Swisher, J A

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The Palimpsest

Air Mail in the Twenties

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Volume 26 | Number 1 Article 3
1-1-1945
Air Mail in the Twenties
J A. Swisher
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Recommended Citation
Swisher, J A. "Air Mail in the Twenties." The Palimpsest 26 (1945), 12-20.
Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol26/iss1/3
Air Mail in the Twenties
The first United States mail ever carried from 
Chicago to Omaha by air route ', it was reported, 
passed through Iowa City on January 8, 1920. 
This initial flight carried no regular mail for Iowa 
nor was any Iowa mail taken on board. At Iowa 
City, however, when the plane stopped en route, 
Pilot Walter Smith carried a letter which he per­
sonally delivered to Robert N. Carson on the air­
plane field. Presumably this was the first airmail 
letter ever delivered in Iowa.
As a part of the publicity campaign for the in­
auguration of a new day in air transportation, 
Mr. Carson had planned to send a small Iowa pig 
to Chicago with Pilot Smith upon his return from 
Omaha. Accordingly at 1:33 o'clock on the 
morning of January 9th, Smith, piloting plane No. 
104, left Iowa City with a live pig consigned to 
John Burke, manager of the Congress Hotel in 
Chicago. It was originally planned to send the 
pig on the previous day and so before the con­
signment arrived the consignee was reported to be 
‘getting impatient”. A message from E. E. Peake, 
manager of an automobile exhibit being held in 
Chicago, addressed to R. N. Carson, Chief
12
A IR  M A IL  IN  T H E  T W E N T IE S 13
Good Roads Booster, Iowa City,” said: “Johnny 
Burke is standing out on Lake front watching for 
airplane pig. Hurry up or it will be a hog. No 
one here believes your story.”
The Carson pig created considerable comment 
in Iowa City, and perhaps it created not a little 
merriment when, decorated with blue ribbons, it 
was led across the lobby at the Congress Hotel. 
But in reality regularly scheduled shipments of 
mail or products by air were left for the future.
Thirteen months later, on February 21, 1921, 
the United States Post Office Department con­
ducted a series of experimental flights in anticipa­
tion of the establishment of regular coast to coast 
mail service, involving night-time flying.
A message from Hazelhurst, New York, on 
February 24th reveals something of the results.
Eight bags of mail dispatched from San Fran­
cisco by airplane at 4:30 Tuesday morning, ar­
rived at Hazelhurst field yesterday at 4:50 p. m., 
establishing a cross-country mail record of 33 
hours and 20 minutes, with allowance for time 
zones changes in the coast to coast flight.”
To accomplish this difficult and dangerous feat, 
the Post Office Department had dispatched four 
airplanes on a transcontinental mission. Two 
planes had left Hazelhurst Field with mail ad­
dressed to San Francisco. At the same time two
14 T H E  P A L IM P S E S T
planes had left San Francisco with mail for New 
York City. The mail was transferred from plane 
to plane in a relay flight. Pilots were changed 
from time to time, but only one of the relays suc­
ceeded in spanning the continent.
One of the west-bound planes was grounded at 
Debois, Pennsylvania. The other continued its 
journey as far as Chicago. One of the east-bound 
planes flew from San Francisco to Elko, Nevada, 
where the plane was wrecked and its pilot W. F. 
Lewis was killed. The east-bound plane which 
was successful in reaching New York was piloted 
on the last leg of the journey by E. M. Allison. 
Allison had left the New York field on the west­
bound plane which arrived at Chicago. He had 
piloted as far as Cleveland, Ohio, and had re­
mained there to take over the east-bound plane 
which was piloted from Chicago to Cleveland by 
Jack Webster. Other pilots who participated in 
this successful relay were Farr Nutter, who 
started the flight at San Fransisco and carried the 
mail to Reno, Nevada. There the relay was taken 
up by Easton who piloted the ship to Salt Lake 
City, Utah. The distance from Salt Lake to 
Cheyenne, Wyoming, was traversed by Pilot 
Jimmie Murray. Pilot Yager flew the plane from 
Cheyenne to North Platte, Nebraska. From 
there to Chicago, the mail plane was flown,
A IR  M A IL  IN  T H E  T W E N T IE S 15
chiefly during the hours of darkness, by Jack 
Knight, one of the best aviators of his day.
On February 23, 1921, the Iowa City Press- 
Citizen carried a story of the flight, and of the 
landing at Iowa City — the only stop that was 
made in Iowa. “A splendid flight through dark­
ness; with a perfect landing on a strange field — 
after a journey of countless miles over a tract he 
had never beheld before, by day or night — that 
is the admirable record of Lieut. Jack Knight, a 
transcontinental flyer in Uncle Sam’s air mail ser­
vice, who reached here this morning, at 4:45 
o’clock — only 20 minutes behind a schedule that 
covered the extraordinary aerial voyage”, began 
the account.
For many miles, Lieut. Knight fought adverse 
conditions”, the reporter continued. From North 
Platte to Omaha “clear weather favored him”, 
but after he left there two hours after midnight, 
gloomy and forbidding” clouds covered the sky 
all the way to Des Moines. “Thus, through 
Stygian gloom, he pursued his way, fought 
bravely on.”
After passing the capital city, “he was a bit 
more fortunate for a time, as the murky atmos­
phere cleared, and, at an altitude of 1000 feet, he 
flew Iowa Cityward.” Near Williamsburg, “he 
met the forces of nature that made for renewed
16 T H E  P A L IM P S E S T
danger — snow and fog, and banks of depress­
ing clouds, through which he was compelled to 
fight his way, blindly, determinedly, desperately. 
This was about 4:15. Temporarily, the fog and 
snow, hostile and perilous, almost induced him to 
attempt a landing at some spot — but he would 
not descend”.
Presently he was in the vicinity of Coralville, 
but “could not locate the aviation field far to the 
south. He flew around in the gloomy heights for 
about 15 minutes, and finally succeeded in locat­
ing the Iowa City field, where Chief H. S. Long 
awaited his coming. The lights on the local field 
helped him, of course, after he reached a point 
within the scope of his vision on high. Espying 
the gleaming beacons 1000 feet or so down, he 
then descended, and made a perfect landing.”
“It was a wonderful feat”, declared Chief 
Long, of the Iowa City station. “Many a time a 
pilot, new to the territory over which he is flying, 
and whereon he desires to descend, finds it diffi­
cult, even in the daytime, to locate a strange field. 
This has been true right here.
“With Jack Knight coming to a perfectly 
strange city and field; and at night; and under 
adverse conditions, too, what he accomplished is 
about as fine a piece of work in the air as I ever 
saw.”
A IR  M A IL  IN  T H E  T W E N T IE S 17
On the following day the New York Times 
quoted Knight as saying in Chicago that he was 
“feeling fine“ except that he needed something to 
eat and some sleep. “I got tangled up in the fog 
and snow a little bit/’ he said. “Once or twice I 
had to go down and mow some trees to find out 
where I was, but it did not amount to much, ex­
cept for all that stretch between Des Moines and 
Iowa City. Say if you ever want to worry your 
head, just try to find Iowa City on a dark night 
with a good snow and fog hanging around. Find­
ing Chicago — why, that was a cinch, I could see 
it a hundred miles away by the smoke. But Iowa 
City — well, that was tough.”
Two more years passed while planning and ex­
perimentation in air-mail transportation continued. 
Current Opinion for September, 1923, said: 
“Brilliant illumination along a pathway 1,000 
miles long will be one of the features of the cross 
continent air-mail service to be inaugurated by 
the Post Office Department shortly. A line of 
beacons will extend from Chicago to Cheyenne, 
covering one-third of the route from New York to 
San Francisco. Over this part of the course, mail 
carrying planes will travel at night. The schedule 
calls for departure from New York daily at noon, 
and arrival at Frisco toward evening of the fol­
lowing day — an elapsed time of only 28 hours.”
18 T H E  P A L IM P S E S T
Prior to this time there had been much plan­
ning and intermittent attempts to improve the 
service. But transcontinental air-mail transpor­
tation had not yet become a through service. 
Rather it was auxiliary to railway mail service. 
Early-morning mail planes would pick up mail 
bags in New York, carry them to Cleveland, and 
place them on the Chicago express train which 
left New York the night before. The new system 
was intended to 'lift the air mail out of its auxil­
iary status and give it the standing of an inde­
pendent service from coast to coast."
To perfect this plan and to facilitate night fly­
ing, powerful beacon lights were installed at each 
of the five regular flying fields — Chicago, Iowa 
City, Omaha, North Platte, and Cheyenne. Each 
was to have a 600,000,000 candlepower light, 
which would swing slowly around on top of a 
tower, where it would be visible for fifty miles. 
In addition to these terminal lights, less powerful 
lights were located at twenty-mile intervals to 
mark emergency landing fields. As a final safe­
guard flashing traffic lights directed upward were 
located every three miles along the line of flight.
In accordance with a well-laid plan of the Post 
Office Department a trial flight was made over 
this route on August 21, 1923. The plane which 
left San Francisco on this flight was delayed en
A IR  M A IL  IN  T H E  T W E N T IE S 19
route. But an east-bound plane which left Chey­
enne at 6:53 o’clock Tuesday evening without 
waiting for the San Francisco plane arrived at 
Hazelhurst Field at 5:04 Wednesday evening.
Only about fifty persons, among them J. E. 
Whitlock, Superintendent of the Eastern Division 
of the Air Mail, and W. E. Clecknen, detailed by 
Postmaster Morgan for the arrival, were at Hazel­
hurst Field when the Cheyenne plane landed. 
Word had been received that Pilot Eugene John­
son had left Cleveland at 2:02 Wednesday after­
noon on the last lap of the eastward flight, which 
usually required three and a half hours. At 5 
o’clock a plane appeared in the sky. Four minutes 
later it taxied up to the hangar, and the officials 
were surprised to see Johnson climb out. He had 
arrived fifty-nine minutes ahead of his schedule.
Johnson had averaged 140 miles an hour over 
the 435-mile air way between Cleveland and 
Hazelhurst Field, at one time attaining an altitude 
of 11,000 feet over Bellefonte, Ohio. With fa­
voring weather and wind, he had just ’‘opened up 
for all she’s worth” in the last lap of the race. 
Mail which had arrived on the plane was hastened 
to the New York post office whence it was dis­
tributed yet that night.
One of the letters carried on this trip was dis­
patched by Robert N. Carson from Iowa City at
20 T H E  P A L IM P S E S T
three A. m . to the editor of the New York Times. 
“Greetings, with the inauguration of the night fly­
ing of the Air Mail ', it began. “The mail that 
left New York City Aug. 21, at 11 a. m., arrived 
here the same date at 8:50 p. m. and left for the 
West at 9 p. m. en route to Frisco. The ship ar­
riving here was slightly ahead of schedule.
“Let us hope", the letter concluded, “that the 
flying of the Air Mail by night as well as by day 
is a permanent thing".
The westward flight which was made at this 
time was equally successful. Mail which left 
New York on Tuesday morning was delivered in 
San Francisco on Wednesday evening. This was 
the first mail ever carried westward by air the 
complete distance between these two cities. Jack 
Knight, ace flyer of 1921, was one of the pilots on 
this relay flight.
In 1938 Knight visited Iowa City and recalled 
those early flights. At that time he predicted that 
flying in the near future would be “in four-motor, 
42 passenger planes, which will fly non-stop coast 
to coast." Trans-Atlantic plane service as well 
as trans-Pacific service, he said, would soon come.
Knight's prophecies have now been richly ful­
filled. But Iowans should not forget those heroic 
days of small beginnings in the development of air 
mail transportation in the decade of the twenties.
J. A. Swisher


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