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LXXXVI

By the time Pan American made its first flights in 1927, the brief, glorious age of the barnstormers was coming to its end. A decade after America’s entry into the Great War, the pilots who’d survived, like Juan Trippe himself, were hovering around the age of thirty. They were still young men (even as age was reckoned in the 1920s) but they were old pilots. Most of them had seen friends and colleagues die by capricious chance or by terrible intent, and they had become by default the Grand Old Men of their profession. Prewar pilots like Orville Wright and Glenn Curtiss, the few score that they were, were Olympian, even to the sons of the war in the sky. 

 

Charles Lindbergh defying death

There were still some lone wolves who flew into one-horse towns offering fifteen minute airplane rides for a dollar, but airplanes had become, if not yet common, familiar. It was a rare little village whose occupants would pour out into the streets anymore just to watch a plane fly overhead. 

By 1927, most barnstormers were operating in Flying Circuses made up of multiple planes and pilots. They flew together for camaraderie and because even if a single pilot had a bad week, the other pilots in the Circus wouldn’t let him starve. They flew together because the simple loops, barrel rolls and stalls that had thrilled audiences in 1921 no longer did so. Barnstorming required organized performances. Even wing-walking, in all its variations, had grown old. The fact is that some in the crowd watched from the ground praying for crashes to add excitement to their dull lives.  They were enthused when Charles Lindbergh had done the impossible by standing on the top wing of a Jenny while the pilot looped. Lindbergh had been securely harnessed, but even the best harnesses break under stress. Not long after surviving a run with this more than risky stunt, Lindbergh had quit barnstorming and begun hauling the mail. A lot of barnstormers did.  

   

Flying mail over predetermined routes was usually boring, but it was flying, and the earliest airmail planes were U.S. Government property, and they were presumptively well-maintained, and the hours were more-or-less predictable, and there was a paycheck every week which, for barnstormers who’d eaten in the worst hash houses that ever existed, was Nirvana. At thirty, a man wasn’t looking for thrills so much anymore, he was looking to go home to the wife and kids. At least sometimes.  

One of Inman's "Clippers." This one was built by the Stinson Aircraft Corporation owned by Dave Ingalls' grandfather. Ingalls was America's first Navy Ace and was a friend and classmate of Juan Trippe at Yale

There still weren’t a lot of airmail routes operating, so it was a plum job. Men who couldn’t pick those plums settled for airline work, which was less steady and certain. The little air companies of the time came and went, and usually operated in the red, and sometimes there wasn’t any pay, but it was a respectable job, a step above the hobo’s life that was barnstorming.

But there were still a few holdouts, and one of these holdouts nearly derailed Pan Am. 

Visiting more remote locations in the deepest South or on the high plains of the Dakotas, the Inman Brothers Flying Circus (apparently no relation to the Great British Inman Steamship Company of the 1880s) was a true Flying Circus, even featuring a flying lion named Kitty. It practiced formation flying and mock dogfights and was a fully self-contained air show. It was a huge operation for its kind, having been cobbled together from several smaller Flying Circuses mixed with one and two-plane operations, at its peak employing perhaps fifty planes and eighty fliers. 

A typical Inman Brothers ad, featuring the Boeing Clipper

Inman Brothers could have formed an airline, but that kind of gussied-up nonsense didn’t suit them, owners, pilots, or their audience, either. Inman Brothers was a last-gasp purely populist operation, as opposed to Pan American with its government contracts, Air Corps Generals, and Wall Street tycoons. Inman Brothers advertised widely and was well-known. What, if anything Juan Trippe knew of the Inmans isn’t clear.

Most of Inman’s planes were small monoplanes and biplanes, but it did have a huge trimotor, a fourteen-seat behemoth that it called the Boeing Clipper. The Boeing Clipper was larger than any of Pan Am’s Fokker Trimotors, about twice the size, and Inman Brothers bought a few more big planes like that. They weren’t airliners; they were just great big airplanes taking people for twenty minute rides in the sky, far from Pan Am’s single air route to Cuba. 

Another, locally printed, Inman Brothers ad, probably after their legal tussle with Pan Am. Notice that the word "Clipper" doesn't appear and that Inman is now "Flying Under Supervision U.S. Government"

Unfortunately for the Inmans, they decided they didn’t much care for this Juan fella in Florida, and sued him over the use of the name “Clipper.” It didn’t go well for Inman, though it could have gone worse. Trippe had trademarked the use of the word “Clipper” in relation to his planes. The Inmans hadn’t. The court held for Pan Am, but the judge allowed Inman “fair use” of the name since it had predated Juan Trippe’s trademark. They got to keep their Clippers. 

All in all, it was an expense for the Inmans that they didn’t need, and it cost them thousands of dollars they couldn't spare. Pan Am’s Wall Street lawyers beat up their lawyers fairly meanly, and they weren’t in any better position after the suit than before.

Inman Brothers kept flying until the Great Depression grounded them permanently. With no disposable income the luxury of watching an air show or going aloft was just too much for most Americans, particularly small-town folks, and Inman Brothers Flying Circus vanished from aviation history, except as a footnote.

Though few in number, modern barnstormers routinely follow the air show circuit. The practice of just dropping in on some locale is discouraged by the FAA which, since 9/11, requires flight plans for even small planes