AERONAUTICS: The Big Trails

The white man’s great lines of migration across the continent to the western ocean were three: 1) the Oregon trail to the Northwest; 2) the pioneer route west to the Missouri River and over the Rockies to Great Salt Lake; 3) from Leavenworth southwest by the Santa Fe trail to the southern Sierra. Where the oxcart went, Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown has decreed, there shall the commercial airplane first go—until men learn to travel through the air as safely and economically as they can move on earth. Result: migratory lines Nos. 2 & 3, plus a third “natural channel” across the flat south and lower southwest, have formed the bases for charted airways.

Not yet is through passenger travel by air completely established over all three, but last week the middle (Santa Fe) line was opened. T. A. T.-Maddux and Western Air Express, operating together as Transcontinental & Western Air Inc. which they formed to fulfill their new joint U. S. main contract (TIME, Oct. 13 ), began 36-hr, service between Newark and Los Angeles.

Middle Line. The first westbound passengers over this middle line did not, of course, pay for their rides.* Riding on the first plane, followed by two planes with mail, were four distinguished deadheads: Postmaster General Brown; Harris M. Hanshue, president of the line; Earl Wadsworth, superintendent of airmail; Amelia Earhart. Cargo was eight sacks of mail. Well before noon the vanguard plane was past Camden (Philadelphia’s airport of entry) and into the Alleghenies via Harrisburg. Here the pilots watched out for “dirty stuff,” the fog, snow & sleet that had harassed Chairman of the Technical Committee Charles Augustus Lindbergh on his inspection tour two days prior.

After leaving Pittsburgh’s belching chimneys, the going is less rough over the checkered carpet of Ohio farmlands to Port Columbus, big T. A. T. division point. The smiling copilot, uniformed like a naval officer save that his shirt is blue, saunters through the cabin to serve box luncheons, or to invite passengers to step to the door of the pilot’s compartment and hear weather reports through a radio headset. The plane passes near National Cash Register’s factory at Dayton, on to Indianapolis’ new municipal airport for another ten-minute stop. Beyond St. Louis no passenger will fail to notice the widening checkerboard of section line’s. Thinning population is plainly charted by farm boundaries flung to the horizon.

Overtaken by dusk, passengers deplane at Kansas City’s municipal airport on the north bank of the Missouri, enter busses for hotels in town. Next morning they are likely to resume their sleep during the monotonous passage across the oil fields and prairies of Kansas and Oklahoma to Amarillo, Tex. But there will be no catnaps that afternoon. Slowly the plane begins its climb over foothills and broken mesa interspersed by patches of desert, signposts to the Rockies. Over the first range, the Continental Divide, near Winslow. Then into a glory of reds, greens and browns if the atmosphere is clear and the afternoon sun bright, across the fearful maw of Red Rock Canyon. To the north is the Painted Desert and farther on, famed Meteor Crater, 600 ft. deep; the tiny boxes at the bottom are cabins of an expedition which has located, is digging up the meteorite. Farther on mesa dwellers, descendants of the original Hopi, gaze up from their doorways in the face of the earth at the winged monster on high. Beyond Kingman the plane crosses the Colorado River into California from where, if the day be clear, the passenger can see the lowest and highest points in the U. S.; Death Valley ( — 276 ft.) and Mt. Whitney (14,502 ft.). The desolate Mojave Desert is a runway to the last hurdle, the San Bernardino range, and another study in contrast as the plane “coasts” down the heavily wooded slope, orange groves reaching to the foothills, and again a close-lined population checkerboard. In the distance—it is now dusk —are the lights of Los Angeles and the welcoming beam of Alhambra Airport.

Southern Line. Fortnight ago the route from Atlanta to Los Angeles was opened by Southern Air Fast Express, operating company formed by American Airways (of Aviation Corp.), joint bidder with Southwest Air Fast Express for the mail contract (TIME, Oct. 6). President Coburn and Vice Chairman Grosvenor of Avco made the inaugural trip. Passengers leave either terminus at early morning, may stop overnight at Fort Worth or Dallas (about 16 hr.) and reach the opposite end next evening. (Fare, $147.15). Service will be completed between New York and Atlanta about Dec. 1 when Eastern Air Transport, mail operators, begin carrying passengers.

Northern Line. Until National Air Transport establishes through passenger service between New York and Chicago, tentatively planned for next May, travel via this, the nation’s oldest transcontinental airmail route, will remain irregular. Passengers may fly from New York to Pittsburgh via Pittsburgh Airways, transfer to a Pennsylvania Air Lines plane to Cleveland, thence by N. A. T. to Chicago, arriving early evening. (Schedule 7 hr.; total fare $75.) If the mail load is light, passengers may take the Boeing night mail plane, arriving in San Francisco late the next afternoon. (Schedule 20 hr.; fare $200.) Otherwise travelers may spend the night in Chicago, take the morning plane, a Boeing Transport with an attractive, green-uniformed trained nurse in attendance. Most thrilling part of that flight lies west of Omaha where the plane picks up the oldtime Overland Trail across the grain belt to North Platte, chasing the setting sun to the red roofs of Fort Russell which mark Cheyenne. As dusk falls the plane is climbing toward the highest beacon on this route, at Sherman Hill, about ten miles northwest of Laramie, Wyo. (8,800 ft.). From the fueling stop at Rock Springs the plane follows blinker and beacon over the forbidding Wasatch range until suddenly a cluster of jewels—Salt Lake City—winks up from the base of the western slope. Great Salt Lake, unrelieved by the light of a single ship, lies a great dark blot in the desert. Thence across miles of “natural landing field,” beacons visible as far as the eye can reach ahead.

If the plane is on time, the remainder of the flight will be in darkness until San Francisco Bay is reached at dawn. But if sufficiently late, the passenger may count himself lucky. For then, in the last climb over the Sierra and Lake Tahoe, from Reno into California, behind his back will burst the rising sun.

*But the first six eastbound passengers, who flew from Los Angeles, paid fares ($200 each, overnight expenses not included).