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Court of Claims later determined that no fraud had actually occurred.) Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Roosevelt, however, charges of corruption in Brown’s awarding of the contracts led to a congressional investigation and the cancellation of all domestic airmail contracts on February 9, 1934. READ MORE: The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Lasted 16 Harrowing Hours The Aviation Industry Reorganizesįollowing the election of President Franklin D.
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Service further expanded when Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, operating with enhanced powers under the Airmail Act of 1930, masterminded a series of airline mergers and awarded passenger and airmail routes to the industry’s largest entities such as American Airways (formerly Robertson Aircraft Corp.) and United Air Lines, which emerged after Boeing consolidated smaller airlines he had purchased into a transcontinental carrier. READ MORE: 6 Little-Known Pioneers of Aviation Airmail Companies Start Passenger Service By 1929 more than 30 different airlines were delivering mail. By September 1, 1927, all airmail transportation had been handed off to private companies. Hubbard flew the first international contract mail route between Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, and in 1927 lobbied Boeing to successfully bid on the country’s longest airmail route between San Francisco and Chicago.
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“Flying that airmail reinforced the reality that the airplane could have a very practical use to carry passengers as well as freight.” “Boeing envisioned a great future for the airplane beyond military use,” says Michael Lombardi, senior corporate historian for The Boeing Company. With his airplane manufacturing company struggling to survive after the cancellation of military contracts at the end of World War I, Boeing and his lead test pilot, Eddie Hubbard, flew a bag of 60 letters from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle on March 3, 1919, in North America’s first international airmail flight. Bad weather forced him to parachute to safety twice while flying that airmail route.įurther west, airmail helped William E. Louis and Chicago a year before his famous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Two months later, Robertson Aircraft Corporation’s chief pilot, Charles Lindbergh, launched airmail service between St. The short-lived, but influential Ford Air Transport, owned by Henry Ford and his son Edsel, began the first commercial airmail service on February 15, 1926, on routes from Detroit to Cleveland and Chicago-flying Ford’s “Tin Goose,” the first American metal-clad, multi-engine plane envisioned primarily for passenger use.
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The airmail contracts attracted some of the country’s most prominent business titans and aviators. Private Airlines Take Over AirmailĪfter proving airmail’s financial viability-and building a transcontinental airway system with landing strips, beacons and even enormous concrete arrows pointing pilots in the correct direction-the Post Office in 1925 started taking bids from commercial aviation companies to provide airmail services.
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WATCH: Full Episodes of The Titans That Built America online now. Postal Service, nearly three-dozen airmail pilots died in crashes between 19. “Flying at 30 to 50 feet with never over 100 feet forward visibility in the average fog-made a great many angels of good pilots,” wrote aviator Jack Knight. Without radio communications or reliable instruments, pioneering airmail pilots relied on landmarks and instincts to guide their fragile biplanes from city to city, sometimes as sleet lashed their faces and rain blurred their vision in open cockpits. Routes soon spread beyond the Northeast, stretching from coast to coast by 1924. In August 1918, the Post Office took over airmail service with civilian pilots and six specially built planes.