The development of airmail began long before the invention of the airplane, the dirigible or even the balloon. It began with the pigeon post, which was used by armies many years before the birth of Christ to send messages long distances. Since then, all the man-made vehicles of the air have been used to carry letters from one place to another. Lighter-than-air craft carried mail. Then came the airplane. In the Space Age, experiments have been conducted with missile mail, and messages have been carried on spacecraft and deposited on the planets and the moon for future explorers to discover.

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The story of airmail really begins on May 15, 1918, when the world’s first regularly scheduled airmail route was inaugurated under U.S. government auspices between New York and Washington, D.C., with a stop at Philadelphia. The distance of the route was 218 miles, and one round trip per day was made, six days a week. Army Air Service pilots flew the route until August 10, 1918, when the Post Office Department took over the entire operation with its own planes and pilots. T56 gearbox.

Attempts to start airmail service had begun as early as 1912, when it seemed that the airplane might develop into a practicable means of transportation. Recommendations were made to Congress that year to appropriate $50,000 to start an experimental service. Many government permits were issued to make short exhibition flights with mail, but it was not until 1916 that sufficient funds were made available to begin scheduled operations. Advertisements for bids were issued but not one was received. However, the war in Europe caused improvements in aircraft to be made rapidly, and in the fiscal year ending

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June 30, 1918, Congress appropriated $100,000 for development of an experimental route between Washington and New York. Bids were to be delivered within 10 days.Much to the surprise of the Post Office Department, Colonel E.A. Deeds, head of the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps (later the Army Air Service), offered to operate the postal route with military planes and pilots. The offer had developed because of a request from Europe that pilots be given more cross-country experience before being sent overseas. Flying the mail over a fixed route system would give pilots valuable experience.

On March 1, 1918, the Post Office Department made an agreement with the War Department ‘to inaugurate an Aerial Mail Service between Washington, D.C., and New York beginning May 15th.’ Major Reuben H. Fleet, the executive officer to Colonel Henry H. ‘Hap’ Arnold in charge of planning instruction at Army Air Service schools, was concerned about training pilots at 34 fields in the United States; setting up an experimental airmail service was far from his mind. Consequently, when he saw the War Department order dated May 3, 1918, he paid little attention to it. Fleet, a tall, broad-shouldered man who would one day be president of his own aircraft company, had enough problems without worrying about what he considered unrelated responsibilities.

On May 6, Fleet received a summons from Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and was told that Arnold had recommended him for the job of getting the airmail route started. Baker said, ‘The first plane will leave Washington for Philadelphia at precisely 11 a.m. on May 15th. President Wilson will be there.’

Fleet was dumbfounded. ‘Mr. Secretary,’ he said, ‘we don’t have any planes that can fly from Washington to Philadelphia and New York. The best plane we have is the Curtiss JN-4D Jenny, and it will fly only an hour and twenty minutes. Its maximum range is 88 miles at a cruising speed of 66 miles per hour.’

Baker listened patiently while Fleet explained that the range of a plane was dependent upon its fuel supply, that the Jennies had dual controls and were designed to carry only an instructor and a student, and that they had no baggage compartment where mail could be stowed. He told of the shortage of pilots, of how very few Air Service pilots had any experience flying cross-country, of how there were no adequate maps available, and of how there was a lack of good, experienced aircraft mechanics. He said he would need much more than eight days to modify some planes, test them and train some pilots.

Baker was adamant. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson had already issued a national press release announcing that the airmail route was going to be inaugurated at 11 a.m. on May 15th, and he was not going to back down. The schedule, already announced, called for daily flights five days a week between Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

Fleet was furious, but he knew he could not waste a minute. He made arrangements with the Curtiss Aeroplane Corporation on Long Island, N.Y., to convert six JN-4Ds to JN-4Hs, which involved replacing the standard 90-hp OX-5 engines with 150-hp Hispano-Suizas.

‘And leave out the front seat and the front set of controls and make a hopper to carry mailbags up there,’ Fleet ordered. He also asked that the gas capacity be doubled by hooking two 19-gallon gas tanks and two 21Ž2-gallon oil tanks in tandem for longer range operation. A total of 12 modified Jennies would eventually be required. Next, he made arrangements with the owner of Belmont Park, a racetrack on Long Island, to use the infield as a terminus so that the training of Army pilots would not have to be interrupted on Hazelhurst Field at nearby Mineola. Bustleton Field, located near the railroad station in north Philadelphia, was designated for the midpoint station. The Washington, D.C., field would be Potomac Park’s old Polo Grounds, a 900-by-300-foot grassy area surrounded by trees between the Tidal Basin and the Potomac River. Fleet wanted to use the airport at College Park, Md., but postal officials objected because it was nine miles outside the city, too far from the main post office.

Mechanics were hurriedly located and ordered to report to the three fields. Fleet asked for six Army Air Service pilots and was told to choose four; the Post Office Department would choose the other two. Fleet selected Lieutenants Howard P. Culver, Torrey H. Webb, Walter Miller and Stephen Bonsal. They were the most experienced pilots available who had not yet been committed to go to France; however, only Culver had more than four months of flying experience.

Post Office Department officials selected Lieutenants James C. Edgerton and George L. Boyle, two recent flight-training graduates. Fleet understood why these two were chosen when he learned that Edgerton’s father was purchasing agent for the Post Office Department and Boyle’s future father-in-law, Judge Charles C. McChord, was an Interstate Commerce commissioner who was credited with saving the parcel post for the Post Office Department at a time when private express companies were fighting the government in court for the business. This victory gave Judge McChord enough political power to persuade postal officials to let his soon-to-be son-in-law go down in the history books.

Edgerton and Boyle had graduated only a few days before from flying school at Ellington Field, Texas. During their training they had flown briefly on one cross-country training flight, a short hop from Ellington to another field about 10 or 14 miles away. Both had only about 60 hours of student pilot time in their log books.

Fleet was furious over the two assignments made solely on the basis of political contacts, but he had no choice. On May 13, he took the train to New York with five of the six pilots, leaving Boyle in Washington to take the first flight north to Philadelphia. The modified JN-4Hs had arrived at Hazelhurst Field by the time he arrived, but they were still in crates. Fleet had only 72 hours to get them assembled and into position to begin operations.

Mechanics and pilots worked around the clock to get the planes ready. By the afternoon of the 14th, only two were ready to go. Leaving Webb in charge of getting the other planes ready, Fleet commandeered a Jenny from Hazelhurst Field that had the smaller engine and no extra fuel and oil tanks. The plan was for Edgerton, Culver and Fleet to fly to Bustleton Field and stay overnight. Early on the 15th, Fleet planned to fly one of the modified Jennies on to Washington so that Boyle would have the honor that Judge McChord so keenly wanted him to have.

Webb would leave Belmont Park at 11:30 a.m. on the 15th and fly the New York mail to Philadelphia; Edgerton would then fly Webb’s mail pouch and the Philadelphia mail from there to Washington. When Boyle arrived at Bustleton from Washington, Culver would take the Philadelphia mail, along with the pouches that Boyle would bring from Washington, to Belmont. From then on, these four pilots, plus Bonsal and Miller, would make all the trips during the experiment.

Fleet’s best-laid plans went askew from the start. He took off from Belmont in the late afternoon of May 14 for the 90-mile flight to Philadelphia in thick haze and fog, followed by Edgerton and Culver in their faster JN-4Hs. Fleet soon lagged behind in his lighter powered Jenny, and he lost sight of the others.

Fleet described the flight: ‘I climbed through the fog and came out at 11,000 feet, almost the ceiling of the plane. I flew south guided only by magnetic compass and the sun until I ran out of gas and the engine quit. Since we didn’t have ‘chutes in those days, there was nothing I could do but ride the Jenny down. I broke out of the clouds at about 3,000 feet over lush farmland, so I just picked out a nice pasture and landed. A surprised farmer sold me a five-gallon can of tractor gas but I had trouble getting it in the tank without a funnel. Perhaps three gallons got in the tank and the rest all over me, but darkness was coming and I couldn’t wait to get more from town. I asked him to point out the direction Philadelphia was and took off. Two miles from Bustleton Field I ran out of gas again and landed in a meadow. Since no telephone was available, I persuaded a farmer to drive me to Bustleton Field. Culver and Edgerton had just arrived after similar experiences, so I sent Culver with aviation gasoline to get my plane and fly it in.

‘There were so many things wrong with our planes and their engines that we worked all night to get them in safe flying condition. For example, one gas tank had a hole in it and we had to plug it up with an ordinary lead pencil. Next morning, one machine was flyable, so at 8:40 a.m. I took off for Washington, where I landed at 10:35 at the [Polo Grounds] in Potomac Park. The mail was due to start twenty-five minutes later.’

While Fleet had been worrying about the technical flying details, Captain Benjamin B. Lipsner had been detailed to take care of administrative matters. He was waiting nervously at Potomac Park, wondering if he had taken care of all the necessary details. Although not a pilot himself, he knew he would be criticized if anything went wrong with the arrangements, especially since President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and many other VIPs, such as members of Congress, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and his assistant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been invited to witness the takeoff of ‘the first plane in history to carry mail at an announced time to and from designated places on a regular schedule irrespective of weather.’

The Polo Grounds had never been intended to be a flying field, but it was the only open flat space available in the city at the time. Towering trees stood like sentinels around the field. On earlier demonstration flights, Jennies had barely cleared the trees.

Lipsner was greatly relieved when Fleet circled the field, squeaked his way among the trees and landed. Lipsner asked him if Boyle did not show up, would he take the first run. Fleet said he would, but Boyle–accompanied by his fiancée, who was holding an armful of roses–arrived at that moment.

Producing a road map he had strapped to his thigh, Fleet instructed Boyle to follow the railroad tracks northward out of Washington’s Union Station all the way to Philadephia. As they were talking, a long line of shiny black cars chugged into the entrance to the Polo Grounds while Army guards held back a cheering crowd. Secret Service agents surrounded President and Mrs. Wilson as they stepped down from the lead car, smiling. The president’s left hand was bandaged because of a burn he had suffered from having inadvertently touched a hot cannon the day before at a military ceremony.

As the president shook hands with the two pilots, a siren blared across the field and a motorcycle escort sped ahead of a mail truck. The truck parked nearby, and four mail bags were unloaded that contained 3,300 letters and weighed 140 pounds. Merrill Chance, the Washington postmaster, held one of the bags open and President Wilson dropped in a letter addressed to Postmaster Thomas G. Patten in New York City. The president had written his name at the top of the envelope above the fresh cancellation of a new airmail stamp that had just been released. Six ranking Post Office officials also placed their initials on the white selvage attached to the stamp. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson called this the ‘first aeroplane stamp to be sold by [his] department.’ Adobe premiere pro cs6 for mac download.

Burleson presented Boyle with a bouquet of flowers and presented Fleet with engraved watches for himself and the six pilots. When the bags were placed in the plane, Boyle climbed into the cockpit. ‘Switch off!’ he shouted to Sergeant E. F. Waters. Waters turned the propeller three times.

‘Contact!’ Waters yelled, and Boyle replied, ‘Contact!’ Boyle turned the switch on and Waters used all his strength to spin the propeller. The engine coughed once and died. Waters tried again. And again. And again.

Fleet, standing nearby, thought the problem might be the spark plugs. While Sergeant Waters tried to find the problem, Fleet heard the president, visibly annoyed, whisper to Mrs. Wilson, ‘We’re losing a lot of time here.’

‘Sergeant, check the gas tank,’ Fleet ordered. Waters climbed up on the plane’s wing with a dip stick. It came out dry. In the excitement, the formalities and picture taking, everything had been checked but the gas tank!

Fleet ordered that the tanks of three aircraft parked nearby should be drained of fuel for Boyle’s plane. He also sent a truck to the Navy yard to borrow replacement gasoline. Several more cans were filled, and the engine was finally started. Everyone, including the president, smiled with relief.

Lieutenant Boyle taxied out and began the takeoff run. Bumping stiffly on its tail skid at first, the frail machine slowly gathered speed–but it was heading for the trees!

The crowd gasped and fell silent. At the last second, Boyle eased back on the stick, missing the treetops by about three feet. The crowd breathed a collective sigh of relief.Except for the fact that Boyle was 45 minutes late getting off, everything seemed to have gone just as the Post Office Department press releases said it would. While Fleet remained to greet Edgerton on his arrival from Philadelphia, Lipsner returned to his office to find a telephone call waiting from New York. After appropriate ceremonies there, Lieutenant Webb had departed Belmont on schedule, carrying mail from New York. An hour later, another phone call came in from Bustleton Field. Webb had arrived there and turned the mail over to Edgerton, who loaded it aboard, along with the southbound Philadelphia mail.

Culver loaded his northbound Philadelphia mail and waited for Boyle. When Boyle did not arrive in a reasonable time, Culver took off anyway at 2:15 p.m. and arrived at Belmont to a rousing welcome–even though he carried no mail from Washington.

Meanwhile, a call came to Colonel Arnold from Boyle about an hour after he had departed the Polo Grounds. Lost and nearly out of gas, he had landed in a farmer’s field at Waldorf, Md., 20 miles southeast of his takeoff point. The plane had flipped over on its back and the prop was splintered, but he was unhurt. Ironically, he had crashed on property next to that owned by Otto Praeger, second assistant postmaster general, who was in charge of the airmail operation. His mail was quietly trucked back to Washington.

Instead of following the railroad tracks northward, Boyle had followed a branch line out of the Washington rail yard that took him southeast instead of north. His unreliable compass was no help. The young lieutenant had become not only the first official, scheduled-airmail pilot to depart with mail from Washington but, unhappily, had also become the first airmail pilot to get lost and the first to have an accident.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Edgerton had landed on schedule at the Polo Grounds that afternoon to be greeted by a relieved Fleet and a small but enthusiastic crowd. He carried 150 pounds of letters and copies of The New York Times.

Boyle’s mail bags were sent by air next day on the scheduled northbound flight. That flight carried 600 letters, including the one President Wilson had autographed. (This letter was later auctioned off for the benefit of the Red Cross in New York City for $1,000.)

The first day of the airmail service was termed a complete success by Post Office Department officials, although Fleet, Lipsner and a few other government personnel felt differently.

While no one else seemed to worry about Boyle’s flying skill, Fleet was very concerned. He wanted a replacement pilot assigned immediately, but Postmaster General Burleson asked Colonel Arnold to ‘give the young man a chance.’

Two days after his forced landing, Boyle took off again, this time with Edgerton flying ahead following the four-track Pennsylvania Railroad in a training Jenny to make sure Boyle was headed in the right direction. About 50 miles north of Washington where the railroad crossed the Susuehanna, Edgerton waved Boyle ahead, confident that he could not get lost going the rest of the distance to Philadelphia, and returned to Washington.

But Boyle did get lost again. Completely disoriented after Edgerton turned back, he edged southward again in the area’s typical spring haze and followed the shoreline of Chesapeake Bay in a semicircle. After three hours and 15 minutes, he landed in a pasture at Cape Charles at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. As Fleet commented in his report of the first day’s operation, ‘[Only] the Atlantic Ocean and lack of gas prevent[ed] him going farther.’

Boyle bought tractor gas and oil from a farmer, asked for directions and took off again. He found Philadelphia this time and flew around the city looking for Bustleton Field until he ran out of gas. He crash-landed between two birch trees on the golf course of the Philadelphia Country Club, only a few miles from his intended destination on the north side of Philadelphia. Although both wings had been sheared off and the landing gear and fuselage were badly smashed, Boyle escaped unhurt. Once more, his mail was trucked to a take-off point.

To Fleet’s dismay, postal officials again requested that ‘Lieutenant Boyle be given a third chance and, if he fails, the Department will take the responsibility for his failure.’ Fleet protested and denied the request, saying with uncharacteristic restraint, ‘The conclusion has been reached that the best interests of the service require that Lieutenant Boyle be relieved from this duty.’ He was backed up in his decision by Secretary of War Baker. Boyle was replaced by Lieutenant E.W. Killgore, who served successfully during the three-month experiment but was involved in five forced landings due to mechanical failure.

In a mid-1960s interview, Reuben Fleet told the author that Boyle’s performance was understandable: ‘There were no maps of much value to airmen in those days. Major E. Lester Jones, chief of the Geodetic Survey Office, made up maps for the airmail pilots. The official state maps of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland were all of different scales and they showed only political divisions with nothing of a physical nature except cities, towns, rivers, harbors, etc. We had to fold large maps of the United States in a strip in order to have everything on a uniform scale. Naturally, they contained little detail.

‘In addition to poor maps, the magnetic compass in any airplane was highly inaccurate and was affected by everything metal on the airplane. Pilots almost had to have a sixth sense about navigating and many didn’t acquire this until they had flown a long time. Lieutenant Boyle simply didn’t have enough training to do the job and should not be criticized too severely for his mistakes.’

Lieutenant Edgerton, the other Post Office Department selectee, served during the entire three-month experiment without accident and flew more trips and had more flying time (106 hours) than any of the other five pilots; he had only one forced landing, which was caused by mechanical difficulties. Postmaster General Burleson gave him a special commendation for his ‘judgment and courage as well in storms as in fair weather.’

Army Air Service pilots continued to fly the New York­Washington route between May 15 and August 10, 1918, without much more public notice beyond the first two or three days. Although few people knew it, the pilots still had their difficulties. The pledge to keep on a regular schedule six days a week ‘irrespective of weather’ drove the pilots to take exceptional risks. However, unplanned landings due to mechanical malfunctions were relatively infrequent considering the times. The airmail pilot’s greatest threat–then, as always–was the weather.

At the end of the first month of operations, the Post Office Department published a press release noting that 10,800 pounds of mail had been flown over 1,000 miles at an average speed of 70 mph. Edgerton was mentioned as having made 20 perfect flights without ‘a stop en route, and without damaging a plane.’

On June 3, the first airmail flight was scheduled to be made between New York and Boston on a single round-trip basis. For public relations and goodwill purposes, Lieutenant Gustave Vannelle, a French aviator, was chosen to make the first flight, along with a mechanic. He crashed on takeoff, and both men suffered minor injuries. On June 6, Lieutenant Torrey Webb was assigned a Curtiss R-4 for the trip; Robert Heck, a mechanic, was to accompany him. Webb got lost en route in a severe rainstorm, landed in a pasture to ask for directions and finally landed at the Franklin Park Aviation Field in Saugas, Mass., where the plane hit a mudhole and flipped over on its back. Neither Webb nor Heck was hurt.

After his plane was repaired, Webb returned to New York in bad weather on June 11 with 64 pounds of mail and Boston Postmaster William Murray as a passenger. As Webb recalled later, ‘Visibility was zero-zero and I just skimmed over the telephone poles all the way.’

Although postal officials bragged about the new postal service, the public did not want to pay the extra charge for airmail stamps. Planeloads of mail averaged less than 50 pounds daily. However, when the airmail experiment with the Army Air Service ended after three months, the operational statistics were impressive for the time period, despite the mishaps and interrupted schedules.

The Army pilots had successfully completed 270 flights and had carried 40,500 pounds of mail. They had flown a total of 421:30 hours without a fatality or serious injury. Of the trips flown, 53 were forced down because of bad weather en route and 16 had ended in forced landings due to mechanical difficulties. Lieutenant James Edgerton had the best record, with 52 trips covering 7,155 miles and only one forced landing.

The Army Air Service pilots had proved they could maintain a fair semblance of regular schedules if a suitable system was set up, the airplanes were properly maintained and the pilots were trained. These pioneers had set an enviable standard of performance for those who followed as civilian employees of the Post Office Department.

The last flight by the Army Air Service pilots took place on Saturday, August 10, 1918. The Post Office Department took over the airmail operation officially the following Monday and continued until September 1, 1927. By the time the Air Mail Service of the Post Office Department was fully replaced by commercial operators flying the mail under government contract, a transcontinental route had been established, radio aids to navigation and ‘blind flying’ instruments were being developed, and planes were flying day and night. Today’s modern airline industry is the direct outgrowth of those pioneering efforts.

This article was written by C.V. Glines and originally published in the May 1994 issue of Aviation History. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

by John A Eney, eneyair@olg.com
Originally Published in Skyways Journal Magazine

Lt. George Boyle in JN-4H 38262 starts his takeoff from
Washington, DC with the first scheduled US air mail on May 15,
1918. Photo USAF 34145, Editor’s collection

May 15th of 2008 marks 90 years since the inaugural launching of the
first scheduled air mail service sponsored by the United States Post
Office Department. On that fog shrouded mid-May morning in 1918,
President Woodrow Wilson handed his personal letter of greetings to a
very young and relatively inexperienced Army Air Service pilot at
Potomac Park polo grounds in Washington, DC, to be flown to the Mayor
of New York City, via a relay stopover at Philadelphia, PA.
Simultaneously, another Army pilot was departing from Hazelhurst Field
on Long Island, NY, for the same relay handover point in Philly. This
may sound simple to modern readers, but in wartime 1918, with
springtime dense morning fog over the entire northeast coast, and no
available pilots trained in ANY cross country navigation, let alone
instrument flying, this was taking extremely high risk. How this
entire event was conceived, funded, produced and directed, and by
whom, is a well documented tale of political ambitions, technical
naivete, and military courage worthy of a Hollywood movie or TV
miniseries. And this event is today recognized as the seed planting
for the U.S. airline industry we now take for granted.

The prime mover in this birth of the air mail was NOT the pilot
community, nor even the young aircraft industry. It was one Otto
Praeger, Second Assistant Postmaster General, himself a non-flyer who
simply sought to improve the speed of intercity mail shipments then
carried exclusively by train. Oblivious to the limitations of 1918
aircraft technology and performance, he convinced his boss, Postmaster
General Burleson, to suggest to the President that the Secretary of
War could order the Army Air Service to assume this new role, starting
in just a matter of several days! And so the executive orders were
quickly passed to War Secretary Newton D. Baker, thence to Chief of
the Army Air Service Col. “Hap” Arnold, who promptly summoned his
Executive Officer to his desk, one Major Reuben H. Fleet. The orders
were dated May 3, 1918. The orders read to initiate daily air mail
service between Washington and New York on May 15, 1918. Hap Arnold
and Reuben Fleet were professional soldier-pilots who knew all too
well that you didn’t say “no” to the President, and they had to salute
and carry out the orders as best they could, given no suitable
airplanes, and no pilots with adequate cross-country navigational
training in good weather or bad.

And it is in major crises that clever men rise to become great men.
In this situation, Fleet needed to overcome his Air Service
inadequacies in men and equipment in just twelve days to avoid
embarrassing the President of the United States and the Air Service in
the eyes of the news media and the American public. His first action
was to request Col. Edwin A. Deeds, Chief of Air Service Production,
to place an immediate order to the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor
Corporation, Garden City, Long Island, NY, for (6) new specially
configured JN-4H “Jenny” training biplanes with doubled fuel tank
capacity and without controls in the front cockpit, which was to be
covered over as a mail pit. This would give the mail plane Jenny
twice its standard range of only 88 miles so it could in fact make the
trip from DC to Philly nonstop. The “H” model Jennies were powered by
the 150 hp Hispano-Suiza (“Hisso”) liquid cooled V-8 with enclosed
overhead cams and automatic valve lubrication, making them far more
reliable than the earlier 90 hp Curtiss OX-5 V-8s with open, hand
lubricated valve actions. Curtiss simply added a second standard
terneplate fuel tank in tandem with the regular tank between the
firewall and the mail pit. The airplane problem was solved in short
order through this instant cooperation between the
engineering-educated Fleet, his parent command staff, and the already
humming production line at Curtiss. (Could this ever happen today?)

Fleet then hand picked by name several of his best Army instructor
pilots who could at least dead-reckon with a road map in lieu of any
aeronautical charts which did not then exist. He had the new special
Jennies assigned to these four pilots with one for himself. The
airplanes were to be ferried to the necessary fields of deployment by
15 May. Fleet flew himself down from NY to DC early in the morning of
the 15th, delayed considerably by very low ceilings and poor
visibility all the way. He flew Jenny number A.S. 38262 into the polo
grounds before a waiting crowd of news media, onlookers, and a very
impatient President Wilson and his attending staff of Secret Service
guards. He motioned to his in-place enlisted men to service the
airplane for the flight back to Philly, and was then informed that the
pilots he had selected were to be replaced by two other fresh
graduates from Air Service primary flight school who happened to be
sons of .politically important officials. in the Wilson
Administration. The politically selected pilot for the DC to Philly
leg that morning was Lt. George Boyle, and the southbound pilot from
Long Island was to be Lt. James Edgerton, neither of whom had ever
flown out of clear sight of their home training fields. Once again
the professional soldier, Fleet realized he had again been snared by
political forces opposing both sound reason and sound physics. He
proceeded to brief Lt. Boyle on how to follow the mainline railroad
tracks that ran from DC to Philly, in a fairly straight northeasterly
heading, unhindered by any mountains or tunnels. All he needed was
the road map from Fleet, and the magnetic compass in the JN-4H cockpit
instrument panel. Potomac Park was a tiny peninsula extending from
the eastern shore of the Potomac River close to the center of DC and
parallel to the river, near the Jefferson Memorial and across from
what is now the Pentagon and Reagan National Airport.

With appropriate ceremony, the President made his public sendoff
speech and handed his personal letter to the crew chief loading the
mail pit while Lt. Boyle suited up and mounted the rear seat of
38262. The Army guards drew the crowd away from the Jenny so that the
engine could be hand propped to start. Well, the engine failed to
start after many tries. Fleet told the crew chief to dipstick the
fuel tank since even brand new float gauges had been known to mislead.
The tank dipped near empty. In the rush of the moment that morning,
they forgot to refuel the airplane after Fleet landed it.

With the fuel soon topped in both the tandem tanks and the mail bin
loaded and the hatch strapped closed, the Jenny now started on the
first swing of the prop and Lt. Boyle waved to have the chocks pulled
from his brakeless spoked wheels. He blasted the power to lift the
tailskid free of the turf polo field and turned to start his takeoff
into what little wind there may have been in that foggy condition.
The crowd cheered as his Jenny cleared the tall trees surrounding the
periphery of Potomac Park and disappeared into the mist as it flew off
toward destiny in Philly.

Major Reuben H. Fleet, just arrived at Potomac Park in
Washington, DC from New York via Philadelphia in Army Air Service
Jenny 38262 for the start of the first scheduled US air mail service
on May 15, 1918. President Woodrow Wilson and other officials were on
hand to witness this historic event. Photo: USAF 34209,
Editor’s Collection

Well, sort of. Astute witnesses at the departure candidly reported
later that the sound of the departing Hisso engine seemed to indicate
that Boyle was not following a straight-out northeastern heading
through the mist, but was circling around at first. But, no matter
that, the southbound Jenny from Philly with the mail from New York
soon landed and the headlines across the nation proclaimed the
successful start of scheduled U.S. air mail service. A short time
later, a phone call was received at the polo field communications
tent. It was Lt. Boyle. He had gotten lost and made an emergency
landing in a farmer’s field. The stub crops caught the landing gear
spreader bar and the prop dug in and flipped the JN onto its back. He
was unhurt. The mail was not damaged or lost. His location was a
farm in Waldorf, MD, southeast of Washington, not northeast. He had
followed the railroad tracks, but the wrong tracks. A branch line off
the mainline northeast railroad right-of-way went south to a coal
powerplant at Popes Creek, through the little town of Waldorf. But
nonetheless, the other legs of the DC-PA-NY air mail route had been
flown successfully that day, and the champagne corks were already
popped. Today, NASA would call this a 90% mission success, and indeed
it was that.

Standard JR-1Bs, designed from the outset as mailplanes,
replaced the Army Jennies when the Post Office Department took over
the air mail from the Army Air Service in August, 1918. Photo:
Editor’s Collection

The Army Air Service continued to operate one trip per day from DC to
NY along this 218 mile route using the mail-configured JN-4Hs on a
6-day week, with Sundays off (for the pilots, not the ground crews) up
until August 12, 1918, at which time the Post Office Department took
over the entire operation, using specially designed mail planes
ordered from the Standard Aircraft Company of Elizabeth, NJ. These
Standard JR-1B models were also Hisso powered, like the Army JN-4Hs,
but had a 200 pound mail capacity and a range of 280 miles. While
rarely if ever depicted in aviation history journals, these Standard
JR-1Bs remain milestones in being the first civil aircraft specified
and procured by the U.S. Government. According to Reference (1), the
scorecard of statistics on the mission performance of the Army pilots
and their (6) Jennies during their May-15-August 12 tour of duty on
the northeast corridor route were as follows:

• 92 percent of schedule flights successfully completed.
• 193,021 pounds of mail carried
• 128,225 route miles flown without a signel fatality

All this was accomplished without aeronautical charts, no radios, no
gyros, in open cockpits, and all during the height of the east coast
summer thunderstorm season.

This first air mail service “experiment,” using Air Service pilots and
JN-4Hs, owed a great deal to the management skills of a non-flying
Army ground officer, Captain Benjamin B. Lipsner. So impressed was
Otto Praeger with Lipsner’s masterful coordination of the air mail
operation, he asked Lipsner to resign from the Army and sign on as
the head of the air mail for the Post Office Department. Lipsner had
wanted to see action in France before the war ended and hesitated to
resign his commission, so Praeger wrote to War Secretary Baker
requesting Lipsner be granted a leave of absence, but this request was
denied. Shortly thereafter, the Army did in fact allow Lipsner to
resign and assume his new civil service position as the first
Superintendent of the Aerial Mail Service (Reference 1). The new air
mail chief’s first official act was to request the Post Office order
to (6) of the Standard JR-1Bs mentioned earlier.

The workhorse of the air mail service in the US, the
Liberty-powered US-built DH-4. Photo: Editor’s Collection

The new Air Mail Service undertook immediate plans to methodically and
cautiously expand its service to other cities in other states toward
the Midwestern industrial population centers of Cleveland and
Chicago. This New York-Cleveland schedule began in May of 1919. In
September of that year, it was extended to Chicago. This was the
prelude toward realization of the ultimate goal of the Post Office,
which was a true transcontinental air mail route from New York to San
Francisco. The airplane of choice for these expanded routes with
longer ranges was the rebuilt ex-Army DeHavilland DH-4, a British
design built under license by several manufacturers in the United
States, and intended to be America’s bomber at the Western Front in
France before the war ended in November, 1918. These DH-4s had been
stripped of wartime armament and had all new landing gears and
fuselages made of steel tubing. The redesign for mail service
included relocating the pilot.s cockpit well aft of the engine and
fuselage fuel tank, whereas the original wartime design had placed the
cockpit underneath the upper wing centersection and sandwiched
(sometimes literally) the pilot between the Liberty V-12 engine and
the main fuselage fuel tank behind that cockpit. (It was the British
wartime original design that had earned the nickname of “Flaming
Coffin” due to high fatality rates in crash landings.) These DH mail
planes were redesignated as DH-4Ms, and many of these conversions were
performed under government contract by the Boeing Airplane Company in
Seattle, WA. It was also during this transition to DH-4Ms that the DC
terminus for the air mail was located on College Park Airport in
College Park, MD, just outside the northeast border of the District of
Columbia. That site of many aviation firsts, including the
demonstrations and sales of Wright Brothers’ aircraft, remains today
as the oldest continually active airport in the United States, going
back to 1909.

The old and the new of mail delivery.The Pony Express was the
fastest means of sending mail during the great western movement of the
19th century United States. The airplane, symbolized by the DH-4
mailplane in this photo, took the lead in speed in the early 20th
century. Photo: Editor’s Collection

Loading mail into DH-4 No. 68 with its big Liberty engine
warming up. Photo: Editor’s Collection

Looks like the end of the line for old number 400; or, maybe
she’s tucked away in an old barn somewhere, long forgotten and just
waiting to be found! Photo: Editor’s Collection

Several attempts were made to improve the DH-4’s load-carrying
ability including the addition of Bellanca lift struts. Photo:
Editor’s Collection

Another load-carrying improvement to the DH-4 was this big
winged modification by the Whitteman Co. in 1921. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

L.W. F. (Lowe, Willard & Fowler) converted the workhorse
deHavilland DH-4B into a twin engine mailplane with disappointing
results. Service ceiling was reportedly 1,500 feet, and takeoff speed,
cruising speed, and landing speed were the same! Photo: Editor’s
Collection

The transcontinental air mail service route was completed in
September, 1920, extending westward through Omaha, North Platte,
Cheyenne, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, Elko, Reno, and into
San Francisco at Crissy Field. Air mail flying remained a
daytime-only operation up until 1921, though maintenance and overhauls
proceeded around the clock at each waypoint shop hangar. Night time
air mail flights were first tried as an experiment starting on
February 22, 1921. On that date, two pilots flying DH-4s left from
San Francisco eastbound, and two other pilots left from Hazelhurst
Field on Long Island westbound, also both in DH-4s. The goal was for
at least one member of each team to successfully link up at a transfer
relay point in Chicago within a total elapsed time of 36 hours, flying
through the night as well as day. The westbound team had one ship
forced down by weather in western PA, a mountainous region with
unpredictable weather still known today by airline pilots as “hell’s
stretch.” The two separated east bound ships had changed pilots at
Reno and again at Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, and North Platte, where
the relief pilot was one Jack Knight. Weather was ominous as Knight
took off for Omaha, but news accounts of the air mail events were
already causing enthusiastic residents along the prescribed route to
light huge bonfires in open fields to guide the pilots through the
night. By 1 am, when Knight made the outskirts of Omaha, he found
the entire city lit up for his guidance, and he landed at the
destination turf landing field between rows of old 55-gallon drums of
gasoline set afire to light the runway for him. He had flown 276
miles and was due to be relieved for the last leg eastward into
Chicago. But that relief pilot was weathered in at Chicago and could
not get to Omaha. Knight was totally unfamiliar with the leg from
Omaha to Chicago, but after a hot slug of coffee, decided to re-man
his DH and press on to Chicago himself, with the help of the bonfires
set along the way. The station manager gave him a Rand McNally road
map of the 435 leg to Chicago, via Des Moines and Iowa City. Knight
overflew Des Moines due to weather and landed for fuel at Iowa City in
a snow squall. After that brief stop at around 5 AM, he again took
off for the last 200 miles into Chicago through light snow and icing
conditions which severely threatened weight and drag of the strut and
wire covered DH. At early dawn light, he spotted the railroad main
line parallel tracks and followed them in to Maywood Airport in
Chicago where he landed and turned over the mail to the eastern route
pilot at 8:40 am on February 23rd, 1921. The nation had been linked
by overnight air mail with an elapsed time of just 33 hours and 25
minutes, with just under 26 hours of actual flying time. Jack Knight,
the air mail pilot, became a national hero and was featured in
newsreels at movie theaters coast to coast. An elated Otto Praeger,
speaking for the Post Office Department, made a public announcement
that overnight air mail service nationwide was now a regular scheduled
operation and that a radio network of ground stations would be
promptly activated during the 1921-1922 period to hasten the exchange
of weather reports needed for the safety of both pilots and ground
crews.

Jack Knight became a national hero for his daring role in the
first overnight transcontinental air mail service.
Photo: Editor’s Collection

The first air mail flights in the US authorized by the
Postmaster General were made by Earle Ovington at the International
Aviation Meet held at Garden City Estates, Long Island, NY from
September 23 to October 1, 1911. A temporary post office was set up
and Ovington carried the mail sack on his lap while flying his Bleriot
monoplane on the 7-mile trip to Mineola, NY. Here, Postmaster General
Frank H. Hitchcock hands the first sack of air mail to Ovington
seated in his Bleriot. The Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island
has a reproduction of Ovington.s Bleriot. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

Early attempts at carrying air mail and, in this case, parcels
as well, were mostly short-lived. Considering the type of aircraft (an
early pusher biplane), this must have been one of the earliest
attempts. Photo: Editor’s Collection

Standard biplanes carried the air mail for Colorado Airways.
Photo: Editor’s Collection

The Post Office Dept. ordered a mailplane version of the Glenn
L. Martin MB-1 bomber that could carry 1500 lbs. of mail in a bulbous
nose. Six of these huge mail carriers known as the Martin Model MP
were put in service on the New York-Chicago run during the winter of
1919-20, one of the most severe on record. Rough weather and rough
airfields quickly claimed 4 of the MPs and the Post Office transferred
the remaining 2 to the Army. Photo: Editor’s Collection

Three Martin MP Mailplanes await delivery at the Martin factory
in Cleveland. Photo: Editor’s Collection

Martin MP No. 203 was severely damaged at Heller Field, NJ in
1920. Photo: Editor’s Collection

In 1923, after Army experiments with beacon-lighted “airways” proved
viable, the Post Office Department began installing tower-mounted
rotating gaslight beacons every 25 miles along its routes with
emergency landing fields adjacent to each of these beacons, staffed
with mechanics for aircraft servicing and repair. Full
transcontinental air mail service along this lighted airway became a
reality in 1924.

The Kelly Air Mail Act

The Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925 became a watershed event that set into
motion the creation of commercial air mail and passenger travel in the
United States. U.S. Representative Clyde Kelly convinced the
U.S. Congress in February of that year that the government should get
itself out of the air mail business and let private air carriers
compete for contracts to operate various portions of the national
route system already established. The first five Contract Air Mail
(CAM) small feeder route contracts were awarded by Postmaster General
Harry J. New on October 7, 1925. The first contract to actually get
underway was not one of these five, but a later one awarded to one
Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer in Detroit, MI. Ford had
hired airplane designer William B. Stout, since 1923, to lead the
development of all-metal monoplane transports produced under the
respected Ford corporate name. This air mail contract award for
service between Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, hastened the fielding
of the legendary Ford Tri-Motor with its signature corrugated aluminum
skin covering the entire airframe. At first, these air mail contract
carriers were paid by the pound of mail actually carried, but this led
to fraudulent abuses whereby the carriers were mailing bricks inside
mail bags back and forth to up their winnings on invoices submitted to
the Post Office Department. The fee schedule was soon changed and
paid the carriers according to the volume of the mail compartment in
their aircraft. This had a secondary benefit in that it accelerated
the purchase of larger aircraft with larger payload capacities that
eventually included space for paying passengers as well as mail
sacks. The U.S. airline industry was thus born in the process.

The Boeing Model 40A (shown here) and 40B could carry
passengers as well as air mail and were used primarily on routes in
the western US. Photo: Editor’s Collection

The Douglas Mailplanes, M-2s, M-3s, and M-4s (shown here) were
developed to replace the aging DH-4s. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

An innovative method of picking up mail in rural areas without
landing was developed by Lytle S. Adams and is shown here in use with
one of Clifford Ball’s Fairchild FC-2s on CAM 11 in 1930. The pickup
system was developed further and used extensively by All-American
Aviation which became Allegheny Airlines. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

U.S. Air Mail usage surged with each new success, and the DH-4Ms
soldiered on in air mail service until they began to wear out. In
1927, the government sponsored a design competition for new, higher
performance mail planes and the winner was the Douglas Aircraft
Company of Santa Monica, CA. They were to produce (51)
Liberty-engined, purpose-built biplanes that carried twice the
500-pound load of the DHs and cruised at 175 mph. Those Douglas ships
were designated the M-2 and one survives today fully restored to
flying condition in the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in
Washington, DC. Only a couple of mail-configured DH-4s remain in
U.S. collections. The former Paul Mantz-owned DH-4M used in the 1957
Warner Brothers feature film, “The Spirit of St, Louis,” resides now
in the Evergreen Air Museum collection in Tillamook, OR. Another
recently restored DH-4M flies occasionally out of the Historic
Aircraft Restoration Museum at Creve Coeur Airport, west of St. Louis,
Mo. The U.S. Post Office Building in downtown Washington, DC,
contains a little-publicized museum hall deep inside the building
which displays a privately reconstructed DH-4 mail plane and a 1939
Stinson SR-10 Reliant that was used for aerial mail pickup by
grappling hook with the All-American Airways contract carrier for
several years. The Smithsonian NASM has an original American-built
DH-4 bomber on display, fully restored with full military equipment,
not as a mail plane.

As more and more contracts were let for commercial air mail carriers
in various regional feeder routes, more civil aircraft of various
makes and models began to appear in air mail liveries. These included
old Curtiss Jennies (again) as well as new production biplanes with
steel tube construction by such manufacturers as Swallow, Travel Air,
Waco, and Stearman. The Boeing Airplane Company operated a Boeing Air
Transport contract carrier in the Pacific Northwest states, and they
developed their own very large single-engined biplane, the Boeing 40,
which was equipped with a heated and lighted fuselage compartment that
would hold not only mail but two seated and safety-belted paying
passengers in fully-enclosed luxury, with windows on both sides.
Today, there is one Boeing 40 displayed in the Ford Museum in
Dearborn, MI, and a newly restored and fully flyable Boeing 40 owned
by Mr. Addison Pemberton at Spokane, WA. Both are powered by the
original Pratt & Whitney R-1690 “Hornet” 9-cylinder radial engine.

Clifford Ball started flying the air mail between Pittsburgh
and Cleveland in 1927 with 2 Waco 9s in an operation that became
Pennsylvania Air Lines and, later, Capital Airlines. One of the Waco
9s, Miss Pittsburgh, survived, was beautifully restored, and can be
seen today hanging in the Pittsburgh airport terminal. Photo:
Editor’s Collection

Ryan M-1 Mailplanes served Colorado Airways out of Denver.
Photo: Editor’s Collection

National Air Transport Douglas M-3 Mailplanes at Hadley Field,
New Brunswick, NJ on Sept. 1, 1927 inaugurating scheduled
coast-to-coast air express service. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

Pitcairn Aviation Inc. operated CAM 19 between New York and
Atlanta with Pitcairn Mailwings and Super Mailwings like this PA-8.
Expanding south into the lucrative Florida market and north to Boston,
the name was changed to Eastern Air Transport and, eventually, to
Eastern Airlines. Photo: Editor’s Collection

The Curtiss Carrier Pigeon mailplane. National Air Transport
operated 10 of these on the New York-Chicago air mail route. Photo:
Editor’s Collection

Varney Airlines provided air mail service between Elko, Nevada
and Pasco,Washington via Boise, Idaho with six of these Wright
J-4-powered Swallow mailplanes.The pilot is Leon Cuddeback who flew
the first flight on this route on April 6, 1926. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

Square-tail Stearmans including the C-3s (C-3B shown here),
Speedmails, Senior Speedmails, and Junior Speedmails were popular
mailplanes. Photo: Editor’s Collection

The McNary-Watres Act

With small contract mail (and passenger) air carriers operating all
over the country, the U. S. Postmaster General now wielded the most
power in all of civil aviation. Such was realized by the new
Postmaster General, Walter Folger Brown, appointed by the newly
elected President Herbert C. Hoover in 1929 (References 1-6). Brown
seized the opportunity to implement sweeping changes toward creating a
nationwide network of commercial airlines who were self supporting on
passenger revenues and who did NOT need to be dependent on air mail
subsidies for survival and profit. In 1930, Brown convinced a majority
in Congress to pass legislation that came to be known as the
McNary-Watres Act on April 29th, which contained provisions for the
Postmaster General awarding contracts to the lowest
“responsible” bidder, vice the traditional “lowest bidder.”
“Responsible” was defined as those carriers who had carried mail over
a route of at least 250 miles for a period of at least six
months. This had the instant effect of eliminating the smaller
carriers who were having difficulty surviving and were shipping bricks
to pad their incomes. In mid May of 1930, Brown summoned the heads
of the major airlines to his office and briefed them on his plans to
reshape their industry, through mergers, to improve economies of scale
and to avoid competition between companies serving the same markets
(!!). The airline heads had little choice, since Brown controlled the
awards of their air mail contracts. Unable to agree among themselves
how to divide up the national route structure, they asked Brown to act
as umpire and decide for them what appeared in the best interests of
the Department. Brown proceeded over a matter a weeks, to define what
became the “big four” U.S. airline companies, American, Eastern,
United, and TWA. Gone were the small carriers such as Robertson in
St. Louis and Ludington in Philadelphia.

What the well-dressed air mail pilot wore, and didn’t wear!
Dick Merrill, a well-known air mail pilot, liked to fly the hot, humid
southern routes of CAM 19 in his shorts, gun, parachute, helmet, and
goggles. Photo: Editor’s Collection

These major airline companies completed expansion of commercial
passenger and mail service to all four corners of the continental
U.S. and achieved sufficient financial stability to invest in their
own research and development programs in partnership with aircraft
manufacturers and national laboratories pursuing aeronautical
sciences, such as the Guggenheim Laboratories at MIT, Princeton, and
Cal Tech. There followed advances in multiengine airframe design and
construction, radial engine design, constant speed variable pitch
propeller design, and gyro-based cockpit instrumentation that was
needed for nighttime and weather flying. By 1933, United had funded
Boeing to produce the Model 247, and TWA had countered by funding
Douglas to produce the DC-2. American pioneered their overnight
transcontinental passenger sleeper service with an order from
Curtiss-Wright for the Model T-32 Condor II (see Skyways

1. and #84).

Keeping the air mail safe was serious business and pilots often
carried sidearms to enforce that. One wonders what was so important
in the air mail on this NAT Carrier Pigeon to warrant protection by
U.S. Marines armed to the teeth! Photo: Editor’s Collection

But, despite what appeared to be benevolent dictatorial steering of
the airline industry by the Postmaster General’s office, to the
betterment of the air transportation of the general public, the winds
of political change and unrest among the smaller air carriers began to
cause opposition in the public news media. The stock market crash of
October, 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression in the American
economy that was felt around the globe, precipitated a swing in
political leadership toward a Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, as
President in 1933. At the urging of Senator Hugo Black of Alabama,
FDR promptly appointed his own Postmaster General, one James
T. Farley, with strong encouragement to sweep the Department clean of
any public appearance of government collusion and profiteering in the
airline industry (References 1-3). Black’s hearings on the air mail
in the Senate opened on February 2, 1934, with unsubstantiated
accusations of government collusion thrown at former Postmaster Brown
and toward the Department of Commerce, wherein resided the Bureau of
Air Commerce which regulated aircraft design and manufacturing
standards. Those who refused to open their accounting books to the
Senate were sentenced to jail terms for contempt. The scene got ugly
and became a public news spectacle on street corners and in movie
theaters.

Army Air Mail, Part TWO

On February 9th, 1934, head of the Army Air Corps, Major General
Benjamin B. Foulois, was summoned to the White House to meet
personally with the President. FDR was very upset about the Senate
hearings and wanted to defuse that situation promptly to regain public
confidence in the Depression-ridden administration. Without
exchanging niceties, the President asked the General, point blank,
“Can your Air Corps fly the air mail?” With flashbacks to the 1918
tasking of Reuben Fleet to create an Army Air Mail overnight, Foulois
reasoned that he too was faced with little choice and responded in the
affirmative, like a good soldier, and like a hopeful leader toward
better funding support for his struggling peacetime Air Corps.
Shortly after returning to his office that same day, Foulois was
served with Executive Order Number 6591, directing that
the Army immediately take over the U.S. Air Mail as an emergency
measure, with full cooperation of the Post Office Department, the War
Secretary, and the Secretary of State. On February 19th, the Post
Office cancelled all existing air mail contracts, sending a shock wave
throughout the aviation industry. No criminal charges had ever been
proven, yet the government was punishing the very corporate structure
it had hastily created during the Hoover administration. Airline
leaders such as Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern, and D.W. Tomlinson of
TWA took to public microphones and news cameras expressing their
outrage, to no avail. The die had been cast in the oval office, and
the Air Corps was once again in the breech, ready or not, just like in
1918.

How to clear mac memory. Remove Login Items to Lower Mac Memory Usage. Login items are the ones that load.

When the Army Air Corps was directed to fly the air mail in
1934, a wide variety of aircraft were used ranging from fighters to
large bombers such as this Douglas B-7 seen here on Air Mail Route 18
between Salt Lake City, Utah and Oakland, California. Photo: Editor’s
Collection

Foulois immediately passed the word down through his chain of command,
directing his area commanders to take over regions of the air mail
route structure, using military observation aircraft, fighters, and
bombers, as were at hand in local squadrons. Bomb bays in Martin
B-10s became mail bins with the bomb racks removed and the belly doors
safetied shut. Crews of open cockpit fighters like the Boeing P-12,
and attack planes like the Curtiss A-12 began stuffing sacks of mail
around the pilot’s feet and behind the pilot’s seat. On the P-12, the
only space available was a tiny stowage area behind the cockpit,
which, loaded with mail, made for an aft center of gravity and a
dangerous lack of longitudinal stability. The Army clearly lacked the
proper aircraft and the proper cockpit gyro instrumentation, as well
as the pilot instrument proficiency, to undertake this new air mail
directive around the clock, in fair weather or foul. Within days,
there were front page photos of fatal crashes of Army mail planes
almost every other day. It was a man made slaughter of dedicated
young military pilots, in peacetime, simply to serve a political
purpose. FDR became more embarrassed by the Army Air Mail debacle
than he had been over the Black hearings in the Senate earlier that
year. And what action was taken in the oval office this time? FDR
simply called General Foulois back onto the carpet and blamed the
entire mess on his inadequate leadership of the Army Air Corps
(References 1-5).

The other end of the Army spectrum, also seen here on
A. M. Route 18, were fighters that had very little air mail capacity
such as this Boeing P-12E. Photo: Editor’s Collection

On June 1, 1934, a sheepish Roosevelt administration ended the Army
Air Mail emergency service and returned the responsibilities back to
the contract air mail carriers. In later years, retired General
Foulois tried to put a better face on his being abused by the
executive branch, and stated that the Army Air Mail tragedy of 1934
was actually a godsend, for it awakened the American public to the
needs in training and equipment in the Air Corps that served to shore
up our air defenses in time to bounce back from the attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941. Always, the good soldier, to the bitter end.

Loading the mail into an Eastern Air Transport Condor 18. With
improvements in airplanes, navigation, communication, airports, and
weather forecasting in the .30s, carrying the air mail became routine,
and the risk and adventure of the early days, just a memory. Photo:
Editor’s Collection

United States Air Mail Plate Blocks

References

Most Valuable Us Airmail Stamps

1. Glines, Carroll V. The Sage of the Air Mail, Van Nostrand
   Company, Inc., Princeton, NJ 1968.
2. Shamburger, Page, Tracks Across the Sky, Lippincott
   Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1964.
3. Neilson, Dale, Saga of the U.S. Air Mail Service, Air Mail
   Pioneers, Inc., 1962.
4. Courney, W.B., “The Wreck of the Air Mail,”, Collier’s
   magazine, February 9, 1935, page 10 and following.
5. Allen, Oliver E., The Airline Builders, Time-Life Books,
   Alexandria, VA 1981.
6. Rosenberg, Barry, and Macaulay, Catherine, Mavericks of the
   Sky, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2006.