Felix Turney Smith

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/obituaries/felix-smith-dead.html

Felix Smith, a swashbuckling pilot for a Chinese Nationalist airline that flew covert missions over Asia for the American government during the early days of the Cold War, died on Oct. 3 in Milwaukee. He was 100.

Mr. Smith’s death, at a hospital, came the day before a reunion of fellow surviving members of the airline, Civil Air Transport. It had been scheduled in Milwaukee in his honor.

Civil Air Transport, which was later run by the C.I.A., was a back-channel carrier assembled in 1946 by former Lt. Gen. Claire L. Chennault of the Army Air Forces using surplus World War II planes and a supply and maintenance ship and recruiting pilots from the Flying Tigers, a volunteer World War II unit famed for its exploits in the skies over China. The airline’s aim was to undergird the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in the protracted civil war against the Communists.

The airline’s facade as a civilian commercial enterprise concealed Washington’s full-throated support for Chiang and for the mass evacuation of his followers from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan after he was defeated in 1949.