![]() ![]() The initial mail routes stretched between New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, expanding to Cleveland and Chicago within the next year. A pilot tying a map to a fellow pilot’s leg. Mailing a letter this way was expensive, too: the cost of sending a single letter by plane-a cross-country flight took around 29 hours then-started out at a whopping 24 cents, compared to 2 or 3 cents by train, which took about five days. At this time, just 15 years after the Wright brothers’ famously took to the skies, planes were flown for only two reasons: as an accessory to war, and to deliver the mail. Starting in August 1918, the Post Office Department was tasked by the Army with hiring pilots, buying new planes to supplement the Army’s surplus World War I-era aviators, deciding routes, and negotiating with municipalities to build airports. This group of civilians was the first to deliver postage regularly by air, and their job was no easy task. Often equipped only with the maps tied to their legs or crude navigational aids saying simply to “follow the tracks” of a railroad or to “fly a little west of south for nearly 10 miles or about seven minutes,” the earliest American airmail pilots, the self-declared “Suicide Club,” braved life-threatening challenges to carry the mail. ![]() (All Photos: Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.) From left to right: Pilots Jack Knight, Clarence Lange, Lawrence Garrison, “Wild Bill” Hopson, and the administrator of the Omaha airfield, Andrew Dumphy. ![]()
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