Louis and Chicago a year before his famous crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Two months later, Robertson Aircraft Corporation’s chief pilot, Charles Lindbergh, launched airmail service between St. The short-lived, but influential Ford Air Transport, owned by Henry Ford and his son Edsel, began the first commercial airmail service on February 15, 1926, on routes from Detroit to Cleveland and Chicago-flying Ford’s “Tin Goose,” the first American metal-clad, multi-engine plane envisioned primarily for passenger use. The airmail contracts attracted some of the country’s most prominent business titans and aviators. Private Airlines Take Over AirmailĪfter proving airmail’s financial viability-and building a transcontinental airway system with landing strips, beacons and even enormous concrete arrows pointing pilots in the correct direction-the Post Office in 1925 started taking bids from commercial aviation companies to provide airmail services.
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WATCH: Full Episodes of The Titans That Built America online now. Postal Service, nearly three-dozen airmail pilots died in crashes between 19. “Flying at 30 to 50 feet with never over 100 feet forward visibility in the average fog-made a great many angels of good pilots,” wrote aviator Jack Knight. Without radio communications or reliable instruments, pioneering airmail pilots relied on landmarks and instincts to guide their fragile biplanes from city to city, sometimes as sleet lashed their faces and rain blurred their vision in open cockpits. Routes soon spread beyond the Northeast, stretching from coast to coast by 1924. In August 1918, the Post Office took over airmail service with civilian pilots and six specially built planes.
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