When Air Mail Was Shot from Ships: The Glory Days

Grover, David, Sea Classics

In the early 1930s, even though Zeppelin service had reduced the time of passages to South America as well as to North America, there was still no plane capable of flying that stretch of the Atlantic that seemed to be most readily conquered: The 1800 miles of the South Atlantic between Africa and Brazil. In 1928 the French, turning their backs on the catapult capabilities they had pioneered on the ILE DE FRANCE, had established airmail service to South America, but used a converted Navy destroyer named AIR FRANCE III on the ocean portion of the route between Dakar and Natal.

To fill the obvious vacuum in this South Atlantic service the German airline Deutsche Luft Hansa or DLH …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: When Air Mail Was Shot from Ships: The Glory Days. Contributors: Grover, David - Author. Magazine title: Sea Classics. Volume: 32. Issue: 7 Publication date: July 1999. Page number: 36+. © Challenge Publications Inc. Mar 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.