Pope says engineers and mechanics constantly had to adapt to the myriad problems the fledgling aviation industry presented to them in what became a sort of trial-and-error process. The press adamantly supported the pilots, and Praeger, after firing them, was forced to concede, allowing pilot administrators to make the final call about flying conditions in the specific locations in which they operated.Īvoiding nasty weather didn’t fix every problem, though. And so instead of just saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do it,’ they just got in the plane and did it.”īut as fatalities racked up in the Air Mail Service, the pilots decided that something had to change and organized a strike in 1919. “ couldn’t necessarily convince Praeger, who had never been in a plane himself, and some of these other guys, of the dangers of flying. ‘Keep to the schedule! Keep to the schedule!’… Nothing else mattered,” she says. And he drove that into his division superintendents, the guys who were across the country in all these spots. “He was very demanding of his pilots… All he cared about was that you kept to the schedule. If the weather he saw was good, he thought, the pilots should fly. He had a worldview limited to what he could see out of his Washington, D.C. Most crashes and forced landings had weather to blame.īut Otto Praeger, Second Assistant Postmaster General, wasn’t convinced of the danger or simply didn’t care, according to Pope. Torrential downpours, fog, storms, snow-all presented significant challenges to pilots sitting in open cockpits with no lights to guide them and no wireless weather updates to help them through wretched conditions. Weather was by far the most crippling element. “It kind of became a badge of pride to these guys, that, you know, ‘We’re risking our lives to do our jobs.’” The leather mask worn by pilot Eddie Gardner to protect himself from the elements. “One of the pilots was kidding around about it one day and said, ‘You know, we’re nothing more than a suicide club,’ says Pope. To do a job like this, black humor was sometimes necessary, says Nancy Pope, historian and head curator of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. It was at the time one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and the pilots knew it. The average flying time clocked by a pilot before death was estimated at only around 900 hours. From 1918 to 1926, there were 35 pilots who died trying to deliver the mail, with one death for every roughly 115,000 miles flown in 1919, and there were 15 deaths alone in 1920. In the early days of the Air Mail Service, risk was at an all-time high. The initial mail routes stretched between New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, expanding to Cleveland and Chicago within the next year. A pilot tying a map to a fellow pilot’s leg. Mailing a letter this way was expensive, too: the cost of sending a single letter by plane-a cross-country flight took around 29 hours then-started out at a whopping 24 cents, compared to 2 or 3 cents by train, which took about five days. At this time, just 15 years after the Wright brothers’ famously took to the skies, planes were flown for only two reasons: as an accessory to war, and to deliver the mail. Starting in August 1918, the Post Office Department was tasked by the Army with hiring pilots, buying new planes to supplement the Army’s surplus World War I-era aviators, deciding routes, and negotiating with municipalities to build airports. This group of civilians was the first to deliver postage regularly by air, and their job was no easy task. Often equipped only with the maps tied to their legs or crude navigational aids saying simply to “follow the tracks” of a railroad or to “fly a little west of south for nearly 10 miles or about seven minutes,” the earliest American airmail pilots, the self-declared “Suicide Club,” braved life-threatening challenges to carry the mail. (All Photos: Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.) From left to right: Pilots Jack Knight, Clarence Lange, Lawrence Garrison, “Wild Bill” Hopson, and the administrator of the Omaha airfield, Andrew Dumphy.
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