After touring much of Europe to assess Church members’ needs after the war, Ezra Taft Benson flew from London to New York aboard Pan American Airways flight 101. Conveniently for me and the formatting of this post, his name appears at the very top of the passenger manifest.
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Regrettably, meanies have stolen content from Keepa in the past! I'm confident you will choose honesty and cite this page like this:
MLA: Parshall, Ardis E. "Home from Europe, 1946." Keepapitchin.org, 22 Mar 2016, https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/03/22/home-from-europe-1946/.
APA: Parshall, A. (2016, Mar 22). Home from Europe, 1946. Keepapitchinin.org. https://keepapitchinin.org/2016/03/22/home-from-europe-1946/
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I don’t know about anyone else, but I find these finds of details fascinating.
Oops. “finds” = “kinds”
Me, too. They fill in the background for me. Maybe it doesn’t add anything to our knowledge or appreciation of, in this case, a significant mission, but a document like this anchors that mission in time and space, and is a sort of a link between sacred time/space and ordinary time/space. It’s one of those solid, if small, proofs that “this thing really happened.”
Cool find!
104 kg is a lot closer to my own weight than I would have guessed (and I’m not a small guy). I suppose I need to significantly revise my mental picture of ETB as a frail old man.
I suspect that PanAm was interested in the passengers’ weights so they could calculate the total gross weight of the aircraft, and then calculate the amount of fuel needed to make the cross-ocean flight. In those days before commercial jets, flying across the Atlantic was a challenge.
According to PanAm’s timetables, the airplane was a Douglas DC-4. Powered by four piston engines, the DC-4 had a cruising speed of about 225 mph, and its limited range meant that flights between London and New York made intermediate stops in Shannon, Ireland, and Gander, Newfoundland. Flight 101 was scheduled to leave London at 17:00, land in Shannon at 20:10, depart Shannon after a 75-minute layover and land in Gander at 4:30 a.m. Taking into account the time difference between London and Gander (at GMT-3:30), the Shannon-Gander flight was about ten hours and 25 minutes long. After a 45-minute stop in Gander, the flight was scheduled to fly on to New York, landing at 9:30 a.m.–just under six hours.
The trip overall included about 19 hours and 30 minutes of flying time, and another two hours of layovers. The golden age of air travel? Not quite!
If you’re interested, and all this hasn’t put you to sleep already, airlines published their flight schedules those days in timetables, patterned after those published by the passenger railways. A large collection of Pan Am timetables is here and the timetable in effect for trans-Atlantic service in autumn 1946 is here.
Thanks, Mark — that’s a terrific addition to understanding what a trip like this meant!
I wondered about airfares. I can’t find anything that shows fares for 1946, but a PanAm timetable for 1950 shows a one-way fare between London and New York to be $350. That would have been a tenth of US median annual household income in that year.
For comparison, I tried to find what the fares were for Cunard or US Lines between Southampton and New York–but couldn’t find their timetables online.
Mark B., These additional details are great. Thanks.
Ardis,
Wonderful document!
Mike R., I met ETB in the late 1960’s. Even then, he was a rather impressive figure. My father was 6″ 2″ and 230 pounds, and if memory serves, the apostle was equal to my father.
However, my grandmother just gritted her teeth and tried to remain courteous whenever she interacted with him (she was an FDR Democrat and she adored Hugh B. Brown).