04/09/2026
March 31, 1940. A Boeing 314 named Yankee Clipper lifts off from Bowery Bay in Queens, carrying nine passengers and five thousand pounds of mail. Eighteen hours and thirty minutes later, it lands in Lisbon.
This is what it looked like to leave New York for Europe in 1940 — not from a runway, but from the water. The Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, designed in Art Deco by Delano & Aldrich, was built for exactly this.
Pan Am’s flying boats taxied out from the pier, lumbered into the air over Queens, and crossed the Atlantic with stops in Newfoundland or the Azores.
A year after the service began, Clare Boothe Luce wrote in Life Magazine: “Fifty years from now people will look back upon a Pan American Clipper flight of today as the most romantic voyage of history.”
The terminal is still there. The flying boats are not. If you fly out of Terminal A at LaGuardia today, look up — the terracotta frieze along the roofline shows winged fish, a 1940 sculptor’s tribute to the Clippers that once landed on the bay outside. Most travelers walk under them and never notice.
Dispatches from the Marine Air Terminal.
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Photo: Hans Groenhoff / Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, c. 1940
