Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

"With the Night Mail" By DONALD WILHELM BECAUSE of its great distances, favorable topography, willingness to try out new devices, and characteristic appetite for speed in travel and communication, America is the natural habitat of both radio man and flyer. The plane and the electromagnetic wave — these two annihilators of time and space — came into being almost simultaneously. Their secrets Man discovered and applied within the span of one generation. Now the Twin Sciences, both coming of age, must grow together, for even if radio can do without the plane, the plane cannot do without radio. Soon, too, federal regulation of commercial aeronautics, which is quite as necessary to the development of aviation in America as was federal regulation of radio, is to be lodged under Secretary Hooverether cop extraordinary— in the Department of Commerce. Order in the air, settlement of questions of liability in case of accident, practicable insurance rates and extremely large capital for investment in commercial aviation await this event. Pending it, moreover, and all propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, in aviation as in radio, America is leading the way. Thus — for one thing — our Air Mail Service is without question the largest and most successful achievement in regular, commercial flying in the world to-day. During the next six months or so, the Air Mail will attempt something extremely significant in the history of the Twin Sciences. It will attempt regular night flying, by using radio direction finders, radio field localizers and the radiophone to guide the mail pilots all the way Some years ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a fanciful story called "With the Night Mail " describing an imaginary air mail service in the year 2000 A. D. between London and Quebec. We still have seventy-eight years in which to realize his prophecies, but can we doubt, when we consider the advances made in only eighteen years, that in less than that time there actually will be an airplane mail service from Europe to America ? Not equipped with the huge and clumsy dirigibles of Kipling's fertile imagination, perhaps, but with trim, swift planes of an improved type, as to which, even in 1922, we can only make guesses. Meantime, our own Government is perfecting an airplane night mail service between the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. Its beginnings, struggles, successes, and hopes for the future are dealt with in this article. — THE EDITORS. from hop-ofT to landing. With these aids, it expects to be able to fly mail across the continent daily, both ways, in somewhere around twenty-four hours. THE TEST TRANSCONTINENTAL FLIGHT /^\NLYoncehas mail been carried from Coast v_y to Coast so fast — about 125 times as fast as the Forty-niners crept across the endless plains, and five times as fast as the fastest express train. On February 22, 1921, on a test transcontinental flight without the aid of radio, and at the cost of one pilot's life, the mail plane covered the long trip of 2,650 air miles -(you add a third usually in calculating railway distance), in twenty-five hours. Then Pilot Nutter hopped from the San Francisco field before dawn and, mostly in the dark, and partly at a height of 18,000 feet, crossed the Sierras and ran on to Reno, 187 miles, in two hours. Pilot Eaton ran the mail on to Elko, Nevada, and thence to Salt Lake City, 437 miles. Murray reached Cheyenne, 381 miles, and there Yager carried the mail on into the night, reaching North Platte at 7:48, Middle Time, 1 10 miles. Then it was Jack Knight who flew the 248 miles to Omaha, and, because no other plane or pilot was available, in the middle of the night, with nothing to guide him except the instincts of a homing pigeon and a few farmers' bonfires at long intervals, he continued till dawn and landed safely on Checkerboard Field, near Chicago, 424 miles away. From there, other pilots flashed in relay on to New York. These distances and details are important; for, until planes fly at twice their present speed,