My Grandfather’s “Highly Rated” Commercial Pilot’s License

Posted by Custom_Craft_Guy2@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 200 comments

My Grandfather’s “Highly Rated” Commercial Pilot’s License
I thought this might be of some interest to some of you history buffs out there. This is a photo of the last issuance of my grandfather’s commercial pilot’s license, before his retirement from a 37 year career as a Captain for American Airlines in 1973. He began flying commercial aircraft in 1936, starting with the Ford Tri-Motor and the DC-3, and when he retired from commercial aviation in 1973, he had a career total of over 37,000 hours of flight time logged on a record setting 16 different types of aircraft. For anyone interested in the math, that’s equivalent to 4.22 _YEARS_ of his life spent in the air! Which also includes the birth of my mother. He received the news of her birth via radio message during a flight home to Cleveland in 1947. He missed it by about two hours!