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By using air service, the Post Office Department was able to shorten the time it took to move mail from San Francisco to New York (or vice versa) by 22 hours, unless the weather was bad. For example: a plane would carry the mail during the day on the first leg from New York to Cleveland Evening came and the mail was transferred to rail Overnight a train carried the mail from Cleveland to Chicago where it was transferred to a fresh waiting plane and pilot, who took off early in the morning headed for Omaha, and so on. Because aircraft were necessarily limited to daylight hours (and good weather) trains still carried the mail when planes were grounded.
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The first transcontinental air route (PDF 1.59MB), from New York to San Francisco was initiated in 1920. Flying at night or in bad weather, then, was out of the question. Not even the rudimentary instrument panels were lit. There were no such things as landing lights, either at the airfield or on the airplane. There were very few airfields, mostly found only in larger cities. They relied on spotting landmarks and other visual cues on the ground such as bodies of water, a technique called ‘dead reckoning’. Other than an unreliable compass in the aircraft cockpit and auto club road maps, pilots had no navigation aids. Railroads had carried mail all across the country for decades, but it took several days for mail to reach its destination by train.Īt that time there was very little aviation infrastructure. The Post Office Department (an earlier name for the USPS) was very interested in developing faster cross-country transport of letters and had begun experimenting with delivery of mail by aeroplane in 1911. Lieutenant Knight was discharged from the Army in 1919, afterwhich he found work as an airmail pilot.Īirmail service was in its infancy. Upon coming of age he joined the US Army, where he became a Military Aviator, Aviation Section, Signal Corps, and served as a pilot instructor during the First World War. He was a skinny boy who remained very thin and slight as an adult. James Herbert Brockett was born in Kansas, 1893, and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, by adoptive parents, the Knights, who called him Jack.