![]() ![]() 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. “I spent 40 years of my career trying not to do aerobatics with passengers, so I’d like to go out and try that on my own.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. “I would like to maybe do some aerobatic training,” she says. Her retirement plans are mostly typical - she’s working on her golf game and has signed up for a creative writing course - but she’s also thinking about getting into motivational speaking and writing a book about her career.Īnd while it’s four decades later, she’s still drawn to the exhilaration of that first flight back in 1973. In Toronto, she was greeted with a water-cannon salute from the airport fire department, and the flight attendants presented her with a book signed by the plane’s passengers.įive months later, she misses flying and gets nostalgic listening to a live air-traffic control app when she’s driving around. “All the way across Canada, from the time we hit the coast, every air-traffic controller that we spoke to wished me a happy retirement,” she says. Pursue your dreams.”Ĭameron’s last flight before retirement was from Munich to Toronto on May 24 this year. ![]() “When I first told people that I wanted to be a pilot, everyone thought it was cute and they laughed at me,” she says.
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