This page shows my collection of postcards from Continental Airlines.

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Continental Airlines began service in 1934 as Varney Speed Lines (named after one of its initial owners, Walter T. Varney, who was also a founder of United Airlines) operating out of El Paso and extending through Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, NM to Pueblo, CO. The airline commenced operations with the Lockheed Vega, a single-engine plane that carried four passengers. The airline later flew other Lockheed planes, including the Lockheed Model 9 Orion, the Lockheed Electra Junior, and the Lockheed Lodestar.

The carrier was renamed Continental Air Lines in 1937 ("Air Lines" was later changed to "Airlines"), and the airline's headquarters was relocated to Denver Union (later Stapleton) Airport in Denver the same year.

Profits from military transportation and aircraft conversion enabled Continental to contemplate expansion and acquisition of new aircraft types which became available following the war. Among those types were the DC-3, the Convair 240 and the Convair 340.

The airline's early route network was limited to the original El Paso to Denver route, with routes being added during the Second World War from Denver and Albuquerque across Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. By 1946, Continental had expanded new routes from Denver to Kansas City, Tulsa, and to Oklahoma City, and from El Paso and Albuquerque to San Antonio. Each of these routes included intermediate stops in several of 22 smaller cities. In 1953, Continental achieved its first major expansion by merging with Pioneer Airlines, gaining access to 16 additional cities in Texas and New Mexico. Continental was, like most U.S. carriers of the day, essentially a limited regional operation.

Prior to the introduction of its Boeing 707 jets, Continental acquired the popular DC-7s to operate its nonstop route from Los Angeles to Chicago, as well as Denver-Los Angeles and Chicago-Kansas City.

In 1959 Continental began services with Boeing 707.

During the late 1960s, the company disposed of the last of its turboprop and piston powered aircraft—one of the first U.S. airlines to do so. Continental replaced the Viscount fleet with DC-9s from Douglas Aircraft and began an aggressive acquisition of Boeing 727 aircraft. These two types (DC-9 and B-727) were to become the workhorses of the Continental fleet from the late 1960s, and for the next twenty years.

As for all my airlines pages it's structured in five areas:

Airplanes in flight (1) | Airplanes on the ground (0)

Crews & Passengers (3) | Destinations (0) | Miscellaneous (0)

Current number of postcards on this page:
4

This page was last updated on October 13, 2010