![]() Enter the highway of light - a system of airmail beacons that spanned the country. Nearly 1-in-10 early airmail pilots died during the early days of the postal service’s airmail initiative, and emergency landings were common. The few pilots who did try to travel at night during this time were taking their lives in their hands. Using this process, a letter moving at its absolute fastest might take about 83 hours to get from New York to San Francisco. In 1922, letters sent by airmail would have to leapfrog the country, traveling by air during the day and by train at night. (Smithsonian)Įarly transcontinental airmail delivery was a hybrid system. Treacherous weather stopped others.īut the fourth flight got through, making it from San Francisco to New York in 33 hours and 20 minutes-a distance that took 4½ days by train and 3 days by air/rail (flown by day and shipped by train at night). On February 22, 1921, four air mail flights set out to prove the mail could be flown coast to coast in record time by flying day and night. It fell to the ground and was retrieved by the local postmaster. He banked his airplane and pushed the bag overboard. With a full mail bag squeezed between his legs, pilot Earle Ovington took off and flew to Mineola, a few miles away. To demonstrate the potential of transporting mail by air, the Post Office approved a special air mail flight as part of the festivities at an international air meet on September 23, 1911, on Long Island, New York. At 10:35 am, December 17, 1903, Orville was at the controls and kept the plane aloft until it hit the sand about 120 feet from the rail – the first controlled and sustained power flight. Then, on December 14, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright tossed a coin to decide who would fly first. Coast-to-coast rail mail took about 10-11 days to deliver. The driving of the ‘Last Spike’ at Promontory Summit, Utah, on brought the transcontinental railroad, into the scene. Then, on October 24, 1861, wires were joined on the first transcontinental telegraph the Pony Express mail delivery was discontinued by November 1861. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco, California once or twice a week in 10-16 days. One way, the Pony Express, used 400 horses and employed 183 men only for a brief 20 month period starting on Apin order to carry mail and news across nearly 2,000-miles between about 165 stations from St. Discovery of gold in 1848 made California a destination for tens of thousands from the east communication back east had it challenges. Travel in a straight line between New York and San Francisco and you might find a strange set of concrete arrows on the ground.In the mid-19th century the Wild West was largely unexplored. Airmail Beacon System provides an overview of the. The arrows - set into anonymous hillsides and nondescript scrubland - were laid down by the US Postal Service in the 1920s. Transcontinental airmail service began in 1920. Transcontinental Airway System is a brief article with a map of the. Many of the arrows built in the 1920s to guide airmail pilots are still in good shape, like this one in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Prior to the invention of radar and other modern flight planning implements, pilots would have difficulty navigating the coast-to-coast route over the American Midwest: the arrows, when combined with a 50-foot-tower and a powerful gas light, would help them find their way.Īmerica's first transcontinental air postal route was opened on August 20th, 1920. The first pilots to fly the route had to rely on landmarks to guide their way across the land, making the journey near-impossible in poor visibility. To make the route navigable in the rain or the dark, Congress approved funding for a network of beacons in 1923. Even the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon. The first beacons were built in 1924, and covered a portion of the flight from Ohio to Wyoming. ![]() Rotating beacons lit arrows painted in bright yellow to guide travelers, and any pilots who did run into trouble with their flimsy biplanes knew that emergency airfields were located close to the markers.īy 1929, the network of beacons extended from New York to San Francisco By 1929, the network stretched from New York to San Francisco. ![]() Most of the towers are now either repurposed - the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports one such tower in the area is now a TV antenna - or gone, stripped down for scrap metal during World War II. More of the arrows remain, their locations recorded and split into lists of the eastern or western parts of the United States thanks to the efforts of modern surveyors.
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