The Hare-Brained, Deadly Stunt that Helped Launch America as an Air Power
In 1919, with the future of American aviation taking a nosedive, the iconoclastic man who would later be known as the father of the Air Force proposed a solution: a brutal cross-country air race.
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U.S. Army biplanes circled overhead as the Cunard liner
Aquitania steamed into New York Harbor on Feb. 28, 1919. It was a fitting welcome for Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell, a hero of the Great War returning to the United States after nearly two years overseas.
As the commander of American air operations on the Western Front, Mitchell arguably had done more to demonstrate the military potential of the airplane than any man alive, for which he would one day be recognized as the father of the U.S. Air Force. But Mitchell’s triumph was clouded by uncertainty. With the signing of the Armistice less than four months earlier, the government had canceled virtually all of its orders for new airplanes, forcing most manufacturers out of business or nearly so.
The brash, iconoclastic air power advocate who years later would predict the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor knew that a thriving domestic aircraft industry was critical to national defense. But who would buy its products in peacetime?
There were no commercial airlines to speak of, and air mail was still in its infancy. For the most part, the only potential customers were wealthy sportsmen or the itinerant stunt flyers known as barnstormers (though most of them flew military-surplus Curtiss trainers purchased for as little as $300 each). Mitchell knew that if the United States were to dominate this essential new field — still an open question in 1919 — the government would have to help create a market where none existed. The only question was how.
His answer was a transcontinental airplane race — an unprecedented, headline-grabbing spectacle in which more than 60 military pilots would compete to be the fastest man to fly round trip from coast to coast, a distance of 5,400 miles. Mitchell hoped that a successful outcome would boost public and congressional support for his goals, which included more federal spending on aviation and an independent air force co-equal with the Army and Navy.
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The transcontinental race, and Mitchell’s role in it, were soon forgotten.
But they shouldn’t have been. Despite its failure to advance Mitchell’s short-term political objectives, “the world’s greatest air race,” as he called it, is worthy of more than a footnote. In fact, it arguably set the stage for the modern air travel system that we all take for granted today.
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It was a different story on the other side of the Atlantic. Aeronautical laboratories backed by governments and wealthy industrialists sprang up in Britain, France and Germany, absorbing some of their best scientists and engineers in the years before the war. From 1908 to 1913, France invested $22 million in aviation, compared with just $435,000 in the United States. Germany led the pack with $28 million.
The pace of aircraft development in Europe accelerated sharply with the outbreak of war in August 1914. At first the warring powers used airplanes for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The planes lacked armaments, and aviators from opposing sides often greeted one another with a gentlemanly wave. That soon changed, as commanders on both sides saw the wisdom of dominating the skies above the battlefield. Aviators began plinking at each other with sidearms and rifles, soon replaced by swivel-mounted machine guns. Smaller single-seat scout, or pursuit, aircraft were deployed to attack enemy planes and observation balloons. Planes became faster, more maneuverable and more lethal, especially with the advent of synchronizing gears that allowed machine guns to be fired through spinning propellers without shooting them off. Aviators chased one another at heights of up to 20,000 feet, groggy from lack of oxygen and numb with cold, in dizzying mortal contests that often ended in agony, as their wood-and-fabric planes burned easily, and they flew without parachutes. The era of the dogfight had arrived.
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Mitchell’s alarm at the state of American aviation was shared by a new federal entity, the Aircraft Production Board, as well as by some in Congress. The turning point came in late May 1917, when the French government cabled an urgent appeal for airplanes and engines. After the board approved the request, military leaders quickly drew up plans for the manufacture of 20,474 new airplanes in just 12 months. Congress supported the program with the largest single-purpose appropriation — $640 million — in U.S. history to that point.
Within days of the French appeal, the production board commissioned two of the country’s leading automotive engineers, Elbert J. Hall and Jesse Vincent, to design a new aircraft engine that could be used across a range of airframes. The men sequestered themselves in a suite at the Willard Hotel in downtown Washington and roughed out the basic design in less than a week. Their design drew heavily on concepts developed by French, British and German manufacturers. Still, the Liberty engine was revolutionary, widely considered the most important American aeronautical advance of the war. Unlike most aircraft engines, which were hand-built like fine Swiss watches, the twelve-cylinder, 400 horsepower Liberty was expressly designed for mass production, with interchangeable parts that would make it easy to repair. Nearly 5,000 would be manufactured by Packard and other automobile companies before the War Department terminated production in March 1919.
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The Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918 had a devastating effect on American aircraft manufacturers. Within a few months, some had closed their doors while others struggled to survive. In Seattle, the Boeing Airplane Co. began making furniture and speedboats. Glenn L. Curtiss and a few other aircraft designers rolled out prototypes for commercial passenger planes, in the optimistic belief that scheduled airline service soon would follow. It did, but not in the United States. By the end of 1919, several commercial airlines were operating in Europe, including one that flew passengers between London and Paris in converted Farman F-60 bombers (another was KLM, the Dutch carrier, which is still flying today). In the months after the war, the threat of foreign domination was a recurring theme in aviation publications such as
Flying and
Air Service Journal, which in January 1919 ran a front-page story under the headline, “U.S. Lags Far Behind Europe in Preparations for Air Transport.”
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Mitchell and his Air Service colleagues searched desperately for ways to prove the airplane’s value in peacetime. In the spring, Army pilots began patrolling for forest fires in California, an effort soon expanded to Oregon. Aerial cameras and photography techniques developed for battlefield reconnaissance were promoted for commercial uses, such as mapping cities and advertising real estate. And in June, military pilots began flying border patrols in Texas after several incursions linked to Pancho Villa, who was still at large more than three years after Pershing’s ill-fated invasion of northern Mexico.
But Mitchell, a natural showman, wanted to make a bigger splash. And in September 1919, he announced his plan for doing just that: A transcontinental airplane race. The “Endurance and Reliability Test” was sold to higher-ups as a “field exercise” and restricted to military pilots, who would compete on a voluntary basis and only if their commanders thought they were up to the challenge. Cash prizes were banned. But nobody was fooled by its veneer of military purpose. The transcontinental race was a publicity stunt. Mitchell hoped that a successful outcome would rally the public behind his goals in Washington and also at the local level, where the Air Service was pushing towns and cities to build airfields — or “aerodromes” — as an essential first step toward commercial air service. It was industrial policy on the cheap.
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The “air derby,” as it was sometimes called in the press, was a bold and risky undertaking. More than 60 airplanes divided into two groups — one on Long Island, the other in San Francisco — would take off for the opposite coast some 2,700 miles distant, crossing in the middle and competing for the fastest flying and elapsed times.
Pilots in the contest, many of them war veterans, had never attempted a journey of such improbable length, and for good reason. Like all aircraft of the day, the surplus DH-4s and single-seat fighters they would fly were almost comically ill-suited for long-distance travel — or arguably for any travel at all. Open cockpits offered scant protection against wind and cold. Engines were deafeningly loud and occasionally caught fire in flight. Primitive flight instruments were of marginal value to pilots trying to keep their bearings in clouds and fog. But that was only part of the challenge. The route across the country was almost entirely lacking in permanent airfields — or any form of aviation infrastructure. There was no radar, air traffic control system or radio network. Weather forecasts were rudimentary and often wrong.
In the absence of electronic beacons or formal aeronautical charts, pilots would follow railroad tracks or compass headings that wandered drunkenly with every turn. Every hour or two — they hoped — they would land at one of 20 refueling stops between the coasts. Most of these “control stops” were makeshift grass or dirt airfields that had been hastily demarcated and stocked with fuel, spare parts and other supplies, sometimes just hours before the start of the race.
Despite these slapdash preparations, Mitchell and his colleagues in the Air Service decided at the last minute to double the length of the race — instead of making a one-way flight between the coasts, contestants would attempt a round-trip journey of 5,400 miles. It was as if, in the absence of anything resembling a national air transportation system, Mitchell had decided simply to will one into being. He hoped that by showing how such a system would work, even in draft form, the contest would stimulate public and private investment in aviation, starting with the preparation of the rudimentary airfields that would be used in the race itself. (Several, including Britton Field in Rochester, N.Y., evolved into modern municipal airports that are still in use today).
Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of “the greatest airplane race ever flown,” as Mitchell had described it. At some airfields along the route, crowds grew so large that police were called in to prevent them from interfering with takeoffs and landings. The press made celebrities of pilots such as Lt. Belvin Maynard, an ordained Baptist minister from North Carolina whose German police dog, Trixie, shared the rear cockpit of his DH-4 with a mechanic. The
New York Times ran 30 stories on the contest, eight of them on the front page.
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In telling the story of commercial aviation in the United States, historians of the field generally have treated the transcontinental race as a curiosity, if they have mentioned it at all. Mitchell would see that as an injustice. As he liked to point out, pilots in the contest had blazed the trail for the first formal air route across the country. Just 11 months later, in September 1920, the U.S. Post Office inaugurated its coast-to-coast airmail service along essentially the same path. In the mid-1920s, the Post Office transferred its airmail operations to private companies, some of which evolved over the decades into major airlines (including American Airlines). It was on that basis that Henry H. “Hap” Arnold — a Mitchell contemporary who helped organize the race and later commanded Army air forces in World War II — described the contest as “the foundation of commercial aviation in the United States.”
Arnold’s claim contains a kernel of truth. There’s little question that the air race helped seed the ground for transcontinental airmail, hastening the development of at least some of the airfields along the route that would be used by the mail planes. On the other hand, much of the route simply followed the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, which eased the distribution of fuel and supplies and served as a navigation aid that pilots called the “iron compass.” The late William M. Leary, an aviation historian at the University of Georgia, admired the military flyers for their gumption and tenacity, but he took a skeptical view of what they actually had achieved. “Associating the Army flyers with such a milestone in the history of aeronautics might sanctify to some degree the lives lost during the race, but, unfortunately, a careful study of the evidence does not support this conclusion,” he wrote. “The presence of the railroad was the key factor, not the efforts of the Air Service.”
But that is only part of the story. Though its trailblazing nature can be debated, the contest did have another, arguably more important effect: It changed the way that Americans thought about aviation. With its dozens of pilots and planes, complex logistics, communications networks, aviation-specific weather forecasts and establishment of a formal flying route, however crude, the contest was a blueprint for the future — it showed Americans what an air transportation system would actually
look like.
No one who followed the race could seriously doubt that the airplane would soon join the passenger train, the steamship and the automobile as a practical feature of everyday life. As the
Rockford Morning Star put it in an editorial on Oct. 23, 1919, a few days after Belvin Maynard and several others completed their round-trip crossing, “The successful journey of the racers means that airplane journeying is right here at our doors. It isn’t going to be very long before people … get into the habit of buying a ticket and taking a seat with a suitcase just as calmly as ever they do now on the local for the next town.” The Air Service officer assigned to the refueling stop at Binghamton, N.Y., reported that public libraries in Binghamton and two nearby towns had been stripped of aeronautical books, many checked out by schoolchildren. The phenomenon surely was repeated elsewhere, as Americans contemplated a future that was taking shape before their eyes.
Mitchell’s “greatest air race,” in other words, was more than just a spectacle. It was the first iteration of a new age.
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In 1919, with the future of American aviation taking a nosedive, the iconoclastic man who would later be known as the father of the Air Force proposed a solution: a brutal cross-country air race.
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