made into films.
- GenresAviation
424 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 22, 2019
31 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 27, 2021
Author needs an editor
If you want to know every time someone at Continental airlines passed gas this is the book for you. Serling is a great researcher but he provides a mind numbing amount of detail that fills a lot of pages but is too inside baseball.
If you want to know every time someone at Continental airlines passed gas this is the book for you. Serling is a great researcher but he provides a mind numbing amount of detail that fills a lot of pages but is too inside baseball.
Displaying 1 of 1 review