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Michael A. Gitt
94 Kings Point Road, Kings Point, NY 11024

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Canadian Colonial Airlines held Foreign Mail Contract No. 1 which gave us the distinction of being the first Foreign operating Airline and which preceded Pan Am. At that time, since air transportation was a new thing, Immigration and Customs treated us as an ocean going vessel engages in coast wise trade. Since there was no proper paperwork set up by the government to accommodate an operation of this kind the customs forms specified that we had no more than so many sheep, pigs or cattle aboard and so we signed the form.

We had bi-lingual stewardesses since we were operating into the French part of Canada.

When I was hired in August of 1940, the operation had begun service with stops only in Burlington, Vermont and Montreal.


Mr. Janas was an innovative and creative President and in the Fall of 1940 with the acquisition of three new DC-3's one of which was equipped for over water flying, he started the first intra-state operation between New York and Niagara Falls. This was a new and novel concept at that time and most certainly upset the C.A.B. It was based on the idea that no Certificate of Convenience and Necessity was required for an operation entirely within the state. In operating we were careful to fly only over NY State and cut no corners over any other state. We also started a VFR operation between Montreal and St. Jovite in the Canadian Laurentians, for skiers. And that upset the CAB more; so we also started a weekly charter operation between Montreal and Nassau in the Bahamas with the over water equipped DC-3... this the Canadians enjoyed and was very popular. The little Company was growing.

This all ended December 7th, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We now went to war.

Colonial was down to two airplanes and were were back to a Montreal, Burlington, Albany operation and an ATC Contract.

After the War we finally got some lucrative handouts from the CAB which included a Bermuda run and an Ottowa-Washington, D.C. run with stops in between.

We had a few changes in management and other people tried to buy us up and finally after some litigation EAL won out, and as of June 1, 1956, we changed over from a Green Uniform to one of Navy Blue.