There were about 45 of these airline companies, most of them small and undercapitalized, flying short routes and disinclined or unable to grow or invest in new equipment. Another carrier shipped a cast iron stove as air mail. One carrier flooded the system with Christmas cards, which cost him nine cents each, including postage, but returned 18 cents each to the airline in revenue. Subsidies exceeded the postage on the letters. “To take in as much for carrying a 150-pound passenger as for hauling an equivalent weight in air mail, a line would have had to charge a prohibitive $450 per ticket.” “In 1926, airlines were paid three dollars per pound for flying the mail a thousand miles,” said historian Oliver E.
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They seldom bothered to install seats on their airplanes.Īir mail and freight paid better. They had little interest in carrying passengers and made little provision for it. Some of these commercial carriers called themselves airlines, but for most of them, that was stretching it. By 1927, they had taken over completely from the Post Office pilots. In 1925, however, Congress decided to turn air mail operations over to private contractors to encourage commercial aviation.
Regular transcontinental service was established in 1924. Night flying became routine, made possible not only by instruments in the airplanes but also by ground beacons and lighted emergency landing fields along the way. In 1922, Post Office pilots went an entire year without a fatal accident. It was loaded again onto airplanes the following morning.Īn O-19 flies over the Columbia River on a mail flight.īoth safety and operational capability improved with time. The airplanes landed at dark and transferred the mail to trains for the next leg of the route. Of the first 40 Post Office pilots, three died in crashes in 1919 and nine more were killed in 1920.įor several years, the air mail operated only in daytime.
They had no radios, no navigation aids, and no instruments. The first mail airplanes were mostly war surplus de Havilland DH-4s. Post Office pilots and airplanes then took over, built the air mail into a nationwide network, and serviced it for the next nine years. US air mail operations began with the Army Air Service, which flew a regular route between New York and Washington as a demonstration for three months in 1918.
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