Air Mail scandal

The Air Mail Scandal is the name that the American press of the 1930s gave to the results of a meeting (the so-called Spoils Conference) of Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown and the executives of the top airlines, effectively dividing among them the air mail routes, and to the disastrous results of the attempt to correct the scandal by using the U.S. Army Air Corps to fly the mail.

Roots of the scandal

Walter Folger Brown

President Herbert Hoover appointed Brown as his postmaster general in 1929. In 1930, Brown, citing inefficient and expensive airmail delivery, requested legislation from Congress granting him authority to change postal policy. The Air Mail Act of 1930, passed on April 29 and known as the Watres Act after one of its chief sponsors, Rep. Laurence H. Watres of Pennsylvania, authorized the postmaster general to enter into longer-term airmail contracts with rates based on space or volume, rather than weight. The Act gave Brown almost dictatorial powers over the air transportation system. Key provisions of the bill were written with the aid of William MacCracken, a lobbyist for the airlines who had been Assistant Secretary of Commerce.

The main provision of the Air Mail Act changed the manner in which payments were calculated. Airmail carriers would be paid for having sufficient cargo capacity on their planes, whether the planes carried mail or flew empty, a disincentive to carry mail since the carrier received a set fee for a plane of a certain size whether or not it carried mail. Airlines could also increase their revenue by using larger planes designed to carry passengers. Awards would be made to the “lowest responsible bidder” that had owned an airline operated on a daily schedule of at least 250 miles (402 kilometers) for at least six months.

A second provision allowed any airmail carrier with an existing contract of at least two years standing to exchange its contract for a “route certificate” giving it the right to haul mail for 10 additional years. The third and most controversial provision gave Brown authority to "extend or consolidate" routes in effect according to his own judgment.

Less than two weeks after its passage, Brown convened a meeting at what became known as the Spoils Conference. He invoked his authority under the third provision to consolidate the airmail routes to only three companies, forcing out their competitors. These three carriers later evolved into United Airlines (the northern airmail route), TWA (Transcontinental and Western Air, which had the mid-United States route) and American Airlines (American Airways, the southern route). Brown also extended the southern route to the West Coast. He awarded bonuses for carrying more passengers and purchasing multi-engined aircraft equipped with radios and navigation aids.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president, Alabama Senator Hugo Black, a Democrat, set a committee to investigate those alleged improprieties and gaming of the rate structure, such as carriers padlocking individual pieces of mail to increase weight. Despite showings that Brown's administration of the airmail had increased the efficiency of the service and lowered its costs, the hearings raised serious questions regarding its legality and ethics.

On February 7, 1934, Roosevelt's postmaster general, James A. Farley, announced that he and President Roosevelt were committed to protecting the public interest and that as a result of the investigation, President Roosevelt had ordered the cancellation of all domestic airmail contracts.

Role of the U.S. Army Air Corps

At the time of the scandal, the Air Corps was in the midst of lobbying for a more centralized control of air operations in the form of an establishment of a General Headquarters (GHQ), Air Force. When approached by the Post Office Department to determine if the Air Corps had the capability of transporting the mail, Chief of the Air Corps Maj.Gen. Benjamin D. Foulois immediately assured the Roosevelt Administration that it could in the interest of demonstrating Air Corps capabilities.

On February 9, 1934 President Roosevelt suspended the airmail contracts effective at midnight February 19, 1934. He issued Executive Order 6591 ordering the War Department to place at the disposal of the Postmaster General "such air airplanes, landing fields, pilots and other employees and equipment of the Army of the United States needed or required for the transportation of mail during the present emergency, by air over routes and schedules prescribed by the Postmaster General."

In 1933 the airlines had carried several million pounds of mail over almost 25,000 miles of routes. Transported mostly by night, the mail had been carried in modern passenger planes equipped with modern flight instruments and radios. The airlines used a well-established system of maintenance facilities along their routes.

On February 14, 1934 four days before the Air Corps was to begin, General Foulois appeared before the House of Representatives Post Office Committee outlining the steps taken by the Air Corps in preparation. In his testimony he assured the committee that the Air Corps had selected its most experienced pilots and that it had the requisite experience at flying at night and in bad weather.

In actuality, of the 262 pilots selected, more than half were Reserve junior officers with less than two years flying experience. The Air Corps had made a decision not to draw from its training schools, where most of its experienced pilots were assigned. Only 48 of those selected had logged at least 25 hours of flight time in bad weather, only 31 had 50 hours or more of night flying, and only 2 had 50 hours of instrument time.

The Air Corps during the Great Depression, hampered by pay cuts and a reduction of flight time, operated almost entirely in daylight and good weather. Duty hours were limited and relaxed, usually with four hours or less of flight operations a day, and none on weekends. Experience levels were also limited by obsolete aircraft, most of them single-engine and open-cockpit planes. Because of a high turnover-rate policy in the War Department, most pilots were Reserve officers unfamiliar with the civilian airmail routes.

Regarding equipment, the Air Corps had in its inventory only 274 Directional gyros and 460 Artificial horizons, and very few of these were mounted in aircraft. It possessed 172 radio transceivers, almost all with a range of 30 miles or less. Foulois ordered the available equipment to be installed in the 122 aircraft assigned to the task, but the instruments were not readily available and Air Corps mechanics unfamiliar with the equipment sometimes installed them incorrectly.

Lt. Col. Horace M. Hickam

The project, termed AACMO (Army Air Corps Mail Operation), was placed under the supervision of Brig.Gen. Oscar Westover, assistant chief of the Air Corps. He created three geographic zones and appointed Lt.Col. Henry H. Arnold to command the Western Zone, Lt.Col. Horace Meek Hickam the Central Zone, and Maj. Byron Q. Jones the Eastern Zone. Personnel and planes were immediately deployed, but problems began immediately with a lack of proper facilities (and in some instances, no facilities at all) for maintenance of aircraft and quartering of enlisted men, and a failure of tools to arrive where needed.

Sixty Air Corps pilots took oaths as postal employees in preparation for the service and began training. On February 16, three pilots on familiarization flights -- Lts. Jean D. Grenier, Edwin D. White, and James Eastman -- were killed in crashes attributed to bad weather. This presaged some of the worst and most persistent late winter weather in history. A blizzard disrupted the initial day's operations east of the Rocky Mountains, followed by snow, rain, fog, and turbulent winds for the remainder of the month over much of the United States.

In the Western Zone, Arnold established his headquarters in Salt Lake City. In the winter of 1932-1933 he and many of his pilots had gained winter flying experience flying food-drop missions to aid Indian reservation settlements throughout the American Southwest isolated by blizzards. As a result of this experience and direct supervision, Arnold's zone was the only one in which a pilot was not killed.

On February 22, 1934 two fatal crashes occurred in Texas and Ohio, and a near-fatal crash in Virginia. The next day a forced landing in the Atlantic Ocean resulted in a drowning. President Roosevelt, publicly embarrassed, ordered a meeting with Foulois that resulted in a reduction of routes and schedules (which were already only 60% of that flown by the airlines), and strict flight safety rules.

On March 8 and 9, 1934 four more pilots died in crashes, totaling ten fatalities in less than one million miles of flying the mail. World War I Air Service legend Eddie Rickenbacker was quoted as calling the program "legalized murder."

On March 10, 1934 President Roosevelt called Foulois and Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to the White House, asking them to fly only in completely safe conditions. Foulois replied that to ensure complete safety the Air Corps would have to end the flights, and Roosevelt suspended airmail service on March 11, 1934.

The Army resumed the program again on March 19, 1934, with limited schedules, in better weather, and after putting its pilots through a hastily-created course in instrument flying. It continued the service through May 8, 1934 when temporary contracts with private carriers were put into effect. Two additional Army pilots were killed before AACMO's last flight on June 6, 1934. In all, 12 pilots had been killed in 66 accidents, resulting in an intense public furor. In 78 days of operations, completing only two-thirds of their assigned flights, the Army Air Corps had moved 777,389 pieces of mail over 1,590,155 miles.

Among Army flyers flying the mail were Ira C. Eaker, Frank A. Armstrong, and Beirne Lay, Jr., all of whom would play important roles in air operations during the Second World War.

Consequences and results

The government had little choice but to return service to the commercial airlines, but did so with several punitive conditions. The Air Mail Act of June 12, 1934 closely regulated the air mail business, dissolved the holdings that brought together airlines and aircraft manufacturers, and prevented companies that held the old contracts from getting new ones. (The industry's response to the last item was simply to change names; for instance Northwest Airways became Northwest Airlines.)

The most punitive measure was to ban all former airline executives from further contracts. United Airlines' president, Philip G. Johnson, for instance, chose to leave the United States and helped to form Trans-Canada Airlines. The effect of the entire scandal was to guarantee that mail-carrying contracts remained unprofitable, and pushed the entire industry towards carrying passengers.

The immediate results of the scandal were disastrous for the image of the Air Corps. Speaker of the House Henry T. Rainey lambasted the service: “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.” (Congressional Record, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session, Vol. 78, Pt. 3, 3144-3145.)

For the Air Corps, despite its public humiliation, the Airmail fiasco resulted in a number of improvements.

Secretary of War George H. Dern at the direction of the president convened a special committee chaired by former Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, to closely examine the program and the overall condition of the Air Corps. Known as the Baker Board, it included five military members of an earlier board chaired by General Hugh A. Drum, four of them senior Army ground force officers, who tightly controlled the agenda and scope of the board's investigation to prevent it from becoming a platform for advocating an independent air arm. Of the 11 members, only three were aviation advocates. The Baker Board endorsed earlier findings of the Drum Board, and while it found against making the Air Corps a third service equal to the Army and Navy, it called for the immediate establishment of the GHQ Air Force, placing under it all the Army's aviation combat units within the continental United States. This provided a first step toward an autonomous air force, but also kept authority divided by maintaining control of supply, doctrine, training and recruitment under the Chief of the Air Corps, and airfields in the control of corps area commanders.

Within the Air Corps itself, instrument training was upgraded, radio communications were greatly improved into a nationwide system that included navigation aids, and budget appropriations were increased. The Air Corps acquired the first six Link Trainer flight simulators of a fleet that would ultimately number more than 10,000.

Finally, the president appointed Clark Howell, newspaper editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to chair a five-person committee to investigate U.S. aviation that resulted in the creation of the Federal Aviation Commission.

References

• Borden, Norman E., Jr., Air Mail Emergency 1934: An Account of 78 Days in the Winter of 1934 When the Army Flew the United States Mail (1968), (p.45)
• Coffey, Thomas M., Hap: The Story of the U.S. Air Force and the Man Who Built It (1982), (pp. 151, 153-155).
• Frisbee, John L. "AACMO---Fiasco or Victory?", Air Force Magazine, March 1995, Vol. 78 No. 3, (p. 79).
• Nalty, Bernard C., Winged Shield, Winged Sword: A History of the United States Air Force (1997), (pp. 122-127), ISBN 0-16-049009-X
• U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission: Airmail and the Growth of the Airlines
• History of United Airlines