SYD KRONISH | Stamps Palau, Antigua honor 1st flight
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the historic Wright Brothers' first controlled, powered, sustained flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
Many countries around the world have hailed this centennial of flight with postage stamps featuring early aircraft and their important missions after the accomplishments of the Wrights.
Palau, a former U.S.-administered U.N. Trust Territory in the western Pacific, honored the occasion with two sheetlets of different stamps portraying famous flights. Some of the stamps show the Boeing Model 747 217-B, the Curtiss T-32 Condor, the Vickers Viscount Type 761, the Wright Flyer III, and the Avro Ten Achilles.
Antigua and Barbuda, a former British colony in the eastern Caribbean, has issued a set of three sheetlets, each containing different stamps, to celebrate the centennial of flight. Included are stamps depicting the 1903 Wright Brothers' first manned powered flight, Paul Cornu's 1907 first free flight in a helicopter, the 1911 first landing by a plane on a ship, the 1911 flight of the Curtiss A-1, the first space walk in 1965 by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the 1969 Concorde SST Supersonic Transport, the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz joint U.S.-Soviet mission, and the 1976 Viking Robot Mars Expedition.
The stamps of Palau and Antigua and Barbuda are available at your local dealer.
The U.S. Postal Service honored the occasion with a souvenir sheet of 37-cent stamps May 22. The stamps illustrated Orville Wright at the controls of the 1903 plane at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The date was Dec. 17, 1903. Text at the bottom of each stamp in the sheet reads "First Flight Wright Brothers 1903."
Collection on display
The greatest collection of U.S. stamps dating back to the first issue of 1847 will be on display at New York's Jacob Javits Center beginning Oct. 23.
The exhibit is called "The Postmaster General Collection." The material has been in vaults and archives of the U.S. Postal Service and includes a variety of stamps from the earliest through current issues. Many of the items are appearing for the first time outside of the USPS Headquarters in Washington.
Material includes die proofs dating back to the first issues in 1847, stamps in full panes dating back to the 19th century, press sheets dating back to the 1950s and earlier including color press proofs, early 20th-century albums and bound logbooks of stamp proofs, postal stationery official mail items and other materials dating back to the 1800s.
Also on display will be die proofs of every major U.S. issue from 1847 through the 1950s, die proofs of the famous 1918 24-cent Curtiss Jenny airmail stamp with inverted center, the space mail pouch that carried philatelic material on a moon landing mission and preliminary designs that were never used for stamps including the "Heroes of 2001" semi-postal.