Hard Landing

The revealing and dramatic story of how a dozen men fought each other for control of the world's airlines. The airline business was created and thrust into maturity within barely 50 years, making it much younger than radio broadcasting, telecommunications, movie-making or automobile manufacturing. Yet it is the fastest-moving and most dangerous marketplace of all.
At the highest level, at the airlines that matter, barely a dozen people have played this game in the past 25 years - a small group of white men who made the industry their sandpit from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. Through diverse paths, these men rose to become only the third generation of management in the history of the airline industry. As they began to reach the top, the rules of the game were utterly transformed: deregulation launched the airlines into a capitalistic free-for-all, a zero-sum game in which trillions of dollars in money, assets, time, convenience, service and pure human toil shifted among many groups of people, from one economic sector to another. The most remarkable aspect of this upheaval is that so few men determined who won and who lost, and in what proportion. Among them: Bob Crandall of American Airlines, Frank Lorenzo of Continental, Colin Marshall of British Airways, Frank Borman of Eastern Airlines, Frank Plaskett of PanAm, Richard Branson of Virgin. This book tells their stories.
At once a de facto primer in modern business practices and ethics and a riveting history of the world's largest industry, Hard Landing is an unforgettable portrait of the jet age itself.


by Thomas Petzinger Jr.
Published by Aurum 1995 1st UK edition. 520pp illustrated, index, bibliography. 16x24 previous owner's stamp, otherwise mint, d/j fine.







Note:
"Long" descriptions, where shown, may have been taken from the book's dust jacket notes, and as such are relevant to the date of publication (e.g. any references to "new edition" "previously unpublished photographs" etc.) and not the present.

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