3 April, 2002: Corsairville
In the '20s and '30s, when air travel was still a luxury, no airline in the world was more luxurious than Imperial Airways. Imperial's flying boats -- large planes equipped with floats, to land on rivers and lakes before airstips were common -- had pilots who were saluted aboard by a crew in dress whites and presented passengers making their first equatorial crossings with personalized certificates; each had its plane had its own name and stationary, and Imperial's pilots set distance and speed records. In 1939, the flying boat Corsair crashed in the Belgian Congo; foreseeing war and a shortage of new planes, Imperial sent a team in to recover the Corsair; it took nine months, and a shantytown, Corsairville, sprung up around the crash site. Graham Coster's Corsairville is not really the story of that salvage effort, however.