Navigation was so difficult in the early years of flying that when the U.S. post office launched airmail service in 1918, the first pilot flew in the wrong direction and the first shipment of airmail ended up being delivered by train.
 

The humorist Will Rogers, when told there was no more room for passengers on an airmail flight he wanted to board, went to the post office and bought enough stamps to airmail himself to his destination.
 

United, TWA, American and Eastern emerged as dominant players in the industry as the result of a secret scheme engineered by the Postmaster General in 1930 awarding them almost all of the nation's airmail contracts.
 

In the late 1930s, the Yankee, Dixie and Honolulu Clippers were luxurious Boeing 314's featuring 40 sleeping cabins, a dining room, galley, lounge, bar, men's and women's dressing rooms and a tail that could be turned into a deluxe bridal suite.
 

The first stewardesses on planes were actually young nurses brought on by United Airlines in 1930 who were specifically enlisted to encourage men to shed their fear of flying.
 

Howard Hughes' love for flying was rooted in a secret. Practically deaf as the result of a childhood illness, he heard a continual ringing in his ears and was only truly happy in the cockpit of a plane where the ringing was masked by the roar of the engine.
 

The notoriously paranoid Hughes was so obsessed about security when building the famous "Constellation," everyone involved in the project had to have a code name -- Lockheed President Robert Gross was called the Apostle Paul, TWA President Jack Frye was called Jesus Christ and Hughes was referred to as God.
 

Royal Air Force engineer Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine that would change aviation forever, never reaped the rewards of his work. Instead, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to retire from the RAF.
 

In the early 1950s, it looked as if Britain, not America, would take the lead in world aviation, but then the British-made Comet started falling from the skies.
 

Juan Trippe, the legendary head of Pan Am, was both a visionary and a ruthless business buccaneer who drove the growth of the aviation industry more than any other person in the 20th century.