Flying Tigers flew surplus warplanes as the first scheduled all-cargo US airline

When the Flying Tigers fighter group disbanded in 1945, its pilots came home with skills but no airline. Bob Prescott persuaded ten of them to pool $89,000, which Los Angeles oilman Samuel Mosher matched, and the group bought 14 Navy surplus Budd Conestoga freighters to start National Skyways Freight out of a Long Beach garage.

The airline's first loads were ad-hoc charters: grapes from Bakersfield to Atlanta, flowers to Detroit, furniture from New York. It renamed itself Flying Tiger Line in 1946, flew military contracts, and in April 1949 — after a four-year fight — won Civil Aeronautics Board certification for the nation's first scheduled all-cargo route from Los Angeles to Boston, with stations along the way.

Cargo-only planes on fixed routes; sell schedule, not seats

Surplus Budd Conestogas were cheap, letting pilots start an airline on $178,000.

Passenger airlines carried only what fit under seats, leaving freight underserved.

A fixed cargo schedule gave shippers something charters could not: predictability.

The LA–Boston route created a spine other cargo airlines later copied.

Find capacity the incumbents consider worthless — surplus aircraft, ignored freight — and turn it into a scheduled product with its own economics.

Flying Tiger Line grew into the world's largest airfreight carrier, pioneering transpacific all-cargo service in 1969 and palletized loading, and was acquired by FedEx in 1989. Its 1949 route was the template for every later express-air network.