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Air Mail
The story of how the delivery of the mail spawned commercial
aviation in the United States is
one of the remarkable chapters in the history of flight.
After a rocky start on May 15,
1918, air mail runs became
reliable, and the Post Office
sought to expand its air mail operations. The
fleet was expanded from the
original seventeen planes, mostly
Jennies, with the addition of Standard
aircraft (manufactured by a
Japanese company) and war surplus
de Havilliand D.H. 4 training
planes dubbed “flying coffins,”
because the fuel tanks were right in front of
the pilot.
The first extension of the
service would be to link
Washington and New York with Chicago, but
that required flying over
the Allegheny Mountains, a treacherous flight in the old
open-cockpit planes then in
service. Between May 1919 and the
end of 1920, the “graveyard run”
between New York and Chicago was
opened, though it claimed the
lives of eighteen pilots—some
crashing due to bad weather or
mechanical failure, some crashing
and being blown up while flying the JL-
6, a Junkers aircraft
bought by the Post Office that had
serious fuel leakage problems.
Fearing that the Warren Harding
Administration would cut the air
mail service of the Post Office when it
took power in March 1921, the Post Office Air
Service, headed by Otto Prager,
decided to stage a dramatic
cross-country flight that would impress Congress and
the president. On February 22
(Washington’s birthday), two
D.H. 4s took off from New York and two from San
Francisco; the hope was
that at least one would make it
across the country.
The event was followed by the entire
country, with many along the route lighting bonfires
to point
the way. The two planes that set out from New
York were grounded by bad weather in Chicago,
and one of the planes
flying eastward crashed in Nevada, which
left only one plane still flying.
This plane landed in North Platte, Nebraska, and from
there pilot James H. “Jack” Knight was to
continue to Omaha, where
another pilot would fly on to Chicago.
A broken tail skid caused a three-hour
delay, so by the time Knight arrived in Omaha, all the
bonfire burners had gone home, figuring the flight had
failed. The pilot who was to take over for Knight had been
unable to come down from Chicago, and in what was to be
described as one of the bravest (and most foolhardy) acts in
the history of aviation, the exhausted Knight, who had never
flown the Omaha-Chicago run, downed a quick cup of coffee
and took off into the night for Chicago, with nothing but
road maps to guide him. After seven hours in the air, Knight
somehow found Checkerboard Field in Chicago, arriving at
8:40 A.M. The mail was transferred to another plane and the
rest of the flight went off without a hitch. The mail had
crossed the continent in an astounding thirty-three hours
and twenty minutes, less than half the previous record.
The war-surplus
de Havilland D.H. 4 biplanes
became
the backbone of the first U.S. air
mail fleet. These planes were not
built for long flights, however, and they
required a wartime regime of maintenance;
as a result, forced landings and crashes were
frequent.
Jack Knight became a national hero
(he would later become a celebrated pilot of the DC-3), and
the air mail service was saved. Harding’s Postmaster
General, Will H. Hays, addressed the entire issue of air
mail service from a businesslike and professional point of
view and instituted many innovations that benefited
all forms of aviation, such as an electric light directional
beacon system, landing lights at airports, and regular
broadcasts of weather
conditions across the
country. The routes were extended
beyond the borders of the United States, and one such
route, a “star route"
(one handed over to a private contractor) between Seattle
and Vancouver, brought William
F. “Bill” Boeing into the aviation industry.
A young Bill Boeing (right) and Eddie
Hubbard, after flying the first
(Canada-to-United
States air mail flight in 1919.
Behind them is the
Boeing-built Curtiss Model C-700
navy trainer they flew.
Boeing, a member of a wealthy
lumber family in Washington, had
been nothing more than a hobbyist before 1919. When
the opportunity arose, he
and aviator Eddie Hubbard started
building mail planes, intending to corner the air
mail contracts from the
United States to Asia. A similar
star route run by Carl Ben Eilson (owner and
one-man operator of the
Farthest North Airplane Company) flew
ski-equipped air mail planes to
Alaska and initiated the
legendary era of Alaskan aviation.
The Post Office lost money on air mail service:
between 1918 and 1925, its air mail service had
cost $17 million to operate
and had brought in less than a third of
that. An odd alliance was
forged between Pittsburgh
Congressman Clyde Kelly and Postmaster General Harry
New that resulted in the
Kelly Act of 1925, which turned
over air mail delivery to private contractors.
Kelly
believed that this would suppress the air
transportation industry and thus
help the railroads, the largest
customers of Pittsburgh steel. Why, Kelly reasoned, would
private air transporters stand
any better a chance of making
a profit than the Post Office? But New made sure
that air mail carriers were
permitted to that air mail carriers were
permitted to keep 80 percent of the face value of the mail
they carried, and this proved to be a windfall for the
holders of the Contract Air Mail, or CAM, routes.
Suddenly, there was a way to make big
money with an airplane. The holders of the CAM routes— only
a handful of contractors were awarded routes at first,
though more than 5,000 companies submitted bids—were among
the biggest industrialists in America at that time. Henry
Ford held two of the contracts—CAM- 6 and 7
(Detroit—Cleveland and Detroit—Chicago). CAM-I (New
York—Boston) went to Colonial Air Transport, an outfit
backed by Rockefeller, Vanderbilt- Whitney, and Fairchild
money. and managed by Juan Trippe. Frank, Dan, and Bill
Robertson, hacked by powerful St. Louis business interests,
were awarded CAM-2 (Chicago—St. Louis), and featured Charles
Lindbergh as its principal pilot.
The Chicago—Dallas- Fort Worth
route, CAM-3, was awarded to National Air Transport, a
hastily assembled company headed by Clement Keys of the Curtiss Corporation and backed by Charles Kettering of
General Motors and Howard Coffin of the Hudson Motorcar
Company. CAM- 4 (Los Angeles—Salt Lake City) was awarded to
Western Air Express, managed by famed race car driver Harris
“Pop” Hanshue and backed by Los Angeles Times publisher
Harry Chandler; CAM-8 (Los Angeles—Seattle) was awarded to
Pacific Air Transport, founded in 1912 by Vein C. Gorst and
one of the few companies in operation before 1920 that
received an air mail contract. Three smaller companies
headed by Walter Varney, Clifford Ball, and Charles
Dickinson were awarded CAM
contracts for the more dangerous, less lucrative routes.
Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT)
offered luxury service,
but the complicated plane-train
(with buses to connect airfields and train stations)
was expensive, required frequent transfers,
and cut only a day off the
railroad’s 3-day coast-to-coast trip.
Still, Lindbergh’s
promotion of
TAT made flying a viable option to many—and resulted in the
formation of TWA.
Having landed these potentially lucrative contracts,
the companies put pressure on the
manufacturers to create the
planes that could fulfil them. Postmaster General
New hoped that the
opportunity to make a profit carrying mail would result in
the carriers’ building better aircraft
that could also carry passengers. The better aircraft
soon came, from such builders as Bill
Stout, who built the Ford
Trimotor, or “Tin Goose,” which became a
mainstay of early 1930s
aviation.
The development of air
mail services of other countries followed the American
model. French airplane
manufacturer Pierre-Georges Latecocre established the
first air mail service
between France and Morocco on
September 1, 1919, with a fleet of fifteen Breguet 14
biplanes. The routes were
even more hazardous than those
flown by the Americans: pilots risked being
captured and held for ransom if their plane went down
in a desert region. Like the
Americans, French air mail pilots
carried guns and frequently had to stand guard and
fend off looters
(sometimes while injured) if the plane went
down for a crash or emergency landing.
In May 1926
a celebrated flier for Latecoere, Jean Mermoz (who
inspired Antoine de Saint
Exupéry’s 1931 novel, Night
Flight) was captured by Moroccan nomads and imprisoned
in a cage for three days until he
could be ransomed by the company
representative in Casablanca.
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