Transcontinental Airmail

On February 22, 1921, the first attempt at a through, continuous transcontinental airmail ser­vice was made. The plan called for a westbound plane to leave New York to fly the initial segment of the route to San Francisco, and an eastbound plane to leave San Francisco initiating the first segment to New York. (See Figure 10-9.) The trip each way would be sequentially flown by fresh airplanes and pilots, like the Pony Express, handing off the mail at predetermined points along the route. Two aircraft were assigned to begin at each end of the route.

The first airplane to leave New York dis­continued shortly after take off. The second plane flew to Chicago but was grounded due to weather. The first plane out of San Francisco crashed in Nevada, but the second plane made

it to Reno, and 12 hours after leaving San Fran­cisco, the mail arrived in Cheyenne. Another plane took the mail on to North Platte, Nebraska, and there it was turned over to the next segment airmail pilot, Jack Knight.

A combination of ground personnel and volunteers built bonfires along Jack’s route, which was to be traversed at night, and he made it to Omaha, his segment complete, by 1:00 a. m. There he learned that the plane scheduled to meet him in Omaha had not left Chicago due to weather. He volunteered to continue, armed only with an automobile road map to guide him over unknown terrain, a landscape he had never flown. This part of the country is chilly in February, and this night was accompanied by cold, ice, and snow, along with the low clouds that produce snow. He was unable to land at Des Moines, Iowa, as planned. He continued to Iowa City, and arriving, searched for the airport that was unlighted because the ground crew had left for the evening, believing that no sane person would fly in the prevailing conditions. A lone employee at the airfield heard his engine, lit a flare and watched as Jack Knight glided in with an empty gas tank. After refueling and accept­ing a quick cup of coffee, Knight gamely flew on to Chicago, finally landing at Checkerboard Field at 8:40 a. m. From there, the mail relay was continued to New York and, when the results were announced, the mail had been successfully carried coast to coast in slightly more than 24 hours.

The best that the Post Office had been able to do up to that time using the railroads was a transcontinental transit of three days. The experi­mental policy of flying the mail during daylight hours and handing the mail off to the railroads at night had only marginally improved savings in time, and was generally considered to be not cost effective. But with the grand experiment of February 21, 1921, it was now clear that flying the mails for the entire route could be done.

The success of this first attempt caused Con­gress to favorably consider appropriations sought by the Post Office, granting a splendid sum for that time, $1,250,000, for airmail extensions. Paul Henderson, who became Second Assistant Postmaster General in 1922, was committed to the Otto Praeger principle that the mail could be flown. But it was clear that the mail had to be flown both night and day, and that bonfires as a means of nighttime navigation probably had only the most limited of possibilities.