He immediately flew off in the wrong direction and then crashed in a Delaware farm field, rather embarrassing everyone. It was the first regularly scheduled flight of Praeger’s first official route, and President Woodrow Wilson himself was among the event’s assembled dignitaries.īoyle wasn’t much of a flier. The fledgling Air Mail Service had gotten off to a notably unimpressive start to begin with, in May 1918, when an Army lieutenant named Boyle left Washington’s Polo Grounds for Belmont Park in Long Island three Now he had ordered them to fly overnights as well,Ī dramatic do-or-die effort to win financing from an austere new Congress unenthusiastic about appropriating federal dollars for such a foolish idea as loading mail into an airplane rather than a perfectly good This was less than half the time that cross-country air mail had previously required, given that Praeger’s men flew their rickety war-surplus crates only by day. That had left San Francisco just 33 hours and 20 minutes earlier. It was 90 years ago today, and the United States Air Mail had just been saved, as a government mail pilot, Ernest Allison, fluttered onto Hazelhurst Field, in Mineola, N.Y., from Cleveland with six sacks of letters “Destined to revolutionize the mail carrying of the world,” agreed The New York Times. “The most momentous step in civil aviation!” exulted the Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger.
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