After The War
Back in The Netherlands Smirnov took up old activities and began to fly on his beloved Java route again. But in 1948 Smirnov got an offer he could not resist. He was asked to pilot a World Tour. The American Atlas Supply Company, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was planning a 100-day round-the-world flight on which heads of important American firms would act as their own commercial travellers. The plane in which they flew would be a travelling stockroom, loaded with colour films, scale models, give-away samples and literature in many languages. The Sky Merchant, a Douglas DC4, was to travel a route of 80.000 kilometres, crossing the equator six times, visiting all five continents, twenty-eight countries and forty-five principal cities. Smirnov was delighted.
In 1950 he retired from KLM and moved to Cala d'Or on the Balearic Island of Majorca. He died in 1956 and was buried in Palma de Majorca. Three years later he was re-buried in Heemstede near Amsterdam.
Read more about this topic: Ivan Vasilyevich Smirnov
Famous quotes containing the word war:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)