Airline Growth - Airmail - Beacons - Contract Air Mail Act of 1925 - Morrow Board - 1926 Air Commerce Act - Ford's Tin Goose - Other New Aircraft Companies - Charles Lindbergh - Watres Act - Air Mail Act of 1934 - Aircraft Innovations
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Airline Growth

With the surplus of planes left after World War I, thousands of military planes were converted to civilian use. In 1919, bombers were being converted in Europe to form over twenty small new airlines. The first regular international airline service was started by one of those. The company setup by Henry and Maurice Farman used old Farman bombers to make wweekly flights between Paris and Brussels.

By 1917, there were seventeen regulary operating airlines in Europe, Africa, Austrailia, and South America. Some airlines from that era that are still operating include: Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM), SABENA World Airlines, Lufthansa, and Qantas. [ Links to Airlines ]. In the '20s American aviation was quite slow. There were a few small airlines, but they often failed after only a few months of service. Americans viewed air travel as a dangerous sport, not a safe means of transportation.

By the 1920's governments started to form national airlines through combining a few private airlines. One such case is the British government who formed Imperial Airways.
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Airmail

By 1917, the U.S. government felt it had seen enough progress in the development of planes to warrant something totally new, air mail. That year, Congress appropriated $100,000 for an experimental airmail service that was to be conducted jointly by the Army and the Post Office between Washington and New York, with an intermediate stop in Philadelphia. The first flight left Belmont Park, Long Island, for Philadelphia on May 14, 1918, and the next day continued on to Washington where it was met by President Woodrow Wilson.

With a large number of war-surplus aircraft in hand, the Post Office almost immediately set its sights on a far more ambitious goal, which was transcontinental air service. It opened the first segment, between Chicago and Cleveland, on May 15, 1919, and completed the service on Sept. 8, 1920, when the most difficult part of the route, the Rocky Mountains, was spanned. Airplanes still could not fly at night when the service first began, so the mail was handed off to trains at the end of each day. Nonetheless, by using airplanes the Post Office was able to shave 22 hours off coast-to- coast mail deliveries.
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Beacons

In 1921, the Army deployed rotating beacons in a line between Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, a distance of about 80 miles. The beacons, visible to pilots at 10-second intervals, made it possible to fly the route at night.

The Post Office took over the operation of the guidance system the following year, and by the end of 1923 constructed similar beacons between Chicago and Cheyenne, WY, a line later extended coast-to-coast at a cost of $550,000. Mail then could be delivered across the continent in as little as 29 hours eastbound and 34 hours westbound (prevailing winds from west to east accounted for the difference), which was two to three days less than it took by train.
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The Contract Air Mail Act of 1925 - Kelly Air Mail Act

By the mid 1920s, the Post Office mail fleet was flying 2.5 million miles and delivering 14 million letters annually. However, the government had no intention of continuing airmail service on its own. Traditionally, the Post Office had used private companies for the transportation of mail. So once the feasibility of airmail was firmly established, and airline facilities were in place, the government moved to transfer airmail service to the private sector by way of competitive bids. The legislative vehicle for the move was the 1925 Contract Air Mail Act, commonly referred to as the Kelly Act after its chief sponsor, Rep. Clyde Kelly of Pennsylvania. It was the first major legislative step toward the creation of a private U.S. airline industry. Winners of the initial five contracts were National Air Transport (owned by the Curtiss Aeroplane Co.), Varney Air Lines, Western Air Express, Colonial Air Transport, and Robertson Aircraft Corporation. National and Varney would later become important parts of United Airlines (originally a joint venture of the Boeing Airplane Company and Pratt & Whitney). Western would merge with Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), another Curtiss subsidiary, to form Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA). Robertson would become part of the Universal Aviation Corportation, which in turn would merge with Colonial, Southern Air Transport and others to form American Airways, predecessor of American Airlines. Juan Trippe, one of the original partners in Colonial, would later pioneer international air travel with Pan Am -- a carrier he founded in 1927 to transport mail between Key West, FL, and Havana, Cuba; and Pitcairn Aviation, yet another Curtiss subsidiary that got its start transporting mail, would become Eastern Air Transport, predecessor of Eastern Airlines. Because of this act, Henry Ford's airline was the first airline to transport US mail. Many of these companies who flew the mail started carrying passengers on flights. In 1926, airlines in the US carried 6,000 passengers. By 1930, passengers flying on US airlines had soared to 400,000.

The Morrow Board

The same year Congress passed the Contract Mail Act, President Calvin Coolidge appointed a board to recommend a national aviation policy (a much-sought-after goal of Herbert Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce at the time). Dwight Morrow, a senior partner in J.P. Morgan's bank, and later the father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh, was named chairman. The board heard testimony from 99 people, and on Nov. 30, 1925 submitted its report to President Coolidge. It was wide-ranging, but its key recommendation was that the government should set standards for civil aviation and that the standards should be set outside of the military.
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The 1926 Air Commerce Act

Congress adopted the recommendations of the Morrow Board almost to the letter in the Air Commerce Act of 1926. The legislation authorized the Secretary of Commerce to designate air routes, to develop air navigation systems, to license pilots and aircraft, and to investigate accidents. In effect, the act brought the government back into commercial aviation, this time as regulator of the private airlines spawned by the Kelly Act of the previous year. The Bureau of Air Commerce was set up to enforce these regulations.

Congress also adopted the board's recommendation for airmail contracts by amending the Kelly Act to change the method of compensation for airmail services. Instead of paying carriers a percentage of the postage paid, the government would pay them according to the weight of the mail. This simplified payments, and it proved highly advantageous to the carriers, which collected $48 million from the government for the carriage of mail between 1926 and 1931.
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Ford's Tin Goose

Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer, was among the first successful bidders for airmail contracts, winning the right in 1925 to carry mail from Chicago to Detroit and Cleveland aboard planes his company already was using to transport spare parts for his automobile assembly plants. More importantly, he jumped into aircraft manufacturing and in 1927 produced the Ford Trimotor, commonly referred to as the "Tin Goose." It was one of the first all-metal planes, made of a new material called duralumin that was almost as light as aluminum and twice as strong. It also was the first plane designed primarily to carry passengers rather than mail. The Ford Trimotor had 12 passenger seats, a cabin high enough for a passenger to walk down the aisle without stooping, and room for a "stewardess," or flight attendant, the first of which were nurses hired by United in 1930 to serve meals and assist airsick passengers. Its three engines made it possible to fly higher and faster (up to 130 miles per hour), and its sturdy appearance, combined with the Ford name, had a reassuring effect on the public's perception of flying. However, it was another event in 1927 that brought unprecedented public attention to aviation and helped secure the industry's future as a major mode of transportation.

Other New Aircraft Companies.

In Santa Monica, California, Donald Douglas started a new company called the Douglas Company. In 1923 another company was formed, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation. This company was based in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Pratt & Whitney started making aircraft engines in 1925 in their Harford, Connecticut plant. In 1929 the two companies, Wright and Curtiss, merged into the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Also, in 1929 the Grumman Aircraft Company started business on Long Island, New York.
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Charles Lindbergh

Slightly before 8 a.m. on May 21, 1927, a young pilot named Charles Lindbergh set out on an historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to Paris. It was the first continent-to- continent non-stop flight in an airplane, and its effect on both Lindbergh and aviation was enormous. Lindbergh became an instant American hero. Aviation became a more established industry, attracting millions of private investment dollars almost overnight as well as the imagination and support of millions of Americans.

The pilot that sparked all of this attention had dropped out of engineering school at the University of Wisconsin to learn how to fly. He became a barnstormer, doing aerial shows across the country, and eventually joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation to transport mail between St. Louis and Chicago.

In planning his transatlantic voyage, Lindbergh daringly decided to fly by himself, without a navigator, so he could carry more fuel. His plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was slightly under 28 feet in length, with a wingspan of 46 feet, and it carried 450 gallons of gasoline that comprised half its takeoff weight. There was too little room in the cramped cockpit for navigating by the stars, so Lindbergh flew by dead reckoning. He divided maps from his local library into 33 100-mile segments, noting the heading he would follow as he flew each segment. When he first sighted the coast of Ireland, he was almost exactly on the route he had plotted, and he landed several hours later with 80 gallons of fuel to spare.

Lindbergh's greatest enemy on his journey was fatigue. The trip took an exhausting 33 1/2 hours, but he managed to keep awake by sticking his head out the window to inhale cold air, by holding his eyelids open, and by constantly reminding himself that if he fell asleep he would perish. In addition, he had a slight instability built into his airplane that helped keep him focused and awake.

Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget outside of Paris at 10:24 p.m. Paris time on May 22. Word of his flight had preceded him and a large crowd of Parisians rushed out to the airfield to see him and his little plane. There was no question about the magnitude of what he had accomplished. The air age had arrived.
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The Watres Act and the Spoils Conference

In 1930, Postmaster General Walter Brown pushed for legislation that would have another major impact on the development of commercial aviation. Known as the Watres Act (after one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Laurence H. Watres of Pennsylvania), it authorized the Post Office to enter into longer term contracts for airmail, with rates based on space, or volume, rather than weight. In addition, the act authorized the Post Office to consolidate airmail routes where it was in the national interest to do so. Brown believed the changes would promote larger, stronger airlines as well as more coast-to-coast and nighttime service.

Immediately after Congress approved the act, Brown held a series of meetings in Washington to discuss the new contracts. The meetings were later dubbed the "spoils conference" because Brown gave them little publicity and directly invited only a handful of people from the larger airlines. He designated three transcontinental mail routes and made it clear that he wanted only one company operating each service rather than a number of small airlines handing the mail off to one another across the United States. Brown got what he wanted -- three large airlines (American, TWA and United) to transport the mail coast-to-coast -- but his actions also brought political trouble that resulted in major changes to the system two years later.
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Scandal and the Air Mail Act of 1934

Following the Democratic landslide of 1932, some of the smaller airlines began telling news reporters and politicians alike that they had been unfairly denied airmail contracts by Brown. One reporter discovered that a major contract had been awarded to an airline whose bid was three times higher than a rival bid from a smaller airline. Congressional hearings followed, chaired by Sen. Hugo Black of Alabama, and by 1934 the scandal had reached such proportions as to prompt President Franklin Roosevelt to cancel all mail contracts and turn mail deliveries over to the Army.

The decision was a mistake. The Army pilots were unfamiliar with the mail routes, and the weather at the time they took over the deliveries (February, 1934) was terrible. There were a number of accidents as the pilots flew practice runs and began carrying the mail, leading to newspaper headlines that forced President Roosevelt to retreat from his plan only a month after he had turned the mail over to the Army.

By means of the Air Mail Act of 1934, the government once again tendered the mail to the private sector, but it did so under a new set of rules that would have a significant impact on the industry. Bidding was structured to be more competitive, and former contract holders were not allowed to bid at all, so companies changed their names and appointed new executives. The result was a more even distribution of the government's mail business, and lower mail rates that forced airlines, and aircraft manufacturers, to pay more attention to the development of the passenger side of the business.

In another major change, the government forced the dismantling of the vertical holding companies common up to that time in the industry, sending aircraft manufacturers and airline operators (most notably Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, and United Airlines) their separate ways. The industry was reorganized and refocused.
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Aircraft Innovations

For the airlines to attract more passengers away from the railroads, they needed both larger and faster airplanes. They also needed safer airplanes. Accidents such as the one in 1931 that killed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and six other men kept people away from flying in droves.

Aircraft manufacturers responded to the challenge. There were so many improvements to aircraft in the 1930s that many believe it was the most innovative period in aviation history. Air-cooled engines replaced water-cooled engines, reducing weight and making bigger and faster planes possible. Cockpit instruments also improved, with better turn indicators, altimeters, airspeed indicators, rate of climb indicators, compasses, and the "artificial horizon," which showed pilots the attitude of the aircraft relative to the ground -- important for flying in reduced visibility.
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