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US Airmail History

The history of the United States Airmail system is an intriguing saga containing courageous heroes and determined Postal Officials who worked to utilize the plane as a means of transportation and delivery, which ultimately led to the advance of aeronautic technology. The use of aerial transportation to deliver mail can be traced all the way back to 1870, when balloons carrying up to 500 pounds of letters were released in the winds over Paris. Sufficed to say, this system was unsatisfactory and far from reliable.
A more predictable idea of aerial mail transportation was later explored in the United States during the week of September 23 to 30, 1911, when Earle L. Ovington used his monoplane to drop pouches of mail from a flying field to the post office at Mineola, New York. This and other similar experiments in 1911 showed much promise in regards to creating a permanent US Airmail system. The Post Office Department recognized the promise in this system and recommended that Congress provide financial support in the sum of $50,000 in 1912 to further develop an airmail system. Congress did not grant this support, but the Post Office did not forget this idea. During 1912, 31 postal orders in 16 different states were carried out using short experimental aerial flights. These flights were continued year after year and the Post Office continued to request support from Congress.
Congress finally granted $100,000 in support of the creation of an experimental airmail system for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1918. They were partially convinced to support this system because of the great success the airplane had played in fighting the World War.
On May 15, 1918, the first official airmail route was established between New York City and Washington, D.C., with one stop in Philadelphia, PA. This 218-mile route was traveled once per day, Monday through Saturday, and was made possible through the support of the US War Department. This department supplied the planes, pilots, and maintenance, and the Post Office concentrated on all matters related to the mail. This union continued until August 12, 1918, when the Post office took over the entire system by procuring planes, equipment, and personnel of its own. The route from New York to Washington D.C. was continued very successfully and plans were soon made to expand this route and eventually establish a coast-to-coast route across the United States.
The airmail system was quickly expanded using train service in connection with aerial routes. A route was established from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, from Cleveland to Chicago, Illinois, and from Chicago to Omaha, Nebraska using both airmail and trains. From Chicago, the routes were further expanded to reach St. Louis and Minneapolis. Eventually, the routes expanded as far west as San Francisco, California. However, the aerial portion of all of these routes was restricted to daylight hours only.
The idea of night flying was recognized as having great potential to expand the US airmail system, especially to enable pilots to fly day and night on a coast-to-coast route from New York to San Francisco. But much work would need to done to enable night flying, for airplanes at this time were not equipped with the sophisticated navigational technology of today. Pilots were simply using visual landmarks on the ground to navigate from point to point. This technique was impossible in the dark because pilots could simply not see the ground. The idea of the first lighted airfield, which would be visible to pilots at night and thus enable them to fly at night, was a serendipitous invention in a Chicago park on September 5, 1918. The first uninterrupted flight from New York City to Chicago attracted a large crowd to the park where the plane was scheduled to land. As night fell, the crowd lit several large bonfires to help guide the plane to the park. This was the unintentional invention of the “lighted airfield.”
With this idea in mind, the post office began work on lighted routes between Cheyenne, Wyoming and Chicago. This portion of the coast-to-coast route was chosen for several reasons. First, it was the middle portion of the route and flights could be made during daylight hours in the western and eastern portion of the route, thus allowing continuous coast-to-coast trips. Also, this middle portion was the safest to travel by air because the Midwestern states are relatively flat and sparsely populated, which enabled pilots to perform emergency landings when needed with the highest degree of safety. However, the post office still had to build lighted airfields throughout the Cheyenne to Chicago route to guide the pilots and this work was begun in 1923. 34 lighted emergency landing fields were set up on this route, one about every 25 to 30 miles. These fields were all very similar in their construction. Each had a large landing field, about 40 acres, the boundaries of which were marked with landing lights. A 50-foot tower beacon, which rotated continuously to shine light for the pilots, was built, along with a small caretaker’s shanty to house equipment, generators, and a telephone. Each shanty required a caretaker to maintain the field. In addition to these fields, a flashing beacon was installed approximately every 3 miles in between each airfield to provide further navigational points. There were 289 of these flashing beacons between Cheyenne and Chicago, thus making up the “highway of light” that began day and night coast-to-coast airmail service. In addition to ground equipment, planes making night flights were also given special equipment, including landing and navigation lights, luminous instruments, and parachute flares that would light up a one-mile area where a plane had taken an emergency landing. A test run of the lighted airway was conducted in August 1923 and the official beginning of continuous coast-to-coast airmail began July 1, 1924.
The lighted airways proved so successful that plans were soon underway to light both the eastern and western portions of the route. To finance these plans, postal rates not only increased, but were also differentiated in regards to which zone or zones of the airmail route were utilized. Customers were charged $.08 per ounce for each zone traveled through, and the entire route was divided into three zones, specifically New York to Chicago, Chicago to Cheyenne, and Cheyenne to San Francisco. Although this segmented zone system was necessary to finance the faster and more efficient service provided by day and night coast to coast airmail, the public was dissatisfied with the rate system and many found it confusing. These sentiments negatively affected the public’s use of airmail in general.
Despite the problems with the rate system, the demand for the efficient and fast delivery provided by airmail soon began to increase. So in 1924 through 1925, work was begun on extending the lighted airfields westward and eastward. Each leg of the route provided its own challenges. The westward portion, specifically the area from Rock Springs to Salt Lake City, proved difficult because it crosses the Laramie and Wasatch Ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Besides the obvious challenge of the mountain ranges, this area was also troublesome because of the very sparse human settlement, making manned airfields difficult to set up. One solution to this shortage of available workers was to eliminate the worker. Several experimental airfields used wind-driven electric plants to light the beacon and airfield, thus eliminating the need for a caretaker. These plants generated power with a wind-driven propeller and stored the power in large-capacity storage batteries. They were also set on an automatic timer that turned the lights on at dusk and off at dawn. Other airfields also used automatic equipment in conjunction with local power supplies to set up automatic control of airfield equipment and eliminate the need for a round the clock caretaker.
A similar challenge was found in the eastward portion when airfields were once again required to cross a mountain range, this time the Allegheny mountain range of western and central Pennsylvania. However, this portion of the route was so feared by pilots that many called it “Hell Stretch” because of the tumultuous and unpredictable weather conditions, including blinding fog that obstructed a pilot’s ability to locate ground landmarks, as well as the mountain terrain that made emergency landing very difficult. Therefore, the post office set out to search for relatively flat areas of land that could support airfields. This was very successfully accomplished by creating a series of airfields large enough to accommodate emergency landings at many different points across Pennsylvania. The history of one such airfield, the Numidia airport, has been documented here in the Numidia Airport History.
With both the westward and eastward portions of the route completed, mail loads began to increase and two significant changes occurred in regards to the airmail system. The first change involved the type of plane used in mail delivery. Before July 1, 1921, the postal department had been using at least eight different types of planes. But on this date, the department made the DeHaviland plane with Liberty-12 engine the standard equipment and eliminated all other types. But once the day and night transcontinental route was established, the mail loads increased steadily and the DeHaviland could no longer accommodate these larger loads. In May 1926 the post office purchased 51 Douglas mail planes, which could carry more than twice the load carried by the DeHaviland. In addition, the Douglas planes were faster than the DeHavilands.
The other important change in the US airmail system occurred on February 1, 1927, when the zoned postal rate system was replaced with a new standard airmail postage rate of $.10 per half ounce. This flat rate eliminated the complicated zone system previously employed, with which the public was quite dissatisfied, and instead charged the same rate regardless of the distance the mail had to travel. This boosted the public’s use of airmail.
The initial intention of the US post office in regards to airmail was to demonstrate its practicability and profitability to the public and thus entice private enterprise to develop a commercial air system. This system could then be used for both public transportation and airmail delivery, thus allowing the post office to contract for airmail services from the private organizations instead of running the airfields themselves. The post office did this in several ways, first and foremost by lighting the way across the country with a series of small airfields. It also did this by demonstrating an outstanding safety record, so much so that the Airmail service was recognized with several awards. In 1922, they received the Collier trophy for their outstanding safety record and the most important contributions to the development of aeronautics that year. In 1923, they again received this award for demonstrating the practicability of night flying. In 1926, the Harmon trophy from the International League of Aviators was awarded to an airmail pilot because of his outstanding safety and flight record.
In the spring of 1926, Congress passed the “Air Commerce Act of 1926” which called for the development of commercial aviation and the Postmaster General to transfer jurisdiction of the airmail airfields to the Secretary of Commerce and eventually to the commercial agencies. By July 1, 1927, each leg of the transcontinental airmail route was transferred to several private organizations and by August 31 of the same year, the post office had completely relinquished all components of the airmail service.
Although the US postal department no longer controlled the airmail service, its accomplishments in creating this system cannot be forgotten. One of the most significant achievements of the postal department was creating a day and night coast-to-coast route that enabled mail to be delivered quickly and efficiently. Its safety record through this adventure was extremely impressive. The postal department demonstrated the practicability, profitability, and efficiency of air transportation. This fueled the advancement of aeronautic technology, which eventually led to the sophisticated air travel system, as well as the space aviation program, of today.

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