One Summer: America, 1927

wasn’t enough. Halfway through his sophomore year he flunked out and abruptly announced his intention to become an aviator. From his parents’ perspective, this was a mortifying ambition. Flying was poorly paid, wildly unsafe and unreliable as a career – and nowhere were those three unhappy qualities more evident than in the United States.
     
    In no important area of technology has America ever fallen further behind the rest of the world than it did with aviation in the 1920s. As early as 1919, Europe had its first airline in KLM and others quickly followed. Before the year was out, daily flights were introduced between London and Paris, and soon more than a thousand people a week were flying that route alone. By the mid-1920s it was possible to fly almost anywhere in Europe – from Berlin to Leipzig, from Amsterdam to Brussels, from Paris to distant Constantinople (by way of Prague and Bucharest). By 1927, France had nine airlines operating, British airlines were flying almost a million miles a year, and Germany was safely delivering 151,000 passengers totheir destinations. In America, as the spring of 1927 dawned, the number of scheduled passenger air services was … none.
    Aviation in America was almost wholly unregulated. The country had no system of licensing and no requirements for training. Anyone could buy a plane, in any condition, and legally take up paying passengers. The United States was so slack about flying that it didn’t even keep track of the number of aeroplane crashes and fatalities. The most authoritative source, the Aircraft Year Book , compiled its figures from newspaper clippings. The anonymous authors of that annual tome were in no doubt that the absence of regulation was holding back progress and causing needless deaths. They wrote: ‘Since the Armistice, when airplanes were first made generally available and came into hands skilled and unskilled, responsible and irresponsible, it may be conservatively estimated that more than 300 persons have been killed and 500 injured – many of them fatally – in flying accidents which could have been prevented had there been in existence and enforced a statute regulating the operation of commercial aircraft.’
    Without airlines to employ them, American aviators had to turn a hand to whatever work they could find – dusting crops, giving rides at county fairs, thrilling spectators with stunts and acrobatics, dragging advertising banners across the skies, taking aerial 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