Maverick: The Story of Robert Six and Continental Airlines
By Robert J Serling
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.
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.
