Treasure Trove: Israel’s Aviation History Will Include Flights from Canada Again

The long awaited resumption of Air Canada’s Toronto-Tel Aviv direct flight is scheduled for November 30, 2026.  In anticipation of these flights starting again, Treasure Trove is taking this opportunity to give a brief history of aviation in the Land of Israel.

With the first flight by the Wright Brothers in 1903, a word for “airplane” needed to be created.  In 1907, Itamar Ben Avi, whose father Eliezer Ben Yehudah was the father of the modern Hebrew language, coined the word aviron for aircraft from the word avir (air). 

The first avion to land in the Land of Israel (then called Palestine) was in 1913 when French aviator Jules Vedrines landed on the beach in Jaffa.  He was competing in a flying race from Paris to Cairo held to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first flight, and intended to stop at Mikve Yisrael where a landing strip had been prepared for him in fields beside a cypress grove.  High winds forced him off his route so he landed on the beach near Tel Aviv instead.

The first airfields in Palestine were built in 1917 by the Turks, with German assistance, for military use.  The first airline service was established by the British in 1924, linking London and Palestine.  The first scheduled airline route to Palestine was established in 1927 with a stop in Gaza on the route from Cairo to Iraq. In 1931, using flying boats, a route was established between Athens and Haifa Bay with continuation on to Tiberius (landing in the Sea of Galilee). 

In 1934, the British built a small airport in Haifa, originally to serve the Iraq Petroleum Company, and in 1938 paved the Sde Dov airfield north of Tel Aviv.   Also in 1934 the British began construction of what is now Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main international airport at Lod outside Tel Aviv.  This major hub began as two unpaved runways as a back up plan should the British be forced out of neighbouring Egypt.

The first continental European airline to operate a regular scheduled service to Lod was the Polish airline LOT (lot means flight in Polish) which began in April 1937.  On October 27, 1936 (90 years ago) a trial flight took place between Warsaw and Haifa which included mail from various towns in Poland.

This is one of the pieces of mail carried on that flight that originated in Warsaw and was sent to the office of the Palestine-Poland Chamber of Commerce in Tel Aviv.  A special postmark was affixed in Poland that has an outline of the map of Poland, an airplane and a depiction of a city scene in Palestine with the words “Mail Flight from Poland to Palestine”.  On arrival each envelope had affixed a round stamp in Hebrew that says “First Flight Poland-Eretz Yisrael 27-X-1936”.

We eagerly await the next “First Flight Toronto-Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel)” in November.

For more treasures from the Herzl and Zionism Collection of David Matlow, which have appeared weekly in the Treasure Trove column in the Canadian Jewish News (www.thecjn.ca) since February 2021, see https://herzlcollection.com/treasure-trove