Bellanca aircraft made continuous headlines during the ‘golden age of aviation’, roughly between 1925 and 1935. Bellanca’s established long distance records, duration records and hight records. Bellanca’s also crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on numerous occasions when commercial services across these oceans were still years in the future.
All these aircraft were specially prepared for these flights, if not by the Bellanca Aircraft Company, then by their crews. Hence the title of this book: Bellanca Specials. Most of these flights have now been largely forgotten, as have most of the men and women that made them.
Almost every one knows that Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris in May 1927. Almost no one knows that within a month the Bellanca ‘Columbia’ followed in Lindbergh’s trail and finally landed in Germany. Crew members Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine covered 3,905 miles and remained 42 hours and 45 minutes in the air. The trip was 315 miles and 9 hours and 6 minutes longer than Lindbergh's transatlantic crossing. At the same time Chamberlin and Levine established a new world distance record.
The last time a Bellanca aircraft captured the international headlines was in October 1936, when Englishman Jim Mollison flew the Bellanca ‘Dorothy’ nonstop from Newfoundland across the Atlantic to Croydon airport near London in the record time of 13 hours and 17 minutes.
Between these two flights Bellanca aircraft made dozens of other impressive flights that made their names - usually each aircraft had its own name - and the names of their crew members household words, albeit briefly. This book brings the names of those men, women and aircraft back from the past.