The route from New York to San Francisco was marked, in part, by arrows on the ground - or as Jack Warner might have stated it, “Frisco - That-a-Way.” Those towers stood atop concrete arrows, measuring up to 70 feet in length, that were painted bright yellow and pointed toward the next tower.
To aid the airmail pilots, the Post Office Department erected a network of 51-foot-tall towers with powerful rotating lighted beacons on top. The ultimate goal, naturally, was to fly the entire route and cut two to three days off the time it took trains to cover the route.īut those were the days before radio navigation and instrument landings. Congress fixed the cost of sending a transcontinental letter by airmail at 24 cents, the equivalent of about $3.84 today.
Flying mail by day, then putting it on trains overnight, the hybrid airmail service cut nearly a full day off the time it took to cover the same route solely by rail. Transcontinental airmail between New York and San Francisco - a distance of 2,612 miles - began in 1920.
Pilots flew by dead reckoning,” according to today’s U.S.
“These early mail planes had no instruments, radios or other navigational aids. Post Office Department, working in partnership with the Army, inaugurated scheduled airmail service between New York and Washington, D.C. It didn’t matter that the helmet Ovington wore looked like an upside-down flower pot that made him look ridiculous he had flown the first official airmail route in the United States. He flew several miles, then dropped the pouch to the postmaster of Minelo, N.Y., who was waiting on the ground below. Less than eight years later, Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock handed a heavy pouch of mail to a pioneering aviator named Earle Ovington, who took off in his French-made Blériot monoplane from the Nassau Boulevard Aerodrome in New York.
A week ago, I became aware for the first time of another aviation navigational guide that stunned me.īack in 1903, the Wright Brothers conducted what is credited as the world’s first successful airplane flight.