Silk, a biplane and 71 minutes: Air cargo turns 116
The world's first commercial air cargo flight marked its 116th anniversary last Saturday. It carried silk, not mail or military supplies, on a 65-mile hop across Ohio in a Wright biplane.
Air cargo turned 116 this weekend. On Saturday, 7 November, the industry marked the anniversary of the day a Wright Model B biplane flew a consignment of silk from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio. The 1910 flight is widely recognised as the first-time goods were shipped by aeroplane for a paying customer.
At the controls was Philip Orin Parmalee, one of the pilots trained by the Wright brothers themselves. He took off from the Wrights' Huffman Prairie flying field near Dayton on the morning of Monday, 7 November 1910. He landed at the Driving Park in Columbus a little over an hour later.
"It was the first time cargo was shipped by airplane," notes the Ohio History Connection, the state's historical society, which holds a piece of the silk in its collection today.
A retailer's big idea The idea came from a shopkeeper, not an aviator. According to the Ohio History Connection, Max Morehouse, president of the Morehouse-Martens Company, a Columbus dry goods retailer, saw the commercial potential of aeroplanes after reading about Glenn Curtiss's successful flight from Sandusky to Cleveland, Ohio.
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