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 air- borne: 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 descen- dant, 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 and 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 and adventures of overseas associates, and innovative transoceanic experiments with catapult-launched aircraft.

As in Pan Am, the first book in this series, Lufthansa: An Airline and Its Aircraft is filled with meticulously compiled tables of vital data; scores of photographs, some never before published; and Mike Machat's superb, painstakingly accurate aircraft drawings.