Transatlantic Air Service Inaugurated

Foynes, Wednesday.

Foynes, Wednesday.

On a June day just twenty years ago Alcock and Brown landed in County Galway, after flying the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland with a tiny bag of special air mail. To-day the Pan-American flying-boat Yankee Clipper landed here with fourteen bags of mail, the first official trans-Atlantic air mail, after its flight from Port Botwood, Newfoundland, to inaugurate the new passenger and mail service, which will be available to the public as from July 8th.

Besides the mail - more than a ton of it - the Clipper carried eighteen passengers, including 81 years old Judge R. Walton Moore, Counsellor of the Department of State, and a crew of eleven, headed by the veteran commander of trans-Atlantic flying-boats, Captain Harold E. Gray, who made his first flight to this little port two years ago, during the experimental programme with the old Sikorsky Clipper III.

The Irish Times, June 29th, 1939.