Air Mail Scandal 1934

Eleven years after the Wright Bros. launched their airplane in 1903, the St. Petersburg – Tampa Air Boat line started the first commercial airline passenger service in the US. Tickets were $5 for the 18 mi run between the 2 cities. Prior to that flights could only be taken on a rather ad hoc basis. But that was 1914.

Once World War I started, the US military had 83 pilots and 109 military air craft. By the war’s end in 1919, the military had trained more than 27,000 pilots and had purchased 10,500 air craft.

During the peacetime that followed, many pilots purchased surplus airplanes and tried to start their own airlines, but most people were afraid of flight, and all the war footage of airplanes crashing did not help.

Safety concerns were a major issue. Since it’s inception by 1925, 31 out of the 40 the US Post Office pilots died in crashes.

Dean Smith, a survivor of that period, called the fraternity of early airmail pilots “a suicide club.” He said that “Only pilots desperate to fly would join it,” though he also noted, “you could at least be comfortable while life lasted.”

In the early years, pilots flew in open cockpits, even in unpredictable weather.

According to one veteran airmail pilot, there was a 50/50 chance of engine failure on any given flight.

Airmail service was a working laboratory — wind,rain, ice, snow, and extreme temperatures revealed weaknesses and flaws in airplane design and maintenance.

Through trial and error, designs were improved and failures corrected.

The years that the Post Office Department ran the airmail service were like that—makeshift maneuvers, dangerous and unreliable equipment, and a collection of genuine characters flying the mail.

The Army Air Service continued to operate one trip per day from DC to NY  on a 6-day week, with Sundays off (for the pilots, not the ground crews) up until August 12, 1918, when  the Post Office Department took over the entire operation, using specially designed mail planes ordered from the Standard Aircraft Company of Elizabeth, NJ.

Standard JR-1B models were also Hisso powered, like the Army JN-4Hs,but had a 200pound mail capacity and a range of 280 miles.

While rarely if ever depicted in aviation history journals, these StandardJR-1Bs remain milestones in being the first civil aircraft specified and procured by the U.S. Government.

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.

Pilots had to create their own way to calculate their distance, by time and speed. For Lindbergh, he chose to scratch etch marks in the cockpit.

Post Office pilot James Hill once needed three whole cigars and part of another just to find New Jersey.

Hill had taken off from the airport in Cleveland, bound for New Brunswick on his leg of a regular airmail route.

He’d been told the weather was clear up to the Alleghenies, with cloud cover from there to the coast.

In the vicinity of Mercer, Pa., he finished an in flight cigar and looked at his airplane’s clock. The clock had stopped. Hill knew the distance from Cleveland to Mercer was 75 miles.

He also knew that he’d smoked an entire cigar. Doing a bit of math on the fly, he figured he needed to smoke three more cigars and two-fifths of a fourth in order to mark the 255 remaining miles.

When he got that far into the final cigar, he dipped below the cloud cover and found himself approaching Had­ley Field, outside New Brunswick.

The airmail service wasn’t really the Post Office’s idea; the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had suggested it. But Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson threw his weight behind the NACA proposal.

He told Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger, who was given direct oversight, “The airmail once started must not stop, but must be constantly improved and expanded until it would become, like the steamship and the railroad, a permanent transportation feature of the postal service.”

NACA advocated the airmail service to spur the development of facilities, routes and equipment that would also benefit the private sector.

Once landing strips were built for airmail traffic, they could be used by anyone, and the routes that airmail pilots charted would prove useful to commercial traffic of all sorts.

Furthermore, the need for quality commercial aircraft to carry the mail would lead to new designs that could be employed by the private sector.

That was the idea, at least. Implementing it was a bit of a challenge.

The agency expected to pioneer the development of all these things understandably placed a premium on predictability and reliability. Both were in short supply during the early days of airmail.

In 1930, Postmaster General Walter Brown pushed for legislation that would have another major impact on the development of commercial aviation.

 

Known as the Watres Act (after one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Laurence H. Watres of Pennsylvania), it authorized the Post Office to enter into longer-term contracts for airmail, with rates based on space or volume, rather than weight.

In addition, the act authorized the Post Office to consolidate airmail routes, where it was in the national interest to do so.

Brown believed the changes would promote larger, stronger airlines, as well as more coast-to-coast and nighttime service.

Immediately after Congress approved the act, Brown held a series of meetings in Washington to discuss the new contracts.

The meetings were later dubbed the “Spoils Conference” because Brown gave them little publicity and directly invited only a handful of people from the larger airlines.

He designated three transcontinental mail routes and made it clear that he wanted only one company operating each service rather than a number of small airlines handing the mail off to one another.

His actions brought political trouble that resulted in major changes to the system two years later.

Following the Democratic landslide in the election of 1932, some of the smaller airlines began complaining to news reporters and politicians that they had been unfairly denied airmail contracts by Brown.

One reporter, Fulton Lewis Jr. discovered that a major contract had been awarded to an airline whose bid was three times higher than a rival bid from a smaller airline.

Lewis wanted to expose the information, but his boss, William Randolph Hearst refused to let him publish his findings, so Lewis took it to Senator Black.