The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– Latin America reached –
In 1927 Latecoere sold the company to French industrialist Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, who was based in Latin America, where he introduced the service and renamed the company Aeropostale.
In May 1930 Jean Mermoz carried out the first commercial air crossing across the south Atlantic, between Saint-Louis in Senegal and Natal in Brazil with a Late 28 seaplane.
Aeropostale’s Henri Guillaumet regularly crossed the dangerous Andes Mountains, delivering mail between Buenos Aires and Santiago in Chile.
In June 1930 his Potez 25 made an emergency landing in the mountains. He was taken in by a villager after walking for several days in the snow.
“What I did, no idiot would ever have done,” he told Saint-Exupery when they met several days later.
Aeropostale was by this time financially strapped. In 1933 its assets were bought by a group of aviation companies which would later become Air France.
Mermoz was lost at sea in 1936. Several decades later his correspondence with his family and friends was published under the title “Defricheur du ciel” (Pioneer of the sky).
The Aeropostale saga was just the beginning of a long list of airborne feats around the world between the two World Wars.
Among them was the first non-stop transatlantic flight by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1919. The first major national airlines started to form that year with Dutch KLM, followed by Germany’s Lufthansa in 1926 and American Pan Am in 1927.
