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n February 1934, not long after the
introduction of early “blind flying” instruments such as the barometric
altimeter, artificial horizon, radio compass, rate-of-climb, and the
turn-and-bank indicator, a political scandal over the awarding of airmail contracts prompted
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cancel all airline airmail contracts. It was
a costly mistake. In
place of the airlines Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Army Air Corps to fly the
airmail, though not all airmail routes were assigned. Air Corps pilots during
this period were not trained for all-weather flying, many had limited night
flying experience, and most were unfamiliar with the airmail routes. In addition, most AAC
aircraft were not equipped with up-to-date navigation instruments. The AAC pilots hurriedly
began to familiarize themselves
with selected routes and AAC technicians started to refit aircraft for the new
assignment.
The results were disastrous. After “fifty-seven accidents and twelve
deaths in seventy-eight days,” the
airmail was handed back to the airlines (Solberg, Conquest of the Skies). The experience had some positive
effects, however, in that it focused government attention on the needs of the
Air Corps, which at the time had very limited funding and lacked a “blueprint” for
growth and development in the coming years (Aviation
Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4).
The airline flying during the 1930s was very different from what we are
accustomed to today.
Pilots generally had to fly under or around storms, to the extent that aircraft
range allowed, and had no radar to guide them. Today’s elaborate electronic systems have replaced manual navigation,
which relied on pilotage and dead reckoning.*
In Eagles
Must Fly, Jack Jaynes, an early FAA inspector, recorded numerous examples of
this type of flying as he performed check rides with airline pilots who carried
both the airmail and passengers. Jaynes describes how minimal
conditions at take-off often quickly deteriorated into below minimum conditions in the
air. Cold weather, the rue of northern airmail routes, not only brought
visibility problems, it also often froze aircraft instruments. Jaynes tells of one flight where the
co-pilot routinely removed the compass and took it back to the passenger cabin
to thaw; another example where the throttles froze in cruise and the
pilot had to cut his air speed for landing by repeatedly toggling the master
switch to the engines. Other examples included incidents in which pilots had to move passengers to the
rear of the cabin to keep the tail down for landings on flooded
runways, and had to dodge obstacles on the ground to stay below a thick
overcast. For example, Jaynes describes a flight with Ham Lee of Boeing Air Transport (later
United Airlines), from Omaha to Cheyenne, March 1, 1932, in which he recounts that he began
to take notes which he hoped one of his fellow inspectors would find as they
sifted through the inevitable crash site: “I was thrown
around . . . by his almost constant ‘S’ turning and only after
gluing my face to the small window did I realize what he was doing. He was
banking around haystacks, barns, houses, windmills, trees, etc. We had
practically no forward visibility and he was down on the bottom shelf and still
hunting for a lower one. The snow was very heavy and the temperature registered
27 degrees below zero at Cheyenne. Ham was able to get some relief when he
reached the Platte River. I estimated the river bed [at] 10 to 20 feet below the
banks of the river and this increased his ceiling approximately that amount. We
stayed down in the river bed practically the entire distance. To me, this flight
was one to be remembered, but it was just another routine flight to Ham
Lee” (Jaynes, Eagles Must Fly).
* Pilotage:
Navigation with reference to the features of the earth, including landmarks and other
characteristics such as wind information evident from the air, for
example, blowing dust,
wind patterns on water, etc. Dead reckoning: a navigation
procedure by which the pilot correlates airspeed,
time and direction, and factors in wind drift identified enroute.
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