8, first Reno airport named after William Blanchfield Oakland Tribune, September 10, 1920, Oakland Boy Pilots First Mail Plane Lucky 71 Hops Off in San Francisco At 6:15 and Is in Reno at 8:20, Cutting 27 Minutes From Schedule Westbound Pioneer Mail Air Flier Passed Over Hump. The boys don’t dread the landing so much, they’ll tell you, but ‘the walk back is sure hell.’” (NSJ, 9/11/22).

Rose and “parked the old bus in a snowdrift. And another pilot, “Monte” Mouton wound up landing on a level spot on the summit of Mt. On one flight, Boggs also landed on Market Street in San Francisco when his motor died. Vance, a veteran pilot on an eastern division transferred to San Francisco, and Stanhope Boggs whose doctor ordered him not to continue to fly over ‘the hump’ (the Sierra Nevada) because of a weak heart. Nevada State Journal, September 11, 1922, Air Mail Service Celebrates Second Year of Service Today Western Division Leads All Others in Efficiency and Service: Reno Pilots Have Had Thrilling Experiences During Term Here includes references to C.K. The Tahoe Weekly Sierra Stories Ponies, Trains & Planes Delivering the U.S. Mail: From Ponies to Planes 2010 (through July 2010) McLaughlin, Mark, April 28, 2010, Weather Window: Flu, war and airmail, Flying the Beam: Navigating the Early US Airmail Airways, 1917-1941, Purdue University Press. The 'stuff' you learn on the way is just amazing!Īir Corps Map of 1935, Reno to San Francisco, showing airway markers If you look closely at the San Francisco Bay Area, you can see that no bridges exist between Oakland and San Francisco, nor San Francisco and Marin, and in fact what we today refer to as 'Yerba Buena Island' was then referred to as Goat Island. Map # 89, from 1927, shows northern California and the respective airway markers all the way to San Francisco. Aeronautical strip maps of the United States.

(scrollable)Īirway Beacon List, Western U.S.United States Army Air Corps Of Engineers, and U.S. A click on the PID number links to a page with Lat.

If you’re interested in finding old airway beacons in your area, have a look at these location lists for the Eastern and Western halves of the U.S. Here’s a post from Expedition Portal member PHTaco, who’s gone out and had a look. Today you can still find these remnants of aviation history dotting the landscape, and they make for interesting, historical, overlanding destinations. And it worked.įrom very first transcontinental airmail route in 1924 until the early 1930s, when early forms of radio navigation made them obsolete, many airway-beacon routes were developed. Pilots followed these beacons coast to coast, one after the other, in ten-mile intervals. The towers, in turn, were topped with rotating beacons and a set of course lights which flashed an unique code identifying each beacon. These airmail beacons, as they were called, consisted of the aforementioned arrows, 70-feet long, painted yellow, and lit from above by 50-foot towers. The answer turned out to be a simple one: giant concrete arrows embedded in the landscape. And this in an age before radio beacons, or even reliable aeronautical charts. Postal Service wanted to do just that: guide planes, day or night, along a 1900-mile route from New York to San Francisco, in service of the mail. But just because pilots could keep airplanes from falling out of the sky or crashing into barns didn’t mean they could get one across the country.Īnd the U.S. Via West County Explorers Club: By the 1920s airplanes were staying aloft consistently enough to make airmail a possibility.

Airmail beacon map