The Airplane - Jay Spenser [118]
Covering the Boeing 40A’s inaugural flight, Chicago newspaper reporter Jane Eads became the first commercial passenger to cross most of North America by air. Here she thanks her pilot at San Francisco following a memorable adventure that more closely resembled the Pony Express of Wild West fame than modern air travel.
Boeing
In those early days before pressurized cabins, airliners slogged their way through the weather instead of flying over it. Cloudbursts and thunderstorms surprised flights en route, pelting the windows with torrents of water. Lightning flashed in nearby clouds, eliciting gasps and the occasional scream from frightened passengers. Pilots added to the alarm by altering course frequently in search of better conditions, sometimes even resorting to unscheduled landings on or off an airfield (early airliners could set down in almost any good-size field).
Even fair weather was unpleasant if fluffy white cumulus clouds filled the summer sky. Their presence indicated vertical currents that soured stomachs and turned faces progressively greener as flights ran the gauntlet of constant updrafts and downdrafts. Busy at the controls, the pilots seemed immune to what the passengers experienced.
With excellent rail service providing basic domestic travel, flying was seen as dangerous as well as uncomfortable. Only the hardiest of those with above-average means gave it a try, and it was often for the novelty as much as the need to get somewhere quickly.
Nevertheless, it heralded a new era.
Postmaster General Brown decreed that there should be three U.S. transcontinental air routes. He foresaw feeder services evolving over time around the many stops along the three trunk routes, forming a network that would serve the nation well. To ensure beneficial competition as airlines vied to provide service, he was careful to award these coast-to-coast operating rights to different airlines.
Brown assigned the northern route to United Aircraft and Transport Corporation (UATC), the new name of Boeing Air Transport following its 1930 merger with National Air Transport, an operator of Ford Tri-Motors between New York and Chicago. This consolidation gave the carrier a continuous network spanning the continent. Pacific Air Transport with its West Coast network was now part of UATC, as was Varney Airlines. Today’s United Airlines traces its history to that first commercial airmail flight by Varney’s Leon Cuddeback in April 1926.
Brown awarded the southern transcontinental route to American Airways, the new name for Aviation Corporation as of 1930. That holding company had included Colonial, Universal, Southern, and other early carriers. American Airways would change names one last time to become American Airlines in 1934.
The central route—the third and final U.S. coast-to-coast route—went to Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA), a carrier created through a forced merger engineered by the postmaster general. This shotgun marriage combined Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), a well-financed outfit that flew most of the way west from the East Coast, with Western Air Express, an energetic carrier profitably transporting mail and passengers between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
TAT was the first carrier to deliver passengers from one coast to the other, but it did so only with the help of two railroads. This 1929 plane-train service began in New York City with travelers boarding a Pennsylvania Railroad train for an overnight trip to Columbus, Ohio. The following morning they boarded a Ford Tri-Motor that winged its way westward to Waynoka, Oklahoma, via Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Wichita. From Waynoka, a Santa Fe Railroad train took them overnight to Clovis, New Mexico, where they boarded another TWA trimotor flying to San Francisco via Albuquerque; Winslow, Arizona; and Los Angeles.
With stops in all these places, coast-to-coast travel took forty-eight hours. Arduous as it was, nevertheless it saved a bit more than a day versus