posted 11-08-2020 12:18 PM               

Space Cover #584: Neil Armstrong's first flight

These two philatelic covers celebrate the last flight of Neil Armstrong's Aeronca Champion training plane. The last flight was from Tewksbury Massachusettes to Wapakoneta Ohio, the hometown of Neil Armstrong.

From a very early age Armstrong was fascinated with flight. At age 5 or 6 he went on his first airplane ride and at age 8 was building his own balsa wood airplanes. Neil's first flight lessons were in an Aeronca Champion, a two seater airplane with a 65 horsepower engine.

According to James Hanson, author of the Neil Armstrong biography "First Man," Armstrong and two high school classmates learned to fly in the summer of 1946. "Each soloed about the same time. It was a little unusual, though, that Neil earned his pilot's license before he got an automobile driver's license."

This first cover bears both the Tewksbury Nov. 17, 1969 cancel, the date of the takeoff and a Nov. 20, 1969 Wapakoneta cancel upon the plane's arrival.

The second cover was cancelled in Wapakoneta on November 20, 1969 and bears a "Hometown of Neil Armstrong First Man on the Moon" slogan cancel on a #C76 First Man on the Moon stamp designed by my father Paul Calle.

Of special interest is that the provenance of this cover is having come directly Neil Armstrong's collection. The cover sold for $162.50 at Heritage Auctions in 2019 as part the Armstrong Family Collection auctions.

An Aeronca 7AC Champion plane that Armstrong learned to fly in 1946 at the Port Koneta in Wapakoneta when he was 16 is on display at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta.