![]() The US Postal service sold airmail specific stamps until 1975, by which time most first-class mail was going by airplane anyway. ![]() Still, the service grew over time, expanding to more and more cities. Obviously, the Transcontinental Airmail Service catered to the wealthy, and after the start of the Great Depression, that became even more the case. The completed system of beacons allowed planes to fly the whole way, night or day. These postal employees are moving as fast they can to transfer the mail from the plane to a truck, then onto a train for a night run before the entire route was finished. The Less Glamorous Part: Transferring Airmail Bags from a Plane to a Truck at Night Who is the audience for this ad? The truck is a 1931 Ford AA on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight. ![]() Note that this is the middle of the Great Depression, but the woman is well groomed, well dressed, and has nice makeup and hair. Though the technology seems primitive now, it was a huge undertaking to design a night and day navigation system in 1920, and to build hundreds of beacons across the country.Īirmail Planes at the Elko Airfield, 1920sĪn Ad for Airmail on the Side of a 1931 Postal Truck The Postal Service then built more routes, east-east and north-south, but Reno was the key hub in the very first 24-hour airmail route. Many of the arrows are still there, though almost none of the beacons or sheds in Nevada are still there. Set approximately every ten miles, the first set of arrows stretched across the US and across Nevada. Generators, fuel, and electrical equipment were stored in a small shed, and the arrow number and route abbreviation were painted in large symbols on the roof.Ī Contemporary Diagram of a Beacon and Arrow: #41 on the Denver-Kansas City Route Each one also had a steel beacon tower that broadcast a light at night. They were painted “Chromium Yellow” with a six-inch black border for high visibility. Starting at the airfield in Concord, California (not actually in San Francisco), the Postal Service built a series of giant concrete arrows on the ground, each one pointing to the next one. Just beyond the east edge of the field the ground is extremely rough and there is a huge ditch here." A slight downgrade enables the ship to quickly obtain flying speed. Whenever possible it is advisable to leave the Reno field on the east-west runway, taking off to the east. And landing from four ways is unobstructed. The field is marked by a T and wind indicator. In 1921, the "Transcontinental Air Mail Pilot's Log of Distances, Landmarks, and Flying Directions" gave this description of the Reno airfield: "The air mail field at Reno lies two miles west of the city. ![]() Still, the Postal Service built the first leg of a transcontinental system, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, via Reno. There were funding issues: President Calvin Coolidge cut the budget, and the Postmaster himself thought the idea was stupid. In 1920 though, Congress voted funds to build a national system of 24-hour navigational beacons. It was slow, exhausting, and inefficient. The planes could not navigate at night, so airmail was a strange hybrid: at night, the mailbags were thrown onto trains, and at dawn, the trains stopped near the nearest airfield where workers threw the mail bags from trains to trucks and then onto airplanes that flew all day, then new workers threw the mailbags from the planes to trucks and back onto another train. This inspired the first US Airmail service in 1918, but it was fraught with problems. The Internet of the 1920s: The Transcontinental Airmail ServiceĮven after the Victory Highway offered an actual paved cross-country highway, there was still a need for fast mail service, not just coast to coast, but between cities of large to medium sizer nationwide.
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