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"With the Night Mail"
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if the mail is to be carried from coast to coast in twenty-four hours, a gap of a thousand miles or so must be flown at night, and, the Air Mail insists, such routine night flying is clearly out of the question without radio. But with radio the project is thought to be entirely practicable. It has no terror for most of the postal pilots. There are some who have said to the writer that they would rather fly at night if they have the guidance of radio than in the daytime when, on some of the runs, fog often lies in wait for them and forces them to fly very low, dodging all manner of obstacles. " But," said one," give me radio direction-finding apparatus that really works and I'd a lot rather fly at night, 'way up, than take a chance in the daytime in thick weather with the best compasses, turn indicators, distance recorders and drift indicators I've ever seen in a plane. Our compasses
spin, and most of these other instruments are as good as a pile of junk when you get twisting around in a tight corner at a hundred miles an hour."
So the Radio Division of the Air Mail, after years of experimentation with radio in cooperation with other Federal agencies, and years of yearning for sufficient funds, is making ready to use radio to guide its pilots, and is having a survey made of the transcontinental route. The man at the head of the Post Office Radio Division is, you may take it, qualified to judge of the difficulties. For long before the war he was an ardent amateur, then a teacher of physics and radio, then a war pilot — one of the few trained at Ellington Field for night flying — and, when the war was over, the first man successfully to fly the mail both ways between New York and Washington, over the initial Air Mail run.
THE AIR MAIL RADIO STATION IN WASHINGTON
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