To associate the jet-set image of a corporate flight department with S-38 flying boats and Ford Trimotors might seem a bit of a stretch to those who fly in the plush expanses of a gold-trimmed, leather-upholstered Global Express or GIV. But for UTFlight, the East Granby, Conn.-based flight department of United Technologies, the connection to aviation’s past runs deeper than most. Celebrating its 75th year of continuous operation in August, UTFlight took a rare opportunity to reflect on its rich history, spanning from August 1928, when its first full-time corporate pilot, Benny Whelan, flew the company’s newly delivered Ford Trimotor using skills imparted by his flight instructor, Orville Wright.
Today, UTFlight owns a fleet of three Hawker 1000s, a Gulfstream IV, a Global Express and a pair of Sikorsky S-76 helicopters–a B model and a C+. The flight department employs 48, including 22 pilots, assembled to fly a select group of 21 executives to global destinations ranging from the exotic to the mundane. Of course, places like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Perm, Russia, didn’t appear on the itinerary in 1928, when Pratt & Whitney Aircraft president Fred Rentschler and William Boeing formed United Technologies’ forebear, the giant United Aircraft & Transport Corp. In those days a Sikorsky S-38 plied a route between Hartford and New York, where the flying boat would execute water landings in the Hudson River. Often, the early pilots used the airplanes to flight-test propellers and engines on the same airplanes used to transport the company’s executives.
