Delta Air Lines’ First Passenger Flight — 1929
by Paula Bosse
by Paula Bosse
Delta Air Lines has had a longer — and more important — association with Dallas than you might think. On June 17, 1929, Delta made its first-ever passenger flight, from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi via Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana. According to the Love Field website, “Early flights operated from a passenger terminal near Bachman Lake, which later served as Southwest Airlines’ first headquarters building.” On that first flight, the five passengers sat in wicker chairs and could roll down windows (!) for needed ventilation. The flight took five hours. One of the first ads, from the Delta Flight Museum page, looked like this:
Forty-some-odd years later, the ads — and Dallas — got a bit more sophisticated.
Artist: Fredric Sweney
And we can’t leave out Cowtown!
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UPDATE, June 20, 2017: This almost-three-year-old post got a TON of hits yesterday, and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually, though, I tracked it down: it had to do with yesterday’s Final Jeopardy question (or is it “answer”?):
Nice to see that Jeopardy is incorporating Dallas history into the show!
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Top travel poster — showing Fort Worth in the distance, I guess? — by Jack Laycox.
For a really well-researched article by Timothy Harper describing that first flight, click here (the Dallas bit is contained in the last seven paragraphs).
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 
[…] Yesterday an old Flashback Dallas post from 2014 got a TON of hits. As the hits continued to rack up all day, I thought, “This is really weird.” The reason? Jeopardy! Even better, FINAL Jeopardy! Do you know the answer (…phrased in the form of a question)? See if you do, here. […]
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