The Airplane - Jay Spenser [117]
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Then on July 1, 1927, the Boeing Model 40A biplane entered service with Boeing Air Transport, an airline created by the Seattle company to operate its new product. The Model 40A had a 450-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine that delivered more power than a Liberty, was more reliable, used less fuel, and weighed some 200 pounds (90 kilograms) less.
This transitional airplane featured an enclosed passenger cabin with plush leather seating for two people who traveled in addition to the mail, not instead of it when space permitted. Soon thereafter, Boeing brought out the improved 40B-4, a slightly stretched version with seating for four and a 525-hp Pratt & Whitney Hornet.
Placed into ser vice on July 1, 1927, the Boeing Model 40A mail plane could also carry a passenger or two for added revenue.
Boeing
Boeing Air Transport had won the San Francisco–to–Chicago airmail route with a bid so low that the Post Office Department and other commercial operators expected the venture to fail, so Boeing was forced to post a bond guaranteeing its operation. Instead, the airplane’s new engine technology and additional passenger revenues made the service profitable from the start.
Boeing Air Transport’s first passenger was Jane Eads, a young reporter with the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Smartly attired in travel togs with a cloche hat, winter coat, high heels, and lipstick, she climbed aboard the Boeing Model 40A biplane in Chicago for its inaugural flight on July 1, 1927. Thus began a relentless day-and-night trip reminiscent of an aerial Pony Express. Changing planes and pilots at brief stopovers, Eads’ westward journey covered 1,950 miles (3,140 kilometers) in twenty-four hours and twenty minutes aloft at an indicated airspeed of 105 mph (170 km/h).
Eads kept a diary of the flight to share with her newspaper’s readers. “We are very high up now,” it read. “I feel giddy and my ears are ringing with the sound of the motor…. The air has been choppy and the sky full of lightning.”1
There was pleasure in observing America from this new vantage point during the daylight hours. Eads described grazing cattle, wilderness with few roads, and the spreading majesty of rugged mountains. Particularly poignant was an impossibly lonely farmhouse on the North Platte.
Eads did not hide from her readers that she found this new mode of travel something of an ordeal. “For hours I have been flying through a forgotten country,” she wrote. “One becomes unbearably weary with the altitude and the rough riding.”2
It got worse as the Boeing climbed ever higher to clear the thrusting Rocky Mountains. “This altitude is sapping my energy,” she penned. “It takes real effort for me to move at all. My feet feel like 100-pound weights. I can’t lift them…We’re hundreds of feet above the highest mountain in sight, and we’re hitting some real air pockets, the kind that make your insides turn a handspring. Maybe you think I’m not getting a kick out of it.”3
Still, she felt genuine pride in the pioneering adventure. “According to the pilot,” she noted, “I’m the first woman to cross the mountains in a plane and the first woman to fly so far in the night.”4
Such was the pace of change that a year or so later the first dedicated passenger airliners arrived on the scene. Introduced in the late 1920s, the Fokker F VII, Ford Tri-Motor, and Boeing Model 80 were noisy and drafty, but at least they gave priority to people over mail and packages. Starting in 1930, Stinson would also introduce trimotor airliner models.
Boarding passengers had only a seat by a window, a hat clip, and an air vent. Overhead was an open rack for personal belongings. On the plus side, airplanes flew low and slow, every seat was a window seat, and passengers were issued trip maps identifying sights of interest along the route. On the minus side, the very low wing loadings of 1920s-era design