Airliner

The Airliner, manufactured by Exhibit Supply Company (ESCO) of Chicago in August 1939, is a single-player electro-mechanical pinball machine from the game's pre-flipper era. ESCO was one of the longer-lived names in early coin-op, operating from 1932 to 1957, and the Airliner sits within the company's busy late-1930s pin game output.

As a 1939 game, the Airliner predates the flipper (introduced in 1947), so players of the day would have relied on the plunger and careful nudging to guide the ball toward scoring positions. Beyond its electromechanical construction and its evocative name — suggesting the era's fascination with the dawn of commercial air travel — few details of the machine's features, designer, or artwork have been documented.

That scarcity of information makes the Airliner something of a mystery within ESCO's catalog, and a tantalizing subject for pinball historians interested in the industry's output on the eve of the Second World War.