Harbour Grace Airport
Harbour Grace Airport (Template:Comma separated entries) is Template:Convert west of Harbour Grace, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
History
On 20 May 1932 Amelia Earhart set off from Harbour Grace and, after a flight lasting 14 hours 56 minutes, landed in a pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Over the previous five years, most transatlantic flights had included a stop at Harbour Grace. Wiley Post, who with Harold Gatty as navigator made the first circumnavigation of the globe by airplane (eight days) in 1931, wrote:
The crazy flyers who leave there for Europe are, to those people, definite forerunners of a transportation system to England that will place Harbor Grace on the map. The movement to develop the airport has been aided byTemplate:Nbsp... the entire east coast of the island settlementTemplate:Nbsp... the people there believe with utmost faith that aviation is to be the salvation of a dying community. Not so many years ago Conception Bay was continually filled with a hundred or more ships. Whalers, ore boats, and fishing schooners did a lot of business in Harbor Grace in bygone days, but now the blue bay is dotted only by a scant sail or two, and the people are in hard straits.
I would like to have heard more, but time was pressing on and we had a long way to go.[1]
These transatlantic flights through Harbour Grace are designated as a Canadian National Historic Event.[2]
The airstrip was abandoned after World War II, but was officially re-opened in 1999 following its restoration by the Harbour Grace Historical Society.[3][4]