Imre E. Quastler

In mid-1939, Quastler's parents and sister moved from Germany to Japan, taking one of the last passenger ships that left an Italian port for East Asia before World War II broke out.

As the Allies advanced on Japan in 1944, Quastler and his mother and sister were relocated to the mountain village of Karuizawa, about 80 miles west of Tokyo, which served as a detention area for foreigners.

degree from Northwestern University in 1964, where he studied under William Garrison, a transportation geographer and a leader of the "quantitative revolution" that swept geography and other fields in the mid-twentieth century.

Quastler is one of the few academic geographers to extensively study the historical development of railroad and airline transportation networks.

Quastler's career has centered on documentation of the development and operation of regional transportation systems, an area generally without rigorous academic work.

In 2010 San Diego Aerospace Museum scanned 355 images from among of his extensive collection of airliner slides, making them available to the public through Flicker.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Quastler documented the rise of several other commuter and regional airline networks, including Air Midwest and Scheduled Skyways.

The book was sponsored and published by the Smithsonian Institution, and it remains the only comprehensive history written on the commuter airline industry.

They also range from airlines and services that lasted only a matter of months, to those of longer standing but which are probably unfamiliar to the average reader, whether in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere.