Early Air Mail Biplanes

more at http://www.antiqueairfield.com/features/us_airmail.html

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.

more at http://www.antiqueairfield.com/features/us_airmail.html



*