![]() Others still give advice relying upon lakes and rivers. Being a multi-author work, it doesn’t read with a single voice, nor, having been written at a time when cross country flying was still in its infancy, does it give unified advice: Some pilot authors suggested using railroads as landmarks others, the descriptions of towns. Published by the post office in early 1921, Pilots’ Directions is a field guide to contact flying the transcontinental route, leapfrogging from landmark to landmark, staying “in contact” with the terrain. The collection was bound together into a slim volume called Pilots’ Directions. The solution? A contest among airmail pilots for the best-written description of each leg of the route. Post Office Department was bootstrapping its fledgling airmail experiment into a full-blown, regularly scheduled, coast-to-coast venture, and it needed a means for new pilots to find their way. In the morning I’ll use modern GPS to arrive in the air above this very spot, but after that, I’m going to attempt to re-fly a third of the transcontinental airmail route using nothing but a set of written instructions that are now nearly 100 years old.īefore aeronautical charts, before the concrete arrows and the flashing airway beacons, before radios, the U.S. Now you need a permit to park your car here.Īll that’s left to show that an airport once existed is a forlorn metal plaque erected by the Nebraska State Historical Society. If I had been flying the Omaha-to-Cheyenne route back in the glory days of airmail, this would have been my starting point. I look around at the towering buildings on all sides, and it’s hard to imagine that this was once the site of an airfield. It’s a cold, gray evening, with low ceilings and spitting rain. I’m standing in Parking Lot 5 of the Scott Campus of the University of Nebraska Omaha.
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