Read Online One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online

photographs, and above all carrying mail – the one area in which America was pre-eminent. Of all the aerial employments, delivering mail was the most economically secure but also the most dangerous: thirty-one of the first forty airmail pilots were killed in crashes, and accidents remained common throughout the 1920s. Airmail pilots flew in all weather and often at night, but with almost no support in the way of navigational aids. In March 1927, an article in Scientific American , under the heading ‘Invisible Beams Guide Birdmen in Flights Between European Cities’, noted admiringly how pilots in Europe could fix their locations instantly via radio beacons. Lost American pilots, by contrast, had to search for a town and hope that someone had written its name on the roof of a building. In theabsence of that – and it was generally absent – pilots had to swoop low to try to read the signs on the local railway station, often a risky manoeuvre. For weather reports, they mostly called ahead to railway agents along the route and asked them to put their head out of the door and tell them what they saw.
    Such deficiencies marked almost every area of American civil aviation. Until 1924, Detroit, the fourth largest city in the country, didn’t have an airfield at all. In 1927, San Francisco and Baltimore still didn’t. Lambert Field in St Louis, one of the most important in the country because of its position at the heart of the continent, existed only because Major Albert B. Lambert, a flying enthusiast, was willing to support it out of his own pocket. Metropolitan New York had four airfields – three on Long Island and one on Staten Island – but all were privately owned or run by the military, and offered only the most basic facilities. None of them even had a control tower. No American airfield did.
    Not until 1925 did the country begin at last to address even peripherally its aeronautical shortcomings. The person chiefly responsible for rectifying these deficiencies was Dwight Morrow, a New York banker who knew nothing whatever about flying but was put in charge of the President’s Aircraft Board – a panel charged with investigating the safety and efficiency of American aviation – because he was a friend of President Coolidge. By a rather extraordinary coincidence Morrow would in 1929 become Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law. Had Morrow been told that before the decade was out his shy, intellectual daughter at Smith College in Massachusetts would be marrying an airmail pilot and former stunt flyer we may assume he would have been flabbergasted. Had he been further informed that this pilot would also by then be the world’s most celebrated individual his astonishment would presumably have been immeasurable. In any case, thanks to Morrow’s efforts, the Air Commerce Act was signed into law by President Coolidge on 20 May 1926 – coincidentally one year to the day before Lindbergh’s flight. The act brought in some minimal trainingrequirements for pilots and inspection of planes used in interstate commerce, and required the Commerce Department to keep track of fatalities. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
     
    This was the casual and high-risk world in which Charles Lindbergh learned to fly. His first flight – indeed, his first experience of an aeroplane at close range – was at a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 9 April 1922, two months after his twentieth birthday. He was instantly smitten. Almost at once he embarked on a brief but perilous career as a stunt performer. Within a week he was wing-walking and within a month he was – without any prior training – parachuting from giddy heights to the delight of watching crowds. In the course of these duties he also learned, in an entirely informal way, to fly. He proved to be unusually good at it. Like most young men, Lindbergh was capable of the most riveting foolishness. Part of the job of barnstormers was to impress the locals with their flying