Photo: Courtesy of the Haynes Family Archive

Read the PDF

When aviators and archaeologists teamed up to unlock ancients secrets

Author Eric Hobson, Professor of Humanities at Belmont University, took his first flight as an infant on Pan Am and still remembers as a seven-year-old climbing the spiral staircase of a PAA 747. He is completing a book about the 1931 Matto Grosso Expedition and planning a biography of Pan Am Captain Charles Lorber.

"On Pan American Airways’ (PAA) inaugural mail run from Panama over the Yucatan Peninsula to Brownsville, Texas in February 1929, Charles Lindbergh fully understood the challenge archeologists faced when he spied pyramids jutting through dense, unmapped, inaccessible jungle. Reflecting on that flight, he concluded that scientists could understand Maya civilization in new ways if they left the ground..."