About two years ago, I found a rare set of aviation cards featuring early flyers that was produced by Milton Bradley. The deck of cards was a game featuring 13 different aviators, each having four cards. The highlight of the set was in finding perhaps the earliest card of Amelia Earhart. Originally copyrighted in 1928 by E.K. Barker, the game’s creator, it was then distributed by Milton Bradley, seemingly in 1930 (the copyright on the instructions booklet).

Earlier this year, I was able to have SGC grade the first examples of these cards, including one of my Earhart cards shown here.

I do not expect that game was produced in large quantities. To date, I’ve only come across a handful of games despite looking pretty aggressively for them.

Recently, though, I found that Milton Bradley created another similar game, a few years later.

Instead of “Aviation,” this one’s called “Famous Fliers and their Flights.”

It’s in a similar-sized box as the Aviation game with the dimensions of the roughly 1″ thick box being about 6″ by 7 1/2″. Instead of 13 aviators, though, this one features only ten:

  • Brent Balchen
  • Floyd Bennett
  • Richard Byrd
  • Clarence Chamberlain
  • Amelia Earhart
  • Arthur Goebel
  • Charles Lindbergh
  • Lester Maitland
  • George Noville
  • John Rodgers

In case you’re curious, the three from the earlier Aviation set that did not make it into this one are Bertrand Acosta, Albert Francis Hegenberger, and Leigh Wade.

The cards are slightly different from the Aviation set. While the same sketches of the aviators were reused, the new Famous Fliers and their Flights cards include four career ‘highlights’ printed on the cards for each one. The goal of the game was to collect all four of as many of the particular aviators as you could from the other players.

Pictured here, too, is the back design of the cards.

Determining a Date

So, how old is this game anyway?

Well we know it cannot also be from 1930 as the Aviation set. While the majority of the highlights/facts about particular aviators are from the late 1920s or earlier, a few are later. The latest one that I could find was a mention of Richard Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition, which did not happen until 1933-1934. The set, then, obviously could not have been printed before then. And, unfortunately, this game did not come with a full instruction book (the Aviation’s book included the copyright date). Instead, the instructions to this game were merely printed on the inside of the box and no date is given.

There’s also conflicting information about it. One particular game catalog identifies the set only as being printed before 1937 — though, it is also notable that they have the date of the Aviation game incorrectly listed as 1937 when it was copyrighted nearly a decade earlier. The excellent site BoardGameGeek has it as 1930, which we know from the Byrd card, cannot be correct.

Without more information, it seems best to classify this as a 1930s set for the time being, though I welcome more information on that front to nail down a more definitive date.

The Amelia Earhart Cards

With all due respect to the legendary Charles Lindbergh and Richard Byrd, both of whom are quite collectible, the only reason I was interested in this game was because of Earhart.

Like the others that were featured in the earlier Aviation set, the Earhart cards feature the same exact image.

Earhart’s cards also clearly show the set cannot be from 1930. For one thing, the cards also include her full married name of Amelia Earhart Putnam, following her 1931 marriage to aviator George Putnam. For another, one of her career highlights listed is a mention of her solo transatlantic flight, which did not occur until 1932.

While attractive cards of Earhart while she was still active, these are not as early as Milton Bradley’s Aviation cards of her.