They landed at Schiphol with two passengers, a bundle of English newspapers and a small sack of letters, and that was the whole payload. Jerry Shaw flew it, a chartered de Havilland out of Croydon, in May of 1920 — a bit over two hours in the air, which for the time was brisk and for a man sitting in the back was probably quite long enough. The company itself had been set up the previous autumn in The Hague, 1919, by a lieutenant named Plesman who went round persuading Dutch businessmen that this would amount to something.
It did. Same name ever since, which no other airline can say. I like that the first cargo was newspapers, a little stale by arrival but faster than the boat. And I've just caught myself working out what the block time would be now — fifty-odd minutes, gate to gate, if the stand's free. Old habit. The clock is on the wall and I do look at it.
Worth remembering KLM is older than most of the kit that later told it where it was — the radio range beacons and the VOR stations came along decades after Plesman was shaking hands in The Hague. For a while the navigation aid was a railway line and good eyesight.
Harold, their 1924 run to Batavia took about two months, Van der Hoop flying with Van Weerden Poelman and the mechanic Van den Broeke, dozens of stops and a Fokker loaded with spares because nothing could be sourced en route. Fifty-odd minutes to Croydon against that is a good century's work.