Clipper, Vol. 12, No. 9, September 1955

              Photo Story On KIN, DSO
... Pages 4 and 5
VOL 12, No. 9
Pah Americah World Alrmays LATIN AMERICAN DIVISION
L/PPEP
SEPTEMBER 1955
How PAA Fights Hurricanes
... Page 3
550913
Clippers to Link PAP-CTJ-IDL Direct
SFO New Gateway To South
San Francisco, one of the major seaports and airports of the United States, will be linked directly by air for the first time with Latin America through flights to be inaugurated on December 1 by PAA.
Establishment of San Francisco as another gateway for Pan American routes fanning southward through Central and South America will provide vital additional service for increasing traffic between the Orient and Latin America.
Way for the new service was cleared by the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board approval of San Francisco as a co-terminal with Los Angeles for Pan American routes southward. Pan American has been operating Latin American routes but of Los Angeles since 1951. Both California cities also are terminals for Pan American transpacific Clippers.
Six flights weekly which Pan American has been operating between Los Angeles and Latin America will be stepped up to eight weekly when San Francisco is tied into the Central and South American network.
Backbone of the West Coast service to Latin America is the 4,336-mile route from San Francisco to Caracas, via Guatemala City, Panama, Barranquilla, Colombia, and Maracaibo, Venezuela. The route connects at Panama with flights flown -the"1 West -Coast of South America to Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile, and links up at Caracas with Pan American’s blue-ribbon runs to Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
Addition of San Francisco as a co-terminal on the route was recognition of the increasing community of interest between the Northern California trade center and Latin America. In hearings before the CAB, San Francisco officials pointed out their area generated 38.8 per cent of the traffic carried on the Los Angeles-Latin American route.
Picnic Plans Are Mapped
Bigger and better than ever!
That’s the promise of the committee in charge of LAD’s employe picnic to be held at Crandon Park early in November.
Preliminary plans were mapped at a meeting of the Picnic Committee late in August with Frank Foster, Industrial Relations, again named general program chairman
There will be food and drink to suit the palate of everyone, from the tiny tots to grandpa, Foster said. Games and rides are on the program agenda, running throughout the day.
A complete schedule of events —with details on ticket distribution—will be carried in the October Clipper.
Chairmen directing the day’s fun are:
Financial arrangements, Karl Kaylos, division accountant; tickets. Foster; communications, Robert Lockhart, Jr., division communications superintendent; juvenile and adult games, Capt. Lou Lindsey, chief pilot, and Arthur S. Best, superintendent of stations; food, Rowland H. (Jim) Bacon, commissary superintendent; drinks, Joe Dosal, assistant division supply manager; groun singing and announcements, Richard N. Harbot-tle. production control superintendent; lost and found, Tom Horan personnel supervisor, SOS; first aid, Dr. Martin Mangels, Jr., division medical director; publicity, S. Roger Wolin, division public relations manager, and security and safety patrol, Santos Ceyanes, MOB manager.
Watch The Clipper for the exact date and full program on this top employe event of the year.
Capt. Ekstrom
Stewardess Ramirez
big kiss marks Slim’s last flight
Capt. Rumili
Capt. Lindsey
. . . we’re really going to miss yo
| PAA Passenger Pays | | $2,240 For Baggage |
1 Antonio Galli, a merchant 1 1 from Sao Paulo, Brazil, is not m 1 a man to travel light, jj When he stepped up to the = g ticket counter at Pan Am- 1 = erican World Airways’ Miami g ¡g terminal to check in for his m m flight to Buenos Aires, the m g clerk’s eyes popped at the g g mounting pile of luggage, jj Galli had 13 sample cases, m = weighing 862 pounds.
M The excess baggage charges 1 jj were $2,240.78.
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Interchange Flights Begun
Daily first-class and tourist-class through service between New York, Washington, Miami, Panama and nine key cities in South America was inaugurated September 14, by Pan American World Airways, Panagra (Pan American-Grace Airways), and National Airlines.
Under terms of an interchange agreement, recently concluded and filed with the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board, the airlines are using 365 - mile - an - hour radar-equipped Douglas DC-7Bs on the El Inter Americano Star first-class flights to provide the fastest and only daily service between New York and Buenos Aires.
By eliminating the necessity of changing planes at the Miami gateway, this new through service considerably reduces flying times.
Douglas DC-6Bs are being used on the daily El Pacifico tourist-class flights to Lima, Peru, and on the three-times-a-week service to Buenos Aires. This service reduces flying times between New York and the Argentine capital by four hours.
The flights are made over National’s route between New York-Washington and Miami; Pan American’s between Miami and Panama, and Panagra’s between Panama and Buenos Aires.
The new through service enables passengers to fly all the way from New York to Buenos Aires— a distance of 5,676 airline miles— on one aircraft, and eliminates any possible delays through missed connections or transfer of baggage from one terminal to the other. It also, for the first time, links such cities as Cali, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; Talara, Peru; Antofagasta and Santiago, Chile, with a direct one-plane through service to New York, and greatly speeds up service all along this faster, shorter, more direct route between New York and Buenos Aires.
Father Time Grounds Ekstrom and Rumill
Father Time has ended the outstanding flight careers of two veteran LAD Clipper captains—Gustav J. (Slim) Ekstrom and George Edwin Rumill—who both have reached age 60.
Slim took what he thought was a temporary job with a new little airline back in 1929, flying from Miami to the Caribbean. Since then the airline, PAA, has expanded around the world and Ekstrom has logged more than 25,000 hours and 4,100,000 miles in its Clippers.
In 1931, Rumill ferried a plane to Cuba for William D. Pawley, now head of the Miami Transit Co., who was operating a Cuban airline. Rumill signed on to fly tri-motor Fords and when the airline became affiliated with PAA, he joined the Clipper pilot corps.
His logbook shows 24,000 'i: hours aloft—more than four million miles of travel. He has flown a quarter million passengers in perfect safety and he’s filing away with his logbook one of the oldest CAA licenses in the country, No. 264.
When he was 19, Ekstrom decided it was time for him to get up in the air, even if it cost him his last cent. It almost did.
He enrolled in a Buffalo, New York flying school which charged a dollar a minute for instruction in the air. After making a count of his dollars, the would-be air ace became one of the most serious students in the school’s history. He graduated in jig time.
With the ink scarcely dry on his diploma, Ekstrom joined one of the barnstorming flying circuses then touring the U.S. Then World War I came along and Slim found himself in an AEF infantry division in France after the Army’s air branch neglected to make use of him.
With war’s end, it was back to the flying circus circuit until he saw the interest of the public in flying. Forthwith, he bought a plane and headed for Florida.
But the passenger business was not yet ripe for the picking and soon Slim became an instructor with the Curtiss Exhibition Co.
He ioined PAA on November 19,
1929.
“I thought it would probably just be temporary,” he recalls. “I couldn’t see any future in flying down to those islands.”
Now ending his 25th year with PAA, Ekstrom has become one of the most respected figures on the Latin air lines. As is frequent with Clipper crew members, Ekstrom has figured in many rescues.
In one, five persons adrift in a sailboat for five days without food °nd water near Cat Cay, off the Florida east coast, were spotted by Ekstrom on a Clipper flight to Nassau. A radio report to the Coast Guard resulted in their rescue.
On another occasion, the passengers on a 70-foot sailboat which had run aground on the rocks of an isolated island off the (Continued on Page 6)
Vinal To Join Jet Transport Tests For PAA
A team of three PAA engineering pilots, including Capt. Richard W. Vinal of Miami, have made the first complete airline flight evaluation tests of the 550-mile-an-hour Boeing 707 jet transport.
The first flight was September 14 at Boeing Field, Seattle, it was announced by Franklin Gledhill, PAA vice president.
Capt. Vinal,
LAD assistant CAPT. VINAL chief pilot, technical; Capt. Scott Flower of AD, and Capt. James Fleming of PAD were selected for the tests.
They took the controls of the huge prototype of a future airliner to evaluate the plane’s performance against airline needs.
Pan American has reached no decision on the purchase of jet transports, Gledhill said in New York. Data obtained from the flight will be used in making the final decision.
Cant. Vinal is a graduate aeronautical engineer from the University of Washington where he was a member of the famous Huskies rowing team.
He won his wings in the U.S. Navy and was an engineer for Boeing before joining PAA 20 years ago. In 1950 he was named by American Aviation magazine as one of the five top airmen in the nation, and he has been the pilot of most of the special Clippers that have flown the University of Miami Hurricanes to their away-from-home football games.
Vinal has piloted virtually every type of commercial plane, from the old flying boats to today’s Strato-clipne»' and surveyed many of PAA’s routes in Latin America.
Schedules To Start October 16
Direct flights between New York, the Dominican Republic and Haiti will be inaugurated October 16 by PAA.
The first class service, by Super 6 Clippers, will provide six flights weekly between New York, Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Republic, and Port au Prince, the Haitian capital.
Schedules, filed for approval by the governments concerned, show southbound flights leaving New York, Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 1:00 a.m., arriving at Ciudad Trujillo at 6:45 a.m. and terminating at Port au Prince at 8:20 a.m.
Northbound flights, on the same days, leave Port au Prince at 10:40 a.m., Ciudad Trujillo at noon and reach New York at 6:00 p.m.
The big Clippers, limited to only 54 passengers, will have a seven-passenger lounge in the rear. Five berths will be available on the southbound night flight.
The new flights, which eliminate the delay and inconvenience of changing planes at San Juan or Miami, will give the sister republics on the island of Hispaniola vastly improved service to and from the populous eastern United States and will contribute materially to the rapid growth of tourism to the island.
The direct flights will supplement Pan Am’s daily Clippers connecting Port au Prince and Ciudad Trujillo with Miami, San Juan and other Caribbean islands.
Constellations To Link All Central America
New, through flights by Constellation aircraft between Mexico City and Panama, serving all Central American capitals en route, are being inaugurated September 25 by PAA.
The Constellations replace Con-vairs on the route segment between El Salvador and Panama and they will be the first four engine Clippers to serve San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica.
Operation of the larger aircraft was made possible by completion of San Jose’s new El Coco airport.
The daily southbound flights will stop at Guatemala City, San Salvador, Managua and San Jose, terminating in Panama City. Two days a week the flights also serve Tapa-chula, Mexico, and will stop at Tegucigalpa, Honduras, four days a week.
There will be an additional Constellation round trip flight weekly between Mexico City, Guatemala City and Panama where it will connect with tourist flights to and from Buenos Aires via the West Coast of South America.
100 YEARS OLD and she made her first airplane flight. Mrs. Mary McCay, pioneer Miami resident, celebrated her 100th birthday with a Clipper trip to Nassau. In honor of the occasion, PAA provided a special birthday cake. Stewardess Barbara Davey presents the cake to Mrs. McCay.