Tales of the Air Mail Pilots

by Burt M. McConnell

Returning from San Francisco, I stopped at Salt Lake, where Ellis and Bishop were stationed. Theirs is a story stranger than fiction, and it exemplifies the best traditions of the Air Mail Service.

Late in October, 1923, Bishop, one of the oldest pilots, in point of service, was caught in a blizzard forty-five miles south of Rock Springs, Wyoming, and forced down twenty-five miles from the nearest point of civilization and communication. The sky above the Sierra Nevada Mountains was thick and overcast, with the wind blowing at forty miles an hour. The thermometer registered 18°. Snow of the dry and powdery sort was falling heavily. Bishop could see less than a hundred yards, and could make no headway whatever against this typical Utah blizzard.

Concluding that it would be best to land on the route between Rock Springs and Salt Lake City, with which he was familiar, rather than to try to find his way through the storm, Bishop finally “sat down” on a comparatively smooth and—at that time—bare plateau, known as Bridger’s Bench. He landed without accident, and for approximately an hour kept his motor turning over slowly, in the hope that the storm would subside. By that time at least a foot of snow had fallen. Realizing that he must get out of his predicament immediately, if he expected to get out at all, Bishop began charging backward and forward with his powerful machine, in an attempt to clear a runway with the “backwash” from the propeller. For an hour he sent his plane at full speed over the top of the plateau, backward and forward for two hundred yards at a time, in an effort to clear a path ten feet wide. But each time he had finished digging a runway long enough, and turned around, the snow had drifted in, and the process had to be repeated all over again.

An alarm is sent out by telegraph and radio whenever a plane is missing. Often a man’s life has been saved by this information.

At the end of two hours snow covered the plateau to a depth of two feet. It now became more and more difficult to charge with his machine up and down the runway; but Bishop carried on. Perhaps the wind would cease, so that he could shovel a runway two hundred yards long and ten feet wide. Finally, however, after he had tried unsuccessfully for three hours to extricate his machine from the drifts; when snow had fallen to a depth of three feet and the powerful Liberty motor could not force the plane through the snow, Bishop climbed stiffly out of the cockpit, shook himself free of snow, drained off the water from the radiator, covered up the mail in the cockpit, and started walking in the general direction of the nearest settlement—Lyman, Wyoming.

Bishop was familiar with the country, having flown over it dozens of times, yet, being a careful and methodical pilot, he took the compass from the machine. He had no emergency rations. He had neither snowshoes nor rifle. He saw no game. There was no shelter within twenty miles that he knew of. If worst came to worst, however, he could still return to his machine and start a fire with his batteries and some gasoline.

The pilot was strongly tempted to lay aside his heavy fur-lined flying suit, but, as it seemed likely that he might have to use it for a blanket that night, he threw the legs of the suit over his shoulders, strapped them there in order to walk more freely, and floundered forth into the snow, now three feet deep.

Soon Bishop was wallowing in drifts higher than his waist. For hours he continued on, overheated by his exertions, and rapidly growing weaker with each stride. There was nothing from which to make snowshoes for his feet, even if he had had the tools and the time before darkness fell. The storm still howled about his ears and shut off the view ahead. But with his compass he kept a course toward a farmhouse which he knew nestled at the foot of a mountain some twenty miles to the westward.

For more than six hours Bishop, who was born on an Iowa farm and is sturdily built, staggered wearily along through the snowdrifts, traveling in that time about ten miles. At this critical juncture, half way between the ship, where he could at least have built a fire, and the farmhouse where he was sure to find warmth, food, and shelter, Bishop realized that his fast waning strength was not equal to the task of reaching the one or retreating to the other. He was becoming drowsy by this time, but he struggled onward, still carrying his heavy flying suit, for it seemed certain that he would be compelled to spend the night in the open. No one could possibly have seen him land, and certainly he, a mere speck against the spotless white, could not be discerned from the farmhouse, even with the aid of glasses. Besides, no one would expect even an Air Mail pilot to venture out in such a blizzard.