Las Vegas Takes To The Skies

Aug 27, 2015

by Fred Wasser

Nevada has a rich aviation history populated by people who had a strong entrepreneurial spirit.

One of those people was journalist Randall Henderson. He was the first person to land an airplane in Las Vegas. The plane was a Curtiss “Jenny” – a World War One military plane. Henderson is more popularly known as the the editor and publisher of “Desert Magazine,” which he co-founded in the 1930s at Palm Desert, California.

Randall Henderson’s story is just one of the many stories Mark Hall-Patton will tell in his “Las Vegas Takes To The Skies” lecture at the Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Road, on Thursday, Sept. 3, at 7p.m.

Courtesy: Clark County Museum/ Henderson, NV. Airplane at Anderson/Rockwell Field, probably in the late 1920s.

Courtesy: Clark County Museum/Henderson, NV. The first Air Mail delivery to Las Vegas on April 17, 1926.  The plane flew from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas and then went on to Los Angeles. The man on horseback is Bill Morgan. The pilot is Fred Kelly, one of the first four pilots who flew for Western Air Express.