Air Mail Scandal Totally Explained

Everything about Air Mail Act totally explained

The Air Mail Scandal, also known as the Air Mail Fiasco, is the name that the American press of the 1930s gave to the political scandal resulting from a congressional investigation of a meeting (the so-called Spoils Conference) between Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown and the executives of the top airlines, and to the disastrous results of the steps taken by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use the U.S. Army Air Corps to fly the mail. The parties of the conference effectively divided among them the air mail routes, resulting in a Senate investigation. Although a public relations nightmare for both the administrations of President Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the scandal resulted in the growth of the airline industry and the modernization of the Air Corps.

Roots of the scandal

Background

U.S. air mail operations began in 1919 with pilots and airplanes belonging to the United States Post Office. For nine years, using mostly war-surplus de Havilland DH-4 biplanes, the Post Office built and flew a nationwide network. In the beginning the work was extremely dangerous; of the initial 40 pilots, three died in crashes in 1919 and nine more in 1920. It was 1922 before an entire year ensued without a fatal crash.
As safety and capability grew, daytime-only operations gave way to flying at night, assisted by ground beacons and lighted emergency landing fields. Regular transcontinental air mail delivery began in 1924. However in 1925, to encourage commercial aviation, the Kelly Act (also known as the Air Mail Act of 1925) authorized the Post Office Department to contract with private airlines for feeder routes into the main transcontinental system. The first commercial air mail flight was on the 487-mile Air Mail Route #5 from Pasco, Washington to Elko, Nevada on April 6, 1926. By 1927 the transition had been completed to entirely commercial transport of mail, and by 1929 45 airlines were involved in mail delivery at a cost per mile of $1.10. Most were small, under-capitalized companies flying short routes and old equipment. See main article: United States government role in civil aviation

Air Mail Act of 1930

President Herbert Hoover appointed Brown as his postmaster general in 1929. In 1930, Brown, citing inefficient and expensive air mail 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 McNary-Watres Act after its chief sponsors, Sen. Charles L. McNary of Oregon and 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 strong authority (some argued almost dictatorial powers) over the nationwide air transportation system.
The main provision of the Air Mail Act changed the manner in which payments were calculated. Air mail 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. The purpose of the provision was to discourage the carrying of bulk junk mail to boost profits, particularly by the smaller and inefficient carriers, and to encourage the carrying of passengers. Airlines using larger planes designed to carry passengers would increase their revenues by carryng more passengers and less mail. 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.

Role of the U.S. Army Air Corps

Executive Order 6591

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. At a cabinet meeting on the morning of February 9, 1934, Secretary of War George H. Dern assured President Roosevelt that the Air Corps could deliver the mail without consulting either Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur or Chief of the Air Corps Maj. Gen. Benjamin D.Foulois. Shortly after the cabinet meeting that same morning, second assistant postmaster general Harllee Branch called Foulois to his office. A conference between members of the Air Corps, the Post Office, and the Aeronautics Branch of the Commerce Department ensued in which Foulois, asked if the Air Corps could deliver the mail in winter, casually assured Branch that the Air Corps could be ready in a week or ten days.
   At 4 o'clock that afternoon President Roosevelt suspended the airmail contracts effective at midnight February 19.Initial plans were made for coverage of 18 mail routes totalling nearly 12,000 miles; and 62 flights daily, 38 by night.
   On February 14, five 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.
   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.
   The project, termed AACMO (Army Air Corps Mail Operation),
   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.
   The Western Zone's first flights were made using 18 Boeing P-12 fighters, but these could carry a maximum of only 50 pounds of mail each, and even that amount made them tail-heavy. After one week they were replaced by O-38 and O-25C observation biplanes borrowed from the National Guard. In both the Western and Eastern zones these became the aircraft of choice, modified to carry 160 pounds of mail in their rear cockpits. Better-suited planes such as the new YB-10 bomber and A-12 attack aircraft were in insufficient numbers to be of practical use. Two YB-10s crashlanded when pilots unfamiliar with retractable landing gear forgot to lower it, and there were only enough A-12s for a partial squadron in the Central Zone.
   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. (Ironically, the crash of an American Airlines airliner on March 9, killing four, went virtually unnoticed in the press.)
   In 78 days of operations and over 13,000 hours of logged flight time, completing 65.8 percent of their scheduled flights, the Army Air Corps had moved 777,389 pounds of mail over 1,590,155 miles. Aircraft employed in carrying the mail were the B-2, B-4, B-6, Y1B-7, and YB-10 bombers; the P-12 fighter; the A-12 attack plane; C-27 transport; and the O-19, O-25C, O-39, and two models of O-38 observation planes.
   Among Army flyers flying the mail were Ira C. Eaker, Frank A. Armstrong, Elwood R. Quesada, and Beirne Lay, Jr., all of whom would play important roles in air operations during the Second World War.

Consequences and affects

Effects on the airline industry

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, drafted by Senator Black, closely regulated the air mail business, dissolved the holding companies 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.) With bidding for contracts more competitive and air mail revenue less attractive than before, the airlines placed a new emphasis on passenger transportation and development of modern airliners.
   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.
   Several airlines sued the government for revenues missed while the Air Corps flew the mail. The last claim was settled in 1942. In 1941 the United States Court of Claims found that there hadn't been any fraud or collusion in the awarding of contracts pursuant to the Air Mail Act of 1930. it included all 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 Air Corps 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.

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