Aviron flying school


Aviron Aviation Company was established in April, 1936 in Mandatory Palestine. The company was intended to train pilots and then operate a mainly internal airline, which would serve the security needs of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine.

Name

Aviron is the Modern Hebrew word for airplane.

History

The Aviron airline company was established in 1936 by Dov Hoz and Yitzhak Ben Ya'akov at the initiative of the Histadrut trade union association and the Jewish Agency. At its beginnings, the Aviron flight school was based in three kibbutzim in the northern Jordan Valley, with the flight school in the attic of the cowshed at Degania Alef, an improvised airstrip at Afikim, and a hangar at Ashdot Ya'akov. Yitzhak Ben Ya'akov was one of the first members of Degania.
Two years previously, in 1934, Zionist officials who dealt with Jewish immigration from Poland obtained from David Ben-Gurion, who acted on behalf of the Jewish Agency, the money for buying a de Havilland Tiger Moth. The airplane arrived in October that year, flown by a British instructor-pilot.

Gallery