Winged Shell: Oil Company Aviators, 1927-1987 By Hugh Scanlan

With the end of the First World War, aeroplanes emerged as more than tools of sport or destruction. Pioneer airlines strove to take their place alongside established travel forms. Yet before continents could be crossed a network of staging posts had to be set up, and the concept of the air appreciated as a totally new activity calling for a new level of support. In the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, by then a worldwide enterprise of two decades’ standing, men of vision with a background of war flying evolved a plan. Under conditions of hardship and often danger, they went ahead of the first airlines, using light aircraft to organize the fuel supplies and develop the flight information services that pilots now take for granted. Down the years, as Shell Companies extended the oil search, aircraft increasingly became essential to exploration and production, so that today oil-related flying represents a uniquely varied, demanding specialisation. Winged Shell tells the story of the first sixty years from sources never previously published