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Aeropostale (formally, Compagnie Generale Aeropostale) was a pioneering aviation company. It was founded in 1918 in Toulouse, France, as Societe des lignes Latecoère, also known as Lignes Aeriennes Latecoère or simply "The Line".
Aeropostale founder Pierre-Georges Latecoère envisioned an air route connecting France to the French colonies in Africa and South America. The company's activities were to specialise in, but were by no means restricted to, airborne postal services.
Between 1921 and 1927 the "Line" operated as Compagnie generale d'entreprises aeronautiques (CGEA). In April 1927 Latecoère, having troubles with its planes, damaged due to long flights to South America, decided to sell 93% of his business to another Brazilian-based French businessman named Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont. On that basis, Bouilloux-Lafont then founded the Compagnie Generale Aeropostale, better known by the shorter name Aeropostale.
On December 25, 1918, the company began serving its first route between Toulouse and Barcelona in Spain. In February 1919 the line was extended to Casablanca. By 1925 it extended to Dakar, where the mail was shipped by steamer to South America. In November 1927 regular flights between Rio de Janeiro and Natal were started. Expansion then continued to Paraguay, and in July 1929 a regularly scheduled route across the Andes Mountains to Santiago, Chile, were started, later extending down to Tierra del Fuego on the southern part of Chile. Finally, on May 12–13, 1930, the trip across the South Atlantic by air finally took place: a Latecoère 28 mail plane fitted with floats and a 650 horsepower (480 kW) Hispano-Suiza engine made the first nonstop flight. Aeropostale pilot Jean Mermoz flew 3,058 kilometres (1,900 mi) from Dakar to Natal in 19 hours, 35 minutes, with his plane holding 122 kilograms (270 lb) of mail.
After a scandal involving postal payments from the French government to Aeropostale, the company was dissolved in 1932, and merged with a number of other aviation companies (Air Orient, Societe Generale de Transport Aerien, Air Union, and Compagnie Internationale de Navigation) to create Air France.
Night Flight (1933 film), a 1933 film starring Clark Gable, was based on the novel by Antoine de Saint Exupery, which recounted his real life experiences when he managed and flew for the Aeroposta Argentina subsidiary in South America. In the movie the airline was given the fictitious name Trans-Andean European Air Mail.
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Developed in the aftermath of World War I, air mail service owed much to the bravery of its earliest pilots. During the 1920s, every flight was a dangerous adventure, and sometimes fatal. The period was eloquently described by the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery – himself an Aeropostale pilot – in his novel Vol de Nuit ("Night Flight"), in which he describes a postal flight through the skies of South America.
Aeropostale's roster of pilots included such aviation legends as:
Among the aircraft operated by the company were:
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