This way, they thought, at least some of the mail would make it the whole way.
#Jack knight air mail pilot series
Knowing that the odds of a single series of planes and pilots making the entire trip was doubtful, they decided to stack the deck.
Two planes filled with mail would take off from New York flying west, and two planes would take off from San Francisco flying east. In the morning, planes would take new bags of airmail from the post office and trains, flying it throughout the day.īurleson and Praeger announced that they would begin transcontinental day AND night service on February 22, 1921. Mail was moved from planes to trains that ran all night long. Airfields and planes were not yet equipped for night flight, so planes came to rest at the nearest connecting airfield at dusk. While the airmail service operated a transcontinental service between New York and San Francisco, mail was actually moved only partially by air. That incentive was set to take flight on George Washington’s birthday in 1921. A series of recent deaths of airmail pilots in the Junkers-Larsen (JL-6) airmail planes was proving those planes unworthy of service and throwing doubts on the Post Office’s management of airmail.
Postmaster General Burleson and his 2nd Assistant PMG Otto Praeger, who ran the airmail service, knew they needed to provide some sort of incentive to get congressional approval for better appropriations. The service would cost only slightly more than existing railway mail and speed delivery more than a day faster across the country. In order to obtain funding for continued airmail service experiments and growth postal officials spun a variety of expectations. In 1920, the Post Office Department’s moderately friendly Democratic Congress was replaced by a majority Republican House and Senate. Part of the Chicago-San Francisco airmail route even followed the old Pony Express route. The original Washington-Philadelphia-New York City route was followed by a route connecting the nation’s two large financial centers, New York City and Chicago, and finally followed by connecting Chicago and San Francisco. airmail service settled into a series of experimental growth spurts. After an historic and triumphant beginning in 1918, the U.S.
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