William S. Grooch: Very Rare PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER PILOT AUTOGRAPH, KILLED 1939 for Sale

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William S. Grooch: Very Rare PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER PILOT AUTOGRAPH, KILLED 1939 For Sale

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William S. Grooch: Very Rare PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER PILOT AUTOGRAPH, KILLED 1939:
$125.00

William S. Grooch: Very Rare PAN AMERICAN CLIPPER PILOT AUTOGRAPH, KILLED 1939!

A stamped NYRBA VIA AEREA ebvelope, approximately 3.5 X 6. signed \"W. S. Grooch 1st Pilot\" and addressed to Miss Eva Grooch who was, I assume, his daughter or other relative. The envelope is postmarked Buenos Aires, Arentina 10 FEB 1930. It bears the cachet: \"ARGENTINA-ESTADOS UNIDOS * PRIMER CORREO DE LA NYRBA.\" This particular famous Pan Am Clipper pilot\'s autograph is extremely rare as he died in an air crash in Mexico in 1939. He flew with the most famous of the Clipper pilots, Edwin Musick. Near Perfect!

My interest has always been in the signature of the pilot rather than the philatelic value of the cover but I understand that this piece is of significant interest because it is a \"triple crash\" cover. The envelope was aboard a Consolidated Commodore and two Sikorsky S-38s that crashed en route. The envelope is also, I understand, an \"OutlawMail\"coverbecause the U.S. Post Office Department had no air mail contract with NYRBA and that mail, once in the united States, was carried by truck or rail car.

GROOCH, William Stephen “Bill”. PAN AMERICAN AIRWAYS PILOT. (1890-1939). A professional boxer before enlisting in the USN in 1917; Naval Aviator (number unrecorded), at NAS Pensacola (1918)[732]; he served at NAS Moutchic[732]; copilot of the first test flight of the Consolidated Aircraft Model 12 Commodore flying boat, with Leigh Wade as pilot, from the Niagra River at Buffalo NY (1928)[46] [165]; resigned from the USN (1929)[732]; chief pilot NYRBA (1929-30)[732] [1261]; pilot for Pan American Airways (1930- )[732]; pilot for Lineas Aereas Mineras, Mazatlan, Mexico; killed, with his wife, in a commercial air crash in Durango, Mexico (1939)[732]; author of popular books on flying: Skyway to Asia (1936), Winged Highway (1938) and From Crate to Clipper, With Captain Musick, Pioneer Pilot (1939). (LT, USN.).

Please ignore any [ ] brackets as they the numbers refer to my personal biographical index.

Please check my response regarding fast and well-packed shipments.

This is part of my personal collection of over 2500 aviation autographs dating from the very earliest days of aviation. The collection includes many, many air mail pilots, record holders, aviation personalities, military/naval aviators from 1914 through Vietnam, etc. All are in excellent condition unless otherwise noted and all are authentic. The items I\'m selling on are from my own collection that I\'ve been selling since my retirement.

All autographs will be mailed by First Class Mail with Delivery Confirmation. Larger items will be mailed by appropriate USPS mailing. Tracking numbers are available on all shipments.I accept PayPal and adhere to their requirements that all PayPal orders be mailed with online and only to confirmed addresses. Autographs are weatherproofed and mailed in heavily reinforced padded envelopes with stiff corrugated board for rotection!

I guarantee all the items in my collection to be authentic. I will pay the return postage on any item that is found not to be authentic. All returns must of course be in the condition in which they were mailed.

DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN U. S. AIR MAIL SERVICE PILOTS AND CONTRACT AIR MAIL PILOTS? The U. S. Air Mail Service was formed as a branch of the Post Office Department under the Second Assistant Postmaster General in 1918 and flew air mail until it was disbanded in 1927. There weren\'t very many of them and the lives of many of them were cut short! The movement of air mail was placed in the hands of contractors in the later twenties. They were two distinct groups of aviators and flew under distinctly different circumstances. What makes the pilots of the U.S. Air Mail Service so interesting to us even today, almost ninety years after the service was disbanded? The answer lies in the kind of men they were, in their acceptance of significant risk in every undertaking, and their single-minded focus on a career in aviation. These men were to the children of the twenties what astronauts were to us in the sixties, railroad engineers were to the children of the nineteenth century and explorers were to still earlier generations. Their lives simply reeked of adventure! When pilots signed up for the Air Mail Service they were required to agree to fly fixed routes in literally any kind of weather. And to do it in antiquated open-cockpit planes with only the most basic of instrumentation, which most knew from their Great War flying to be dangerous under the best of circumstances. In the DH, for instance, the placement of fuel tank, pilot and engine assured that the pilot would be incinerated in any significant crash or nose-over. The hot engine drove the fuel tank into the pilot\'s lap and heat and fire exploded the escaping vaporized fuel. Yet applications far, far outnumbered the available jobs and the pilots, day after day, accepted their flight schedules and did everything in their power to deliver the mail to the next air mail field on a fixed schedule. By the time air mail flying was placed in the hands of contractors and Contract Air Mail pilots were licensed by the Post Office Department the things had changed dramatically for pilots. Aircraft were purpose-built for air mail, radio had been introduced, weather was much better understood, pilots were carefully selected and trained and the risks of flying were better understood by the executives managing the air mail routes.