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The Air Ferry Routes of WWII, including North Atlantic Route, South Atlantic Route and South Pacific Route. Although many air route surveys of the North Atlantic had been made in the 1930s, by the outbreak of World War II in Europe, civilian trans-Atlantic air service was just becoming a reality. It was soon suspended in favor of military ...
The winter of 1942-43 presented major problems all along the North Atlantic Transport Route. A high accident rate due to weather was experienced beginning in September 1942 and it continued to climb. On 22 November Air Transport Command suspended the transportation of passengers across the North Atlantic for the duration of the winter. The ...
Before Ferry Command, only about a hundred aircraft had attempted a North Atlantic crossing in good weather, and only about half had made it. [ citation needed ] Over the course of the war, more than 9,000 aircraft were individually ferried across the ocean and the aircraft played a significant role in the outcome of the war.
The South Pacific air ferry route in World War II connected the US via Hawaii with Australia and islands of the Western Pacific. [ 7 ] The South Atlantic air ferry route linked the US with West Africa via Natal, Brazil , the Middle East , India and China .
Personnel at work in the Operations Room of the Atlantic Ferry Service at RAF Prestwick. During the Second World War, Prestwick was used an eastern terminus for the North Atlantic air ferry route, one of a series of routes over which military aircraft were ferried from the United States and Canada to Great Britain, to support the war in Europe.
There is a detailed account of a visit to BW-1 in the early days of World War II by Ernest K. Gann, in the book Fate Is the Hunter. [citation needed] The advent of aerial refueling, and the opening of the larger Thule Air Base in northern Greenland, made the base redundant, and it was turned over to the Danish government of Greenland in 1958.
During World War II the United States had to move large numbers of aircraft to the European and Mediterranean Theaters via the North Atlantic ferry route, a series of short flights between Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and the UK. Weather conditions in winter closed the route and made crossing perilous at any time.
Operating as it did under wartime conditions, Transport Command had a relatively high accident rate. Prominent accidents included a July 1943 crash at Gibraltar, killing the Polish leader General Sikorski and several other senior figures in the exile government; a February 1945 crash in the Mediterranean, killing eleven members of the British delegation to the Yalta Conference; and a March ...