January 18, 2013 The Casablanca Conference, held 70 years ago
this week, is remembered today for the agreement by Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to demand unconditional
surrender from their Axis enemies. But even before the leaders
sat down to talk, FDR made history. His trip across the
Atlantic, in a Boeing 314 flying boat, was the first time a
sitting U.S. president flew on an airplane. Nobody was more
impressed than his pilots. The flights had been planned in
secrecy, and when Roosevelt and his entourage showed up at the
Pan American airways base in Miami on the morning of January 11,
1943, to board the Dixie Clipper, “[the crew] were very much
surprised to learn the identity of our guest,” recalled Pan Am
pilot Howard M. Cone, Jr. Cone, a 34-year-old veteran of
transoceanic flights, flew Roosevelt, advisor Harry Hopkins and
several military leaders on one Clipper, while another flying
boat carried the presidential staff. Cone said the President was
an “excellent passenger” and a “good air sai