The last time Bob Morrell, rear passenger seat, and Dick Morrell, front passenger seat, took to the skies together above Brunswick, the plane was piloted by the pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart. On Friday, Bob’s son, Bill Morrell, organized a ride for his uncle and father with Maine Coastal Flight pilot and instructor Erik Vroom, right, Bill Morrell is in the rear pilot’s side seat. (Darren Fishell / The Times Record)
The last time Bob Morrell, rear passenger seat, and Dick Morrell, front passenger seat, took to the skies together above Brunswick, the plane was piloted by the pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart. On Friday, Bob’s son, Bill Morrell, organized a ride for his uncle and father with Maine Coastal Flight pilot and instructor Erik Vroom. (Darren Fishell / The Times Record)
“It was just like what we’re doing today,” Bob Morrell said Friday of the course charted over the Mid-coast region, flying over Mere Point and up to Bath for a 30-minute trip Bob’s son, Bill Morrell, had arranged for his father and uncle.
On Friday, into clear blues skies, the two brothers took off again, this time with Maine Coastal Flight pilot and flight instructor Erik Vroom.
When the brothers flew with Earhart, Bob was 8 and Dick was 6, but the two still recall their first trip skyward, taking off from what was then a gravel runway in Brunswick.
Neither met Earhart, or saw much of her during the flight they took with three or four others, but the feeling of taking flight for the first time stayed with them. Bob, who later earned his pilot’s license and flew with the Army Air Corps, said most historical accounts tell of Earhart’s flights out of Bangor and other Maine cities, but not Brunswick.
But in 1934, Bob Morrell said, Earhart’s Ford Trimotor plane visited the runway in Brunswick for one of the celebrity flights publicized out of Boston, Portland, Rock- land, Waterville and Bangor. A 1933 story in the Lewiston Daily Sun, now the Sun Journal, tells of Earhart’s visit to those cities aboard one of two tri-motored planes of Boston-Maine Airways Inc.
In 1937, Earhart’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe aboard a Lockheed Model 10 Electra ended somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Investigators with The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) believe Earhart crashed on or near the island of Nikumaroro. While investigators continue to search for traces of Earhart in the South Pacific, Dick and Bob Morrell found traces of her memory Friday in the skies above Brunswick.
dfishell@timesrecord.com
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