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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Mr. and Mrs. John Bennett

Charles H. Bennett (1914-2002) pioneered commercial aviation for over four decades.

A professional radio operator trained in Canada and a constable in the British Columbia Provincial Police Force (1935-1941), Charlie Bennett's initial contact with aviation was in Atlin, BC, where bush pilots provided the primary link to the outside world.

In 1941, Charlie Bennett joined Pan American World Airways in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, as a radio operator-dispatcher and, subsequently, station manager. In 1946 he moved to Nome and then Fairbanks, Alaska, as PAA's station manager. His 1952-1954 assignments were San Francisco, California, PAA's Pacific Division headquarters; Portland, Oregon, on interim duty; Rangoon, Burma, which he opened; and Hong Kong on temporary assignment.
For eleven years from 1954 Charlie Bennett headed Pan Am's operations in Tokyo, Japan, as the airline went from the piston-engine to the jet age. Based from 1965 to 1977 in Kabul, Afghanistan, Charlie Bennett served as the Executive Vice President of Ariana Afghan Airlines, which he expanded from a broken down, regional carrier to a profitable, intercontinental, jet-age competitor. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he continued to direct Ariana from London until retiring in 1982.

With employee welfare always a priority, Charlie Bennett spent much of his retirement counseling former Ariana employees, scattered in refugee camps in Pakistan and India as well as exiled in Europe, and sponsoring many to find asylum with their families in the United States.

As Charlie Bennett entered his final years with his beloved Peg, nothing pleased him more than to guide his grandchildren and old friends through the Boeing Museum of Flight near his home on the Hood Canal, Washington.

Charlie Bennett's pioneering leadership - from the hazards of bush flying to the demands of intercontinental jet travel - virtually replicated the history of civil aviation in the Twentieth Century.