![]() Then it was on to refueling stops in Gander, Newfoundland and Shannon in the Republic of Ireland before the final hop to Hurn, the airfield at Bournemouth.įor Barry, it was all too much-or maybe too little. ![]() His front-page story began: “HURN AIRFIELD, ENGLAND, Oct. It was just as commonplace as that.”Ī yawn on arrival is the standard salute of most passengers who cross the ocean in today’s landplanes.Ģ4-History will never believe it! After completing the first commercial flight of a landplane from North America to Europe late this afternoon, the American Airlines flagship ‘London’ came out of the sky over this field, landed gently, came to a stop and a passenger yawned. Yet that first yawn marked the end of the era of the flying boat, the glamorous “Clippers”-the Boeing 314 and the Sikorsky VS-44-that lofted a tiny number of the rich and important across the seas. That yawn signaled the start of airborne travel for the masses. From this humble beginning of 12 passengers, transatlantic passenger traffic increased dramatically, with 312,000 passengers crossing by air in 1950. Henceforth silvery airliners would lift off from concrete runways, carrying business travelers and tourists first by the thousands and then by the millions. There are sound reasons why the commemoration of the inaugural flight is so…muted. ![]() The year 1945 was a historic one, and the 2020 calendar for 75th anniversaries-VE Day, VJ Day, the U.N. Charter, and the atomic bomb for starters-was already crowded. More importantly, corporate identity left the event a brand orphan. The airline that might have been throwing the party-American Airlines-sold its Atlantic division to Pan Am in 1950. When Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991, Delta inherited its transatlantic routes (but apparently little obligation to celebrate past glories).įinally, the start of land-based commercial flights to Europe was not a bold leap forward in 1945. What had been daring in 1939 when Pan Am opened regular North Atlantic passenger service with its Boeing 314 flying boats was old hat six years later. By the end of the war, the DC-4-with its big reliable Pratt & Whitneys, shiny streamlined skin, capacious cabin, long-range fuel tanks, and tricycle landing gear-had made thousands of chartered Atlantic crossings as C-54s, the U.S.
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