Standard Air Lines; A Productivity and Operations History for
Davis-Monthan Aviation Field, 1927-1930
Findings about Standard Air Lines operations described herein come mainly from the vintage Transient Register of the Davis-Monthan Aviation Field, Tucson, Ariz. Founded by the city of Tucson in 1919,1 the Field was the first municipal aviation field in the United States. The Field register is a large, leather-bound tome, which lived for over a decade in the terminal buildings visible in the photographs. It now lives protected in a glass case in the Operations Office of the contemporary Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
The Davis-Monthan Aviation Field transient register is a robust United States regional aviation artifact. Meticulously handwritten are the historically significant pilot names and their airplanes, tens of thousands of destinations, dates, passengers and events. To this day, many of the pilots, passengers and aircraft have achieved continuing national and global importance and impact.
The author constructed a computerized database from all the information in the register. The register is only 218 pages. Yet, it reports 3,689 landings between February 6, 1925, and November 26, 1936. The database contains 166,005 elements, which can be sorted, filtered and queried. Manipulating the database compels questions, and enables answers, about the people, aircraft, places and events recorded in the log.
Specific to this article, several early air transport companies frequented the Field. Among them American Airlines (the inaugural sleeper service landed there), Scenic Airways (later Grand Canyon Airlines), and Standard Air Lines.
How is the Davis-Monthan Aviation Field transient register used to analyze Golden Age commercial transport activity? Although several Standard Air Lines aircraft landed at the Davis-Monthan Aviation Field, three of them (NC3317, NC8011, NC9724, all single-engine Fokkers)
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Standard Air Lines Fleet
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