A Postcard Comes To Life

I bought a copy of this postcard a couple of years ago because the overall design fits into my Art Deco collection. This is not the exact one I have but there were thousands printed, and they differ only in the addressee and message on the back and sometimes the stamp used as postage differs. They were printed to accompany the first airmail flight from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam to Batavia, Dutch East Indies (the present day Jakarta, Indonesia). When I bought the card I looked up information on the flight and learned that the intention was for the Pander Postjager, a newly designed plane at the time of the flight in 1933, to make the entire journey, carrying several hundred kilograms of mail. I read that the plane had an engine failure in Italy, only a few hundred miles into the journey, and, because it would take several weeks to repair, that a Fokker Pelikaan completed the flight, and the entire journey took less than five days, a huge improvement in the many weeks that sea mail normally took between the two countries. From that brief description, I took it to mean that there was a gentlemanly camaraderie which caused Fokker to take over the mail delivery, but a new television series gave me the full story, which is a much better one. I'm referring to the Dutch TV production "King of the Skies", currently available on Amazon Prime (although, confusingly,if you look it up on IMDB it's listed under "Turbulent Skies", and the original Dutch title is "Vliegende Hollanders".) It's in 8 parts and tells the intriguing story of two pioneers of the Dutch aviation industry, Anthony Fokker, founder of the eponymous aircraft company, and Albert Plesman, one of the founders of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Their careers overlapped for several decades, in which some of the time they worked closely together and other times, they were bitter rivals. Episode five tells the story of the Postjager and the Pelikaan, it was a case of the two companies vying for the very lucrative airmail contract. It was not an outright race, but rather a competition to determine which company could complete the route in the shortest amount of time, so when the Pander plane left first, it didn't necessarily mean that the Pelikaan had lost, it just meant that they had to beat the Postjager's overall time. So when Fokker learned that the Pander plane was out of commission, he offered to take the mail the rest of the way, since, after all the mail still had to get through, although it was largely a few thousand of these cards. It's a very well made series, and if you're interested in aviation history, and you like vintage aircraft, old cars, beautiful art deco architecture and elegant 1930's clothing, you're sure to find something of interest in this show.





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Hi waddsbadds:

Very nice card. May we see some of your other Art Deco cards and covers?

Thanks

Don

Thanks, Don for your interest in my Art Deco collection, so here, as requested are a couple more covers, a First Day cover from the Czech Republic from a series depicting historic stoves, and an early flight cover from the UK with a nice Art Deco cachet, also the set of French stamps that commemorated the 1925 Expo that started the whole trend