page_title: Imre E. Quastler
section_title: Contribution to historical transportation geography
hierarchical_section_title: Imre E. Quastler / Contribution to historical transportation geography
caption_attribution_description: English: Cherokee Airline Skyvan N3419 in San Diego, 1969
context_page_description: Imre E. Quastler is an American historical transportation geographer and an authority on aspects of regional transportation systems in the United States. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography at San Diego State University. He writes professionally under the name I. E. Quastler.
context_section_description: Quastler is one of the few academic geographers to extensively study the historical development of railroad and airline transportation networks. Much of the work in the field has been accomplished by non-academic writers and railroad or airline aficionados. Quastler's career has centered on documentation of the development and operation of regional transportation systems, an area generally without rigorous academic work. Besides writing about those forms of transportation, he also photographed them for historical purposes, starting in the late 1950s. He has photographed hundreds of railroads and airlines, producing one of the largest collection of images of this type from the late 1960s to the present. Additionally, he has mapped the networks of the railroads and airlines he has studied, illustrating and explaining their changes over time. 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. 
  Quastler's study of regional transportation systems expanded to include commuter and regional airlines in 1968, shortly after he arrived at San Diego State College (later San Diego State University). His first book documented the rise of Swift Aire Lines, which at the time served such cities as San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. This was the first in depth study of such airlines. During the 1970s and 1980s, Quastler documented the rise of several other commuter and regional airline networks, including Air Midwest and Scheduled Skyways. Quastler is currently conducting research for a book about the history and historical geography of Pacific Southwest Airlines, the California firm that was one of the most successful intrastate airlines in the history of the industry.
  
  In 1994, Quastler completed Commuter Airlines of the United States, co-authored with R. E. G. Davies (1921-2011), a well-known writer of airline history. The book was sponsored and published by the Smithsonian Institution, and it remains the only comprehensive history written on the commuter airline industry.
caption: Cherokee Airline Skyvan N3419 in San Diego, 1969
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