Central
Airlines Stinson A NC15106
(c/n 9106)
Central Airlines was formed on 31
May 1934 with a route from Washington, D.C. to Detroit, via
Pittsburgh,
Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. It was awarded Air Mail Route14
under the new air mail
contracts issued in April
1934. To service the route, 5 new Stinson Model As were
purchased.
Photographs of these machines for
some reason, are extremely hard to come by. Above is the
most definitive
one I have, and, although showing just how the mail was carried in the
wings, does
not reveal which
specific machine it is. The five aircraft were registered
NC15106 through NC15110.
Since all the other
(poor) images
have I have seen of their Stinsons have all depicted NC15106 I
assume the detail cropped image above is
of that aircraft. Below are seen two other illustrations.
The upper one is
from a 1936
aviation publication advertisement for the B.G. Corporation, a
manu-
facturer of spark plugs carrying a
testimonial from the airline
about how great their plugs were. The
lower image is from a set of
cigarette cards I possess showing "between the wars" airliners, and
following that, the photograph (from the
Austin Brown collection) from which it was extracted..
Central Airlines merged with Pennsylvania
Airlines on 1 November 1936
to form Pennsylvaian
Central Airlines.