A national air tour’s halted in its route at the big airport in Des Moines, despite wind and rain and a storm that grounded one of the planes before it reached its destination. A Ford Tri-Motor landed without incident east of the city to avoid hail in the advancing storm, as organizer Greg Herrick says pilots were bringing their craft to the next stop.Some 27 airplanes are flown by their owners, and the craft are from the 1920s and 30s, typical of ones you’d have seen in a previous national air tour. Iowa native Herrick has bought several classic antique planes and become an aviation booster since selling his dot-com startup for sixty-Million dollars a few years ago. Herrick says the route they’re flying was first planned for a 1935 Air Tour, to popularize support for public air travel by plane. They sent a “pathfinder” ship ahead on the route outlined, to see if they could get support — and they couldn’t, though we still know what route they’d hoped to fly. Herrick says arriving with the National Air Tour on the anniversary of the attacks of September eleventh pointed out how aviation survived another difficult timeHe says it’s a “tragedy” that terrorists got hold of the airliners, and says he was re-creating another flight, a tour by Amelia Earhart, when the attacks occurred, and he was grounded for a week in New Mexico. Herrick was born in Ottumwa and says seeing annual conventions there of the Antique Airplane Association gave him a lifelong love of flying. The air tour’s scheduled to depart at 10 AM but if weather changes that, updates will be promptly posted on the expedition’s website at www.nationalairtour.com
