At Reno, my next stop on the transcontinental Air Mail route, I learned of the untimely end, only a few weeks before, of Pilot Blanchfield. For ten years he had been a flier, first with the Royal Flying Corps during the war. Then he came to the United States, applied for citizenship, and entered the Air Mail Service. In those ten years he had flown approximately 300,000 miles, or more than twelve times around the earth.
Ninety-six inspections before each flight!
In flying over the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, between Reno and Elko, Nevada, Blanchfield found the atmosphere in the neighborhood of the “hump” far more violent and dangerous than the disturbance in the air caused by anti-aircraft shells during the war. Besides experiencing several hazardous journeys under these conditions, during his comparatively brief career with the Air Mail, this pilot, on one occasion, was caught by a “twister” or tornado such as they have in Nebraska. But it was during an almost unheard of succession of gales, blizzards, and cold weather in November, 1922, that Blanchfield experienced what was perhaps his most exciting adventure.
The thermometer was 60° below at Elko one day when he persuaded the field manager to permit him to carry the mail to Reno, 235 miles away. Blinding sheets of snow, carried on the wings of an eighty-mile gale, were driven against the hangar as Blanchfield gave the signal for his machine to be wheeled out into the open. Steering directly into the howling wind and snow, the pilot was completely hidden from view within half a minute. The shrieking winds soon drowned the steady roar of his motor.
It is the custom, west of Cheyenne, for every railroad telegraph operator to report to the nearest Air Mail field the passage overhead of an airplane. Half an hour went by, yet no report came to either the Reno or Elko field. An hour passed, and still no tidings came. Meanwhile the storm had increased in intensity. A foot of snow had fallen.
At the end of two hours an alarm was sent along every telegraph wire within fifty miles of the transcontinental route. When three hours had passed without a report of Blanchfield’s whereabouts, and three feet of snow covered the landscape, it was generally believed that he had been forced down by the hurricane somewhere on the Great Salt Desert.
Finally, when the pilot was more than an hour overdue at the Reno field, the anxious little group in the hangar there heard the faint purr of a Liberty engine. Rushing to the hundred-foot door, they opened it in the face of the raging blizzard. The blinding snow shut out the view of everything more than fifty yards away, but they were positive they heard the steady, low drone of a motor. Then it ceased, and the watchers were about to turn back into the warm hangar when straight toward them, out of the furious storm, a plane came plunging through the drifts. Eagerly grasping the wings, they helped to steer it through the doorway.
Once safely inside, with the door closed behind them, they looked toward the cockpit, expecting to see Blanchfield’s grinning countenance. What they saw, however, was a huge snowman. The pilot himself could not be seen for the snow that covered him and almost filled the cockpit. He seemed frozen in his seat, with one hand clutching the control stick, and his frosted feet resting upon the steering gear. For more than three and a half hours this fearless pilot, sitting in this cramped position, with a violent storm swirling about him, had battled for his life. For the greater part of the 235 miles the ship had been almost beyond his control. The cold was the worst he had ever experienced. At times his powerful De Haviland had been unable to advance a single foot. His attempts to maneuver the plane out of the storm area were unavailing; the blizzard, it seemed, covered the entire State of Nevada. Certainly this was one of Blanchfield’s very narrowest escapes from death.
On another occasion, while en route from Elko to Reno, he ran into another eighty-mile-an-hour gale. As usual, a snowstorm was in progress. Unable to see more than fifty yards in any direction, the pilot might fly into the shoulder of a mountain or be swept by a ‘down draft’ into a rocky canyon. For all he knew, he might be twenty miles off his course. To stay longer in the air was to court disaster. With commendable wisdom, therefore, Blanchfield flew at an altitude of a hundred feet until he came to a comparatively level spot covered with sagebrush. There, in the argot of the Air Mail Service, he “sat down.”