Chris Van Veen Marketing Communications

Books

The History of Manchester Airport

My interest in commercial aviation led to an opportunity to help co-author a book on the history of  Manchester airport. The project, spearheaded by Ed Brouder and Moe Quirin, concluded as a 19-chapter, 417-page book published in 2006.

Chapter 12, 'Contrails of Faith - United and USAir Jet to MHT' told the story of United Airlines and USAir, which made key marketing decisions in 1984 and 1985 to start service at Manchester. Thought to be too close to Boston, Manchester Airport was devoid of anything remotely resembling major airline service in spite of significant economic and demographic strength. United unveiled their '50 States' campaign, which positioned them as the only carrier to fly mainline aircraft to at least one city in all 50 states. 'New Hampshire' meant Manchester, and the new service was a huge success. USAir came to Manchester a year later with flights to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The history of the Airport would have been a much less robust one without these important developments. To write this chapter I interviewed several key individuals at both United Airlines and USAir while collecting a tremendous amount of historical data.

Chapter 16, 'Ka-Ching - Cargo and MHT's Economic Waves' told the story of air cargo at Manchester Airport. FedEx and UPS both have sizable operations at MHT from which they serve and feed other parts of northern New England. The amount of air cargo volume coming through MHT is immense for a city of its size since both FedEx and UPS have sorting facilities at or near the airport.  The chapter tells the story of how the operations work on a local scale and global scale. Humorous and interesting anecdotes are sprinkled through the chapter to give a true 'behind-the-scenes' look at an operation that largely operates outside of public view. As with Chapter 12, interviews contributed a large amount of the content for this story on air cargo at MHT.

'Come And Get It!'

Our family discussed the idea of publishing a cookbook of favorite recipes back in early 2008. We wanted a way to honor our mothers and to provide a timeless quality to some of the recipes that had been 'handed down' throughout the years. Armed with that as inspiration, we set out to produce Come And Get It!

The excellent self-publishing site Lulu.com provided the tools necessary for us to produce and distribute the book, a portion of which you can open up here as a full-color PDF. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I was happy to act as project manager. I collected the recipes and then edited them for consistency. Then, I set to work using Adobe InDesign page-layout software to produce the book. We organized it into sections, complete with color photos of favorite dishes. Everyone in the family had a role to play, and we were all quite proud of the end result.