On May 15, 1918, America’s first official airplane mail service was inaugurated. The man in charge was Major Reuben H. Fleet, U. S. Army Air Service. We will hear more of Major Fleet later on in our story.
Piloted by Army aviators, airplanes took off from Washington, D. C., bound for New York, via Philadelphia—and from New York bound for Washington, by the same route. Twenty minutes after Lieutenant George Boyle took off from Potomac Park, Washington, with 350 pounds of mail, he lost his course, and in landing near Waldorf, Maryland, the plane nosed over, breaking the propeller. Lieutenant Leroy Webb, who took off from the old Belmont Race Track near New York City at 11:40A.M., had better luck, however, and reached Philadelphia an hour and twenty minutes later. Lieutenant J. C. Edgerton took over the controls and flew on from there, landing in Washington at 4:00P.M.Within another half hour Boy Scouts had completed delivery of the 500 letters and parcels consigned to Washington, and air mail service in the United States had begun.
Wartime CurtissJennytraining planes were used for the first air mail service. They could carry about 300 pounds of mail and had a top speed of 90 miles per hour. In August, 1918, the air mail service was taken over by the Post Office Department.
The original air mail route of 1918 was only 218 miles in length, but it was not long before the Post Office Department extended the service. By September, 1920, transcontinental air mail service was in operation between New York and San Francisco, California.
Flying in single-engined, open-cockpit ArmyJenniesand DH-4’s, the unsung pioneers of our early air mail service were Army aviators. They had no reliable flight instruments. Roads, rivers, and railroad tracks were their only airway markers, and the family wash on a clothes line was the means by which the fliers ascertained their wind direction.
The end of World War I found Army aviation with a personnel of 18,000 officers and 135,000 enlisted men. Aircraft manufacturers with expanded production facilities were proceeding at full speed. Within a very short time the aviation strength of the Army was reduced to 1,000 officers and 10,000 enlisted men. Aircraft contracts were canceled and soon after the close of the war many aircraft firms were forced out of business. As a result, the Army was left to carry on with reconditioned wartime airplanes and engines.
Men like General “Billy” Mitchell fought to keep the Army from forgetting aviation. This was a peace-loving country and most people felt that the United States had fought its last war. Mitchell organized a transcontinental air race. He tried to persuade the Government to build lighted airways across the country for commercial aviation, but met with little support. Ex-Army aviators bought discarded Army planes, barnstormed the country, carried passengers at five dollars a hop, and tried in every way possible to keep aviation alive. But the early twenties saw aviation in an almost hopeless struggle for existence.
The three big names of aviation continued to lead in the struggling airplane manufacturing field. The Wright-Martin Company separated. The Wright interests became the Wright Aëronautical Corporation and those of Martin became the Glenn L. Martin Company. The Wright organization made airplane engines, and the Martin Company, with Glenn L. Martin still its director, began to build a big two-engine bomber. The Curtiss Company continued to build airplanes.
The devastating raids made by our big bombers on enemy lands, led many people to believe that the heavy bomber of the Army Air Forces was a “miracle” weapon born of World War II. Airmen know better. In World War I, General Mitchell believed that heavy long-range bombers could have bombed Germany to a more decisive defeat. However, we had no heavy bombers in 1918. It was not until 1921 that General Mitchell had an opportunity to prove the destructive power of aërial bombs.
In July of that year, using six Martin BM-1 bombers, the Army sank the giant 22,000-ton, ex-German battleshipOstfrieslandwith aërial bombs in 25 minutes. “Billy” Mitchell’s theory was proved and America’s policy of long-range, precision bombing was born.
Ever since that morning in January, 1911, when Eugene Ely took off from a platform on the deck of the cruiserPennsylvania, flew around, and landed back on the deck, farsighted naval leaders had dreamed of taking the airplane to sea with the fleet.
World War I and the use of naval aviation in anti-submarine and patrol duties had stopped progress in experiments along this line. It was not until the end of the war that Navy men began to consider the idea of building a surface vessel capable of carrying airplanes to sea. It was soon recognized that such a ship must be devoted exclusively to the carrying and handling of airplanes. It must be literally an aircraft carrier.
The idea of the carrier created several problems. Assuming that the pilots could land on the bobbing deck of a vessel, how were the planes to be stopped? Then there was the question of training flying boat pilots to handle landplanes. While some Navy pilots had obtained landplane experience overseas during the war, the majority had never been aloft in any type of machine other than a seaplane.
Nevertheless, the entire idea appealed to our Navy men and the project was undertaken. The Army agreed to provide landplane training facilities for Navy pilots. Under the command of Lieutenant Commander G. DeC. Chavalier, U.S.N., the Navy pilots first mastered the technique of flying landplanes. They learned to land their planes in small areas marked out on the ground to represent the deck of a ship. Then a platform one hundred feet long and forty feet wide was constructed on a coal barge at the Washington Navy Yard for use in deck landings. The barge platform proved dangerous, since no arresting gear had yet been developed, and the training was continued at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia. Here a platform was erected on the ground and a number of arresting gear ideas were tested. Finally there was developed a simple and reliable arresting gear, an outgrowth of the original taut line and sandbag idea, used by Ely.
In the meantime, the secretary of the Navy had authorized the conversion of the old collier,Jupiter, into an aircraft carrier. A platform, or flight deck, was built covering the entire top of the ship and the arresting gear was mounted on it at the stern. The ship’s smokestacks were set to one side of the deck so as not to interfere with the landings. The carrier, commissioned theLangley, in memory of the inventive professor, first steamed to sea in October, 1922. At a spot near Old Point Comfort, where eleven years before Ely had made his flight from theBirmingham, Commander V. C. Griffin soared up from the deck of theLangley.
Out from Norfolk roared Commander Chavalier, to set his plane down in a perfect landing on theLangley’sdeck. The United States Navy had its first aircraft carrier.
Do you remember the young midshipman who spent his savings to go to see the Wrights fly their plane for the Army at Fort Meyer? After that it was not long before he decided to leave the Naval Academy to take up a career in the new field of aviation. By 1920 Donald Douglas was one of America’s most promising aircraft engineers. At the age of twenty-eight he was vice president of the Glenn L. Martin Company. At that age most young men would have been happy to be even close to a position like that. But not Don Douglas. He still had his dream of great commercial airliners and he thought that California was the place to build them. He left his job with Martin and started in business for himself, at a time when half the aviation industry was struggling for its very existence.
Douglas went to Los Angeles, but friends and bankers alike could see no future in aviation, and advised him to get out of it. Discouraged but not beaten, he kept on trying. A chance meeting with a wealthy man in a barber shop gave him his starting capital and before long the former midshipman was building planes for the U. S. Navy. In 1924, his Army Douglas World Cruiser circled the globe, but his great airliners still were a dream.
It was between April 6 and September 28, 1924, that the first flight around the world was made. Four Douglas Cruisers, each carrying two men, started the flight from Seattle, Washington. A world-wide organization was set up to service the planes as they circled the globe. Two of the planes completed the trip 175 days later. The total distance flown was 26,345 miles and the total flying time was 363 hours, 7 minutes. A third plane was destroyed in a crash in Alaska early in the flight, and the fourth sank after a crash in the Atlantic on the last lap of the trip. The DWC’s used in the flight were powered with 450-horsepowerLibertyengines, and the average speed was about 72 miles per hour. This round-the-world flight was truly a daring operation.
In the early twenties the design of the airplane underwent very little change. The biplane with an enclosed fuselage remained standard in both military and civil aircraft. With the exception of a few Navy flying boats, the biplane was a two-place plane capable of carrying the pilot and one passenger, or 300 pounds of cargo or mail. There were some attempts at streamlining to eliminate drag, but they consisted mainly of using fewer wing struts and wire bracings.
Landing gears were made stronger and the oleo landing strut was introduced. The oleo landing strut was made by two sleevelike cylinders which operated as does a piston. The upper cylinder was filled with heavy oil. The landing wheels were attached to the lower cylinder. On landing, the weight of the airplane caused the cylinder to push up, as a piston, into the oil-filled upper cylinder. This produced a pressure on the oil. A small opening in the cylinder allowed the oil slowly to slip out of the cylinder. This reduced the pressure gradually as the gear absorbed the landing shock. If you take a bicycle pump and hold your finger over the valve, then build up pressure in the pump and at the same time allow just a little air to escape from under your finger, you will readily see how the oleo landing works. The oleo shock-absorbing type of landing gear is standard with all modern planes.
Fuselage construction of wooden stringers and posts, with the wire bracing so familiar in all early airplanes, gave way to the use of veneered wood covering. The first Douglas planes, the DH-4’s, the Curtiss Orioles, and the L. W. F. of the early twenties used veneer covering instead of fabric for their fuselages. This was followed by the introduction of welded steel tubing for fuselage framework. Several attempts were made to develop a monoplane in those days but none was very successful. In Germany, in 1922, the Junkers JL6 was the first plane successfully to use an internally braced monoplane wing. In this country it was several years before an aircraft designer dared to attempt to overcome the prejudiced aviators against the monoplane design.
During the middle twenties the names of Wright, Curtiss, and Martin were still to the fore. The Wright Aëronautical Corporation was the leader in its field. Its liquid-cooled engines had grown from 120-horsepower to 300-, 400-, 675-horsepower. It also had begun to experiment with and develop an air-cooled radial airplane engine. This engine, invented by Charles L. Lawrance, was a result of his study of the Manley radial engine built for Professor Langley’sAerodrome. The Manley engine was far ahead of its time. What might have happened had the first Wright plane and the Manley engine come together in the early days is pure guesswork. The original Manley radial engine weighed only 3.6 pounds per horsepower. In the early twenties, when Lawrance started to work with the Manley engine as a guide, airplane engines weighed about 10 pounds per horsepower. The Manley engine used in theAerodromewas water-cooled and Lawrance went to work to eliminate the extra weight caused by radiator and water-cooling equipment. So successful were his first experiments that he joined the Wright Aëronautical Corporation to collaboratein developing an aircraft engine that was to have a profound influence on world aviation.
During this time the Curtiss Company continued to build successful airplanes for both the Army and the Navy, including the first of the famous Hawk fighters, completed in 1923. Martin worked on improved types of Army bombers and Douglas built planes for both branches of the service. In Seattle, Washington, the Boeing Company had started its first aircraft for the Army. New names such as Beech, Cessna, Sikorsky, Vought, Fairchild, Northrop, and others began to appear on the nameplates of new planes.
In the early twenties, with transcontinental mail service well under way, there were many attempts made to establish air transport and cargo services. Most of these ventures were undertaken by former military aviators, using cast-off Army airplanes. Their airports usually were cow pastures. They planned their own air routes and got their weather reports from the newspapers. Bad weather would often ground a flight and passengers were almost as uncertain as the weather. Many of those pioneer operators had to depend on the dollar-a-ride hops of Sunday sightseers to “keep the wolf from the door.” One service operated 14-passenger converted Navy seaplanes on a route between New York and Havana, and another route between Cleveland and Detroit. Most of these pioneer air transport Operations lasted for only a short time, due to the heavy cost of maintaining the planes and the lack of properly marked air routes.
Difficulties had arisen in the air mail service by 1921. It had become apparent that air mail would not be valuable to the Government unless it could be flown by night as well as by day. It had been standard practice for the mail to be flown only during daylight hours and to be carried by train at night. The Government was about to abandon the air mail service when the pilots pointed out that all that was needed was a chain of airway beacons and lights for the landing fields and planes.
To prove their point a group of pilots volunteered to make a continuous night-and-day flight from San Francisco to New York. Flying in relays and guided at night by bonfires tended by friendly farmers along the route, the pilots flew the mail across the country in 33 hours and 21 minutes. The Post Office Department immediately arranged for the installation of lighted airways and the planes were equipped with navigation and landing lights.
By July, 1924, a continuous chain of lighted airway beacons marked the air mail route from coast to coast. Lighted landing fields were established at 250-mile intervals and through transcontinental air mail service, with night-and-day flying, was an accomplished fact.
We have spoken of the fact that in the early twenties aircraft designers were hesitant about attempting to overcome the prejudice of aviators against the internally braced monoplane design. However, there was one young man who had never been timid about the idea. He was a tall, scholarly fellow who, as a youngster, was designing and flying model planes before the Wright Brothers made their first flight. Like the Wrights he was the son of a minister. This young man, William Bushnell Stout by name, worked his way through the University of Minnesota by firing a furnace. After graduation he worked for a newspaper and edited a boys’ page, one of the first in America that gave complete directions for building model airplanes.
With the outbreak of World War I, Bill Stout became technical adviser to the Aircraft Board in Washington. His first advice to the aviation experts there was to scrap all existing designs and build a streamlined monoplane with an internally braced wing without struts or wires. They said it could not be done. Bill promptly sat down and drew workable plans for such a ship.
Eventually the Government bought Bill Stout’s design and with the money he set up his own engineering laboratory in Detroit, Michigan. He decided that wood and fabric were not suitable to stand the strain required in a modern plane. His first all-metal plane, a Navy torpedo bomber, flew successfully in test flights, but a Navy pilot wrecked it on its official trial. The Navy would not order another one, so Bill had to raise more money. He got it and built America’s first all-metal transport plane. It carried eight passengers in addition to the two-man crew. Bill knew it was a good plane and he was satisfied with it, but he did not want to be a manufacturer. He wanted instead to stay at his engineering work, so he sold his airplane company to Henry Ford, and the famous Stout-designed, Ford tri-motor, “Tin Goose” was born.
Just about the time the Ford tri-motors were proving themselves in tests an important law was passed by Congress. It was the Kelly Air Commerce Act of 1925. It authorized the Post Office Department to contract with private firms to fly the air mail routes maintained by the Department of Commerce. This law was designed to encourage private capital to enter the aviation field, with the objective of carrying not only mail but passengers. In February, 1926, officials of one of the newly formed air transport firms proudly watched their first big air transport plane take off from the Detroit airport. The big plane was a Stout-designed, all-metal Ford, the first of a series of airliners that were destined to make aviation history.
By the end of 1926, there were sixteen air transport operators holding air mail contracts. Most of the flying was still done in single-engined planes. Up to that time the weight of the big water-cooled engines in multi-engined transports left little to spare for pay loads. It was not until the development of the radial engine that commercial aviation really started.
The in-line engine required a long, heavy crankshaft with sections for each cylinder. This required that separate crankshaft bearings be used for each cylinder. The whole crankshaft assembly was heavy and cumbersome. When extra cylinders were added, the engine’s weight increased and it became longer. In the radial engine a single crankshaft hearing was used.
The radial air-cooled engine immediately showed many advantages over the in-line, water-cooled engines of that time. The use of aluminum in its construction made it lighter. It was cooled by allowing air to rush through finely spaced fins on cylinder heads and barrels. The weight of the cooling liquid (water) and the pump and mechanism to circulate it was avoided.
The Wright Brothers’ first airplane engine had weighed 170 pounds and had produced 12 horsepower. It had used twenty-five per cent of its energy propelling itself. With the introduction of the air-cooled, radial engine twenty years later, a pound and a half of engine had been made to produce one horsepower. Thus the new 350-pound radial engine of 200 horsepower put all but a fraction of weight into load-carrying power.
While we are discussing horsepower, it might be well to find out just what we mean by the term. In connection with steam and gasoline engines it is used for the reason that the horse had for years been man’s most common power plant. One horsepower represents the power ascribed to a heavy dray horse in the days of horse-drawn vehicles. This “standard” one-horse’s-power includes the three factors, time, weight, and distance, or the length of time it takes to move a certain weight a certain distance. One horsepower in these factors amounts to the ability to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute. Actual brake tests, where an experimental engine shows its ability to lift a certain number of pounds so high in one minute, gives the engineer a series of tables to be used in designing other engines. Each cylinder produces an equal share of the engine’s total horsepower. Thus each cylinder of the nine-cylinder, 200-horsepower, Wright radial engine produced slightly over 22 horsepower, or eight more than the entire four cylinders of the Wright Brothers’ 1903 engine.
With the introduction of the first practical, light-weight, air-cooled, radial engine, American aviation underwent a great change for the better.
The Lawrance-designed Wright J engines promptly began to put a long succession of famous fliers and famous airplanes in the books for one record after another. The Stout-designed Ford tri-motor transport plane was powered with Wright J3 radials. The J3 was adapted for use by the United States Navy and led the Navy to discontinue entirely its use of liquid-cooled power plants in favor of air-cooled radial engines for all its service airplanes. Wright J4 engines powered the flight of Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett over the North Pole in 1926. Tony Fokker, who had designed Germany’s fighters in World War I, began to make records with his American-built planes powered with Wright radials.
With the arrival of a suitable engine, fliers all over the country began to think of the Raymond Orteig prize of $25,000 for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. This offer had been standing since 1919. Admiral Byrd was ready to try for it when a slim, quiet, young air mail pilot hopped off from Long Island, N. Y. Flying a Ryan monoplane powered with a Wright J5 radial, this young fellow flew the Atlantic nonstop to land, some thirty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes later, in Paris with the quiet announcement, “I am Charles Lindbergh.”
The best fighter planes used by the Germans in World War I were not of German design. They were designed and built under the supervision of a young man from Holland. Tony Fokker had offered his airplane designs to his native Holland. They were refused. In turn, Fokker tried to interest the British, French, and Belgians in his airplanes, but none of them took him seriously. Just before World War I, the Germans “tied up” Fokker with a contract that kept him practically their prisoner until the war was over.
After the Armistice, Fokker fled from Germany with much of his equipment and established himself in an airplane factory in his homeland. The United States bought some of his airplanes, and in 1923 he established an aircraft factory in this country.
In April of the same year, two Army lieutenants, Oakley Kelly and John Macready, flying a Fokker T-2 powered by aLibertyengine, set a world’s endurance record by remaining in the air for thirty-six hours. Later, in the same Fokker, they flew nonstop from Long Island to California at a speed of nearly one hundred miles an hour. In 1925, Fokker began building his famous Fokker tri-motor transport plane.
Among the first private firms that were successful in winning an air mail contract was the Colonial Air Transport, operating between New York and Boston. This airline was started in 1925 by a young ex-Navy flyer named Juan Trippe, descendant of an old New England whaling family. Young Trippe’s airline used a small fleet of Tony Fokker’s tri-motor transport planes. In December, 1925, Juan Trippe, Tony Fokker, Harry Bruno, and George Pond, the pilot, climbed into one of the Fokker tri-motors on what Trippe called a survey flight. The “survey” included some flying around the Florida coast and climaxed with a record nonstop flight from Miami, to Havana, Cuba.
The idea behind Juan Trippe’s “survey” flight to Florida and Havana was to extend Colonial Air Transport’s route from Boston to Florida, then on southward. His board of directors could not see his point, so Trippe left Colonial. In a matter of weeks he had rounded up a few ex-war flier friends with money, and had organized his own airline under the title, Pan American Airways. Before it was completely set up Trippe had a contract to fly the mail from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba. That was in 1928. From that time on, Juan Trippe’s Pan American Airways continued to move just as fast as it had in its first few weeks of organization. Less than two years after the first Key West-Havana flight, Pan American was flying the mail to the Argentine.
While Tony Fokker was producing his famous tri-motor transports for budding airlines like Juan Trippe’s Pan American Airways, Admiral Byrd and three companions had flown a tri-motored Fokker to France. Clarence Chamberlain and Charles Levine flew a Bellanca radial-powered monoplane to Germany; Army Lieutenants Maitland and Hegenberger flew 2,400 miles nonstop from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, in a radial-powered Fokker; Amelia Earhart and Wilmer Stultz flew a Fokker from Newfoundland to England. Amelia thus became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. Later she was to fly the Atlantic alone.
Tony Fokker’s tri-motors and Wright radial engines predominated in the famous flights of the late twenties, but other American planes and engines were coming into prominence. The first Wright 200-horsepower radial engine was called theWhirlwind. It was soon followed by a more powerful Wright radial, the 400-horsepowerCyclone. At the same time the Pratt & Whitney organization of Hartford, Connecticut, made the 425-horsepower air-cooledWaspradial engine. WrightCyclonesand Pratt & WhitneyWaspswere destined to power American airplanes for many years to come.
During 1927 and 1928 the map of the United States showed a continually increasing number of lines marked “Air Mail Route.” In 1926, the sixteen companies holding air mail contracts flew about 1,700,000 air miles. Much of this mileage was flown in single-engined, open-cockpit airplanes. Mail was the principal source of revenue. The few passengers who first braved the rigors of early air transport either rode on mail sacks or in small, cramped cockpits. Pilots and Operation men alike frankly admitted they were not keen about carrying passengers.
The Boeing Aircraft Company of Seattle, Washington, set up the Boeing Air Transport and took over the operation of the air mail service from Chicago to San Francisco. National Air Transport handled the Chicago-New York route, to complete the transcontinental route. Jack Frye and others established an air mail and transport service between Los Angeles, California, and Phoenix, Arizona. Western Air Express operated between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, Utah. A number of short lines operating routes from the Great Lakes and down through the south were soon to be merged to create American Airlines.
In 1928, an air traveler making an extensive trip would be likely to fly in seven or eight different types of planes. He might step into a Fokker tri-motor, change to a single-engined Boeing, ride for some distance in a Ford tri-motor or a Whirlwind-poweredTravel Air, and finish his trip in a CurtissCarrier Pigeon. The planes usually flew low, at between one and two thousand feet. Here the air was usually rough and a good percentage of air travelers were troubled with airsickness. The planes landed every few hundred miles to refuel. They were noisy and heated only by exhaust gases from the engines, which usually furnished more sickly fumes than heat. Little food, if any, was served, and a coast-to-coast journey took thirty-three hours.
Though 1926 was the official start of American air transport, the first two years of its existence were years of experimentation. It was not until the country’s imagination had been fired by the flights of Lindbergh, Byrd, Chamberlain, and others that air transport emerged from its experimental stage. By 1927 the bigger minds in airline services had realized that the time was coming when provisions must be made to carry passengers on a large scale. It was not until 1928, with the arrival of powerful radial engines and better airplane designs, that air transport began to show real prospects. It was two years after the first beginnings of air transport that John Monk Saunders, the author, paid over $400 for an air passage from Los Angeles to New York, and became the first transcontinental air passenger.
Although its aircraft production had been mainly for the Army and Navy, the Boeing Aircraft Company also was in the air transport business through its Chicago-San Francisco air mail route. Boeing’s inventive genius was turned to air transport problems and created, first, the Boeing 40-B4 four-passenger and mail plane. Then came the big twelve-passenger, radial-powered, tri-motor plane, called the “Pioneer Pullman of the Air.” This ship, Boeing 80-A, helped to reduce the coast-to-coast transport time to twenty-seven hours. When the 80-A was introduced the Boeing Air Transport and the National Air Transport had been merged to form United Air Lines, the first transcontinental airline.
With air transport five years old, by 1930 the speed of planes was only about 100 miles per hour. Engineers and transport men agreed that the air transport plane must be faster. The planes of that day still had a considerable amount of external bracing and many of them were biplanes with strut and wire wing bracings. This caused the drag that was holding down the speed of the transport. Many of these planes had so many bracings that they whistled as they flew. To make a profit, the air transport operators had to have faster, quieter, and yet more comfortable airplanes. They must also be more easily maintained.
In 1921, Boeing came up with a plane that, while not the final answer to the air transport problem, was to point the way to the modern all-metal, monoplane type of air transports. This plane was the BoeingMonomail. TheMonomailwas big, fast, and comfortable, and it carried a big pay load. It was the first practical low-wing, all-metal transport to be put into service in this country. It carried five passengers, their baggage, and 1,750 pounds of mail or cargo, at a cruising speed of 140 miles per hour. TheMonomailwas the sensation of air transport in 1931, and set the pace for future transport planes.
The Boeing people, though pleased with the reception and performance of theMonomail, knew that the single-engine plane was not the final answer. If the engine failed, the plane must land. If the plane was over rough or mountainous country, forced landings meant danger. A big plane must have two engines, one of which could keep the plane flying if the other failed. Boeing went to work with this in mind.
Near Los Angeles, the young man who had been dreaming of big commercial transport planes since the Wright Brothers’ trials at Fort Meyer, also was thinking of two-engined transports that could fly on one engine. From the time Donald Douglas’World Cruisershad circled the globe, his aircraft had grown larger and larger. His orders, however, were for Army, Navy, and Coast Guard planes; not for great commercial airliners.
Although Donald Douglas had achieved a great deal of international fame as the result of the round-the-world flight and was highly respected in military circles, few other people knew him. A quiet, industrious young man, he had put all his earnings back into his business and had continued to work on his dream of big, roomy, smooth-flying airliners. He visualized air transport flying from coast to coast and from country to country in a great network of airlines that would link the whole world.
On a hot, dry day in the summer of 1933, in Winslow, Arizona, a new two-engined transport took off from one of the highest airports on the Transcontinental & Western Airways route. Gaining altitude, the pilot cut off one of its two engines, then flew more than 200 miles over the Rockies to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Returning, the pilot cut off one engine on the take-off. With oneCycloneradial roaring, the transport took off easily and climbed steadily. The first Douglas DC-1 transport had proved itself and a dream had come true.
The DC-l was an experimental model of the new Douglas two-engined luxury air transport plane. On the night of February 18, 1934, six months after the first DC-l was tested over the Rockies near Winslow, a new Cyclone-powered Douglas took off from Los Angeles for Newark, New Jersey. This plane was the first of the famous DC-2’s. It was flown by Jack Frye of TWA (Transcontinental & Western Airways) and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Air Lines. They roared into Newark ahead of a snowstorm which had blotted out all the airports along the route, and were three hours ahead of schedule for a new transcontinental record of 13 hours, 4 minutes. This flight made obsolete all existing transport planes.
The new Douglas DC-2 transport plane combined all the knowledge of thirty years of flight. In the early “thirties” air transport began to come into its own. Plane-to-ground radio was put into use. The radio range, or radio beam, pioneered by “Shorty” Schroeder with Henry Ford in 1927, was guiding our airliners on their course. The radio beam flashed the Morse code letters “A” and “N” along the flight path of the airliner. The dot-dash of the “A” signal was flashed on one side of the route and the dash-dot of the “N” signal was on the other. In the center of the flight path the two signals blended into a steady hum. This hum notified the pilot that he was “on course.” Regardless of fog, rain, or darkness the pilot got his course through his earphones.
The application of the gyroscope to aircraft instruments was a great step in the advancement of flying. First experimented with by Lawrence Sperry in the early days of the airplane, the constant action of the gyroscope was used to register the changes of attitude of aircraft in flight. It was first used in the Turn and Bank Indicator, then in theGyro-HorizonandDirectional Gyro. Power-driven gyros constantly whirled in the direction in which they were set. They were attached to dials on the instrument panel and to the plane itself. The position or attitude of the gyro was indicated on the dial in relation to the attitude of the airplane. As the plane changed, the constantly spinning gyro remained in its correct attitude. The gyro position and the position of the plane shown on the dial told the pilot the actual attitude of the plane in the air so that he could correct in relation to the true position indicated by the gyro. This allowed the pilot to keep his plane on a true compass course and in the proper flight attitude without having to see the horizon. Thus a pilot could fly through fog or total darkness with both ease and safety.
The gyro instruments soon proved their value and were installed in the cockpits of transport planes the world over. The Sperry Gyropilot then was perfected. This remarkable instrument, based on the gyroscope movement, was developed actually to manipulate automatically the controls of even the largest airplane, keeping it directly on the desired course and leaving the human pilots free for their many other duties.
In 1933, Wiley Post flew around the world alone, but the Gyropilot piloted theWinnie Maeover most of the route. This relieved the fatigue of constant flying and allowed Wiley to keep a continual check on his maps. His successful use of the automatic pilot soon caused its adoption by most of the major airlines of the country.
Thus, with the aid of the radio beam, better flight instruments, special octane gasoline, two-way radio, sound-proofing, wheel brakes, and adjustable pitch propellers, the airlines of America were fast emerging into a safe and comfortable means of travel.
While the DC-2 was coming into prominence in the air transport field, Boeing engineers had gone on with their idea of a two-engined plane and had built an all-metal bomber for the Army.
In building the two-engined, all-metal B-9, Boeing engineers learned how to build another plane with a more peaceful purpose. This ship was the famous Boeing 247-D commercial transport plane. The 247-D was an all-metal, low-wing monoplane, powered with two 550-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engines. It had a top speed of 200 miles per hour and a cruising speed of 180 miles per hour. It was America’s first three-mile-a-minute air transport plane.
In designing the speedy 247-D, the Boeing did not forget the comfort of the passengers. The plane was fully heated and ventilated. Its seats were deeply upholstered and had reclining backs. There were broad windows at each chair. There were dome lights and individual reading lamps; and the plane was equipped with a tiny galley and a complete lavatory. Insulation kept the 247-D quiet and comfortable in any sort of weather.
The 247-D carried ten passengers, a pilot, co-pilot, and stewardess, plus baggage and mail. It was first put into service by the United Air Lines in 1933, on their coast-to-coast route. Incidentally, it was United who had introduced to the airlines the third member of the air transport’s crew, the stewardess. The pretty young stewardesses were all trained nurses. They looked after air-sick passengers, served food en route, and looked after the comfort of the air travelers.
With the Boeing 247’s, United Air Lines in 1933 cut the coast-to-coast air trip to twenty-two hours. As DC-2’s and the fast two-engined LockheedElectraswere speeding up air transport schedules on the airlines throughout the country, differences arose between the government and some air transport firms over mail contracts. The result was the cancellation in February, 1934, of all air mail contracts.
The air mail revenue was the life of the air transport operators and the cancellation of the mail contracts suddenly darkened their future. An attempt to put the transportation of air mail into the hands of the United States Army resulted in a tragic failure. This was due mainly to the unfamiliarity of Army pilots with air mail routes and their lack of proper equipment. In June, 1934, the air mail was turned back to the airlines.
The return of the air mail contracts to private operators saw the introduction of the new Douglas DC-3. This was the plane that brought Donald Douglas’ dream to complete fulfilment. His big, all-metal, low-wing, two-engined DC-3 completely revolutionized air transport. By 1935, the name Douglas had come to mean fast, comfortable, and safe air transport.