Before carrying passengers, America’s most iconic airlines hauled the mail. It was one of the riskiest jobs around.
The U.S. aviation industry took off in the early 20th century not by transporting people, but by moving America’s mail. At first, airmail pilots flew in flimsy open-cockpit planes through every kind of weather—an experience that ranged from frequently harrowing to sometimes fatal. As routes expanded, airports proliferated and safer, more reliable aircraft were developed, the commercial air travel industry emerged, initially by piggybacking on airmail flights. The earliest passengers unceremoniously used mailbags for seats.
U.S. Mail first took to the skies less than a decade after the Wright Brothers made their pioneering flights over the dunes of Kitty Hawk. In 1911, the U.S. Post Office Department began staging dozens of experimental airmail flights at air meets, fairs and carnivals. On May 15, 1918, it launched the first scheduled service between New York City and Washington, D.C.
Initially, the U.S. Army Signal Corps operated the airmail route as a way to train its fledgling aviators before deploying them to the skies over Europe in World War I. That plan, however, immediately encountered turbulence.
Inauspicious—and Dangerous—Beginnings
On the inaugural flight from the nation’s capital, Lieutenant George Boyle’s plane failed to start because of an empty fuel tank. Then when the rookie pilot finally lifted off, he flew in the wrong direction and damaged his Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny” while landing in a freshly plowed field in an attempt to ask a farmer for directions. Boyle—and the mail—rode in a truck back to Washington, D.C. Two days later, the pilot became lost again and made an emergency landing at the Philadelphia Country Club after running out of fuel.
In August 1918, the Post Office took over the airmail service with civilian pilots and six specially built planes. Routes soon spread beyond the Northeast, stretching from coast to coast by 1924.
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. “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. According to the U.S. Postal Service, nearly three-dozen airmail pilots died in crashes between 1918 and 1927.
Private Airlines Take Over Airmail
After 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.
The airmail contracts attracted some of the country’s most prominent business titans and aviators. 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. Two months later, Robertson Aircraft Corporation’s chief pilot, Charles Lindbergh, launched an airmail service between St. Louis and Chicago a year before his famous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Bad weather forced him to parachute to safety twice while flying that airmail route.
Further west, airmail helped William E. Boeing builds his aeronautical empire. 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.
