The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Strategic decision · 1945–1949
Flying Tigers flew surplus warplanes as the first scheduled all-cargo US airline
Wartime pilots turned Budd Conestogas into a freight airline, winning the CAB's first all-cargo route in 1949.
Flying Tiger Line
the move
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.
why it works
- 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.
what transfers
Find capacity the incumbents consider worthless — surplus aircraft, ignored freight — and turn it into a scheduled product with its own economics.
what came after
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.
references
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