The Air Mail Fiasco

CXXVII

Having stripped the domestic airlines of their Contract Air Mail (CAM) routes, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned to the United States Army to assume the mantle it had shed years before, as the nation’s air mail carrying service. 

It was a temporary task. The government had decided to void the old CAM contracts and issue new ones based not upon mileage flown but upon the absolute volume of mail carried. The initial idea was to both punish the airlines by cutting their air mail revenues and to open the door to new competitors. The new scheme had a third consequence, unforeseen but ultimately happy: Since the airlines were paid by volume, the new arrangement spurred the development and acquisition of new and larger aircraft. The necessity of designing and building them in the midst of the Great Depression put engineers and factory employees back to work. 

But Roosevelt’s plan soon had a popular, headline-making name: The Air Mail Fiasco. 

It was a fiasco, and a tragic one. In deciding to null and void the existing CAM contracts, FDR asked his Secretary of War, George Dern, if the U.S. Army Air Corps was up to the task of carrying the mails. Dern, who was a Cabinet Officer, not a military man and never a flier, assured the President on the spot that the Army was more than capable of handling the job.  He never checked with the Army. When presented with the already-decided-upon plan on the afternoon of February 9, 1934, Major General Benjamin Foulois, Chief of the USAAC, confirmed Dern’s opinion, again without any idea of the actual capabilities of his service. Foulois was a pilot. He had flown the first Wright Flyers purchased by the Army, and had accomplished many aviation “firsts” in his career, but time flying a desk had clouded his judgement. He called the new Service AACMO, “Army Air Corps Mail Operations.”

In reality, the Army Air Corps was barely capable of getting off the ground in 1934. Post-World War I pacifism had cut deeply into the vitals of America’s military, and nowhere worse than the Air Corps, which many Congressmen and military brass hats still considered “newfangled.” The Army spent nothing on Research and Development of new planes, and hadn’t for years. The Army farmed out the development of new navigational equipment and structural designs to private airlines like Pan Am. As a result, the airlines had the most advanced equipment built to military standards, but the military did not. Thus, the USAAC could not fly at night or in bad weather.  Such was the condition of U.S. air defense during the Great Depression.

The First World War-vintage Boeing P-12 was pressed into service as an AACMO plane. It could carry only 50 pounds of mail before becoming tail heavy and aeronautically unstable

 

It was an era when George Patton had to pay out of his own pocket for the gas to run his tanks, a time when promotions from Corporal to Sergeant could take twelve years, a time when men left the Service and joined the Reserve because the pay was better. Air Corps fliers usually just circled their own airbases to get requisite flying time, and most aircraft were essentially display pieces sitting on the tarmac for lack of aviation fuel. 

The Army planes available for air mail service were fossils. Some of them were the original air mail planes used experimentally by the Army in 1918. To navigate, Army pilots had to fly by the seat of their pants, dropping down to the deck to follow railroad tracks to the next town to fix a position. It was as if time had stopped for the Air Corps. 

Most of AACMO’s fatalities occurred to pilots flying the Douglas O-38

 

Perhaps none of these shortcomings would have been so glaringly evident if the President’s Executive Order had been handed down in Spring and the Air Corps had flown the mail until Fall. But the Air Corps went back into the air mail business in February, and it was immediately clear that USAAC had insufficient, ineffective, inferior and antiquated equipment, and grossly inexperienced pilots. The inception of AACMO service coincided with a week of devastating blizzards that blanketed the whole country, from the Georgia line to Maine and from the Eastern Seaboard to the Sierra Nevadas.   

Keystone B-6 bombers were used to carry air mail. Here, one attempts a liftoff in blizzard conditions

AACMO was an utter operational disaster. The first day’s deliveries, on February 19^th, were cancelled due to the nationwide bad weather. When the planes finally managed to get off the ground, many suffered equipment glitches --- instrumentation failures, fuel leaks, brake failures. Pilots often couldn’t get off the ground with the weight of the mail aboard. Within days, the flight over the Appalachian Mountains was dubbed “Hell’s Stretch” by the struggling pilots. What made it all seem worse was the fact that private planes had been flying the mail for years without such major disruptions.   

Within 48 hours after AACMO began flight operations, two pilots were dead in crashes, and the death toll kept mounting. By March 9, 13 men had been killed, either in flying accidents or ground accidents, and there had been an appalling sixty-six major non-fatal accidents as well.  AACMO operations were suspended the next day and not reinstituted until March 19^th. New rules applied. The oldest planes in the air fleet were retired, and AACMO pilots were ordered to fly only in clear weather during daylight hours. AACMO routes, already only operating at 60% of previous civilian capacity, were drawn down even further. Never mind the Post Office Creed, Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, the mail was not getting through.

Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, Chief of USAAC, belatedly discovered that his air force couldn’t carry packages, much less bombs. Though none of it was his fault, he was forced to retire in the wake of the Air Mail Fiasco

William P. MacCracken Jr. was another victim of the Air Mail Fiasco. The first U.S. pilot to get a Federal license, MacCracken was Commissioner of Federal Aviation when the Black Committee tarred his reputation. Like Foulois, he was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing

In the meantime, the government’s lawyers were furiously drafting new CAM agreements for the airlines. One after another, starting on May 8^th, the routes were returned to the airlines. AACMO went out of whatever business it had on June 1, 1934. As far as the American public was concerned, the Air Mail Fiasco was over. 

Urged by Senator Hugo Black, Congress passed new airline regulations during the Air Mail Fiasco. These included the busting of the ‘airline trusts’ that allowed ownership of airlines, airports, aircraft factories, and aircraft suppliers by a single parent company. The CAM routes were redistributed (most of the previous CAM holders received new routes despite their much-trumpeted “fraud and collusion”), and the rate measure went from mileage to volume.  

USAAC had a badly-blackened eye. Speaker of the House Henry Rainey echoed the voice of all of Congress, much of the military, and most citizens when he said, “If we are unfortunate enough to be drawn into another war, the Air Corps wouldn’t amount to much. If it is not equal to carrying the mail, I would like to know what it would do in carrying bombs." 

Several concurrent investigations were conducted by the Executive, the Legislature, and the Military. Each came to the same general conclusions: USAAC needed a budget separate from the ground Army and more independent freedom of action,  and it absolutely needed a new fleet of planes with modern instrumentation and navigational equipment. Ground navigation was also cited for improvement: Radio beacons were recommended and RDF towers were suggested. Congress appropriated USAAC an expansive budget which led to the development of modern planes like the B-17 bomber and the P-40 Warhawk and many others. 

As an aside, all U.S. military aircraft that saw action in World War II were designed and ordered up in the aftermath of the Air Mail Fiasco. 

The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was first flown in 1938. Fast and agile but underpowered, the plane was inferior in design to either the German Messerschmitt Bf-109, the Focke-Wulf FW-190 or to the Japanese Mitsubishi 00 (“Zero”).  In the hands of a skilled pilot though, the P-40 could hold its own in combat while inflicting vital damage on the enemy.  Until late 1942, when U.S. warplane production had reached a critical mass level, the P-40 was perforce the best aircraft available to too many Allied units. The American Volunteer Group (AVG) used the P-40 (with distinctive sharktooth livery) in China both before and after the U.S. entered the war. The “Flying Tigers” made the plane famous  

And just as the Black Committee had claimed a sacrificial victim in William MacCracken, Commissioner of Federal Aviation, the Air Mail Fiasco also claimed General Foulois. Although the General was exonerated upon appeal (as MacCracken had been), he left USAAC in 1935.