Now this is some excellent trivia for you. The first flight to use the airport was Eastern Air Lines en route from Atlanta to Newark, landing just after midnight on July 24th.
Source: Kilduffs
Below is the article that we dug up from The Baltimore Sun, printed on July 24th, 1950.
About 80,000 persons visited Friendship International Airport yesterday on the first day of scheduled airline operations at the new field.
Airport officials said the spectators were attracted by the 56 scheduled flights which landed and took off during the day.
C. F. Grigg assistant director of the City Department of Aviation, estimated the crowd at 80,000. Only 10,000 were present June 24 when the field was dedicated by President Truman.
Airport traffic reached a peak late in the afternoon and vehicles were lined up bumper-to-bumper for several miles.
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The first scheduled flight to use the field was an Eastern Air Lines plane en route from Atlanta to Newark, N. J. The ship landed at 12:01 A.M.
The first passenger to arrive at Friendship as Raymond T. Borneman, a Colt football player arriving from his home in Houston, Texas.
Keys in the city were presented to the crew of an American Airlines DC6, the flagship Maryland, which was the first transcontinental flight to originate from the field.
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Mayor D’Alesandro sent letters on the plane to the mayors of Chicago and Los Angeles.
The messages, marking the initial flight, said “July 23 will go down in history as a great day in Baltimore.”
The Mayor wrote Mayor Fletcher Bowron, of Los Angeles, and Mayor Martin H. Kennelly, of Chicago, that Friendship “has brought our two cities even more closely together.”
Mayor D’Alesandro also said “the new airport has put Baltimore on the air map of the world.”
Six members of the Mayor’s staff were passengers on the flight. They were en route to Washington to inspect National Airport.
Airline officials said the American flight, which departed at 1.45 P.M., is the first through service on 4-engine DC-6s ever scheduled for the city.
I’ve been looking all over for Raymond Borneman, and it doesn’t seem like he had much of a career, if any, in the NFL. There is a little bit on him as a successful high school football player in Texas during the 1940s, but that’s about it. Anyone else know who Borneman was?
