![]() ![]() There could hardly be a more colorful crew than the pilots who flew for the Post Office during the first years of airmail. “Every bedtime story I heard had something to do with the airmail.” “My father grew up in Greenfield, Iowa,” he says, “a town between Omaha and Iowa City”-two stops on the transcontinental route the early mailplanes flew. Pemberton inherited his enthusiasm for mailplanes from his dad. (Scott and Pemberton, who also owns a Speedmail, flew the pair on a reenactment flight in 1993 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of airmail.) Two other pilots will fly mailplanes on the cross-country trip: Larry Tobin of Colbert, Washington, will fly the oldest airworthy Stearman biplane, a 1927 Stearman C3B, and Ben Scott will fly a 1930 Stearman 4E Speedmail. Pemberton’s is the only one flying today. It is the great grandaddy of today’s 747s, one of the first aircraft to carry paying passengers along with a load of letters, and key to the Boeing Company’s eventual success. On the reenactment, he’ll fly his Boeing Air Transport, one of the early companies awarded a government contract to deliver mail. (He has restored 19.) He likes all open-cockpit, round-engine varieties, but his favorites have always been the machines that carried the U.S. Pemberton, owner of a Spokane-based manufacturing company, has been flying since he was 15 and is a collector of vintage aircraft. With a daily blog and historical features drawing from Smithsonian archives, this Web site will follow his group’s progress-from the first stop in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, on September 10, to the last stop in San Francisco on September 15. Pemberton will carry 700 envelopes that will receive special cancellations from postal representatives to commemorate the flight. coast-to-coast airmail route, flying a mailplane built only 10 years after the first mail flights of 1918. In a way, that’s what Addison Pemberton is doing this week as he retraces the first U.S. space program, say, or the expansion of the West, or World War II. The establishment of airmail service in the United States, 90 years ago last May, is a whopper of a story, yet it hasn’t had the attention that historians and filmmakers have paid to the U.S. The action wasn’t directed by the military or by NASA, however, but by the U.S. ![]() ![]() One chapter of American history has everything you could ask for in a national epic: visionary leaders, triumph over technological hurdles, exploration of the unknown, heroes skillfully battling an implacable foe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |