Contract air mail routes are located by the Post Office Department and are so arranged that the mail service can be improved by use of air transportation over other means of communication.
The route is opened for bid and the contract awarded to the lowest bidder who is responsible and in a position successfully to carry on operations.
The contractor can bid any amount up to three dollars per pound of mail and is paid by the pound for the actual amount carried over his route.
Our route, between St. Louis and Chicago was operated on a schedule which saved one business day over train service to New York. A letter mailed in St. Louis before three-thirty P.M. was rushed to Lambert Field by a fast mail truck, transferred to the plane which was waiting with engine turning over, landed on the Air Mail field at Maywood, Illinois at seven-fifteen, transferred to one of the Chicago-New York overnight planes, retransferred at Cleveland, Ohio, and was in the Post Office in New York in time for the first morning delivery.
An answer could be mailed at New York in the evening and be delivered in St. Louis before noon on the following day. If sent through the ordinary mail it would not arrive until one day later.
The advantages of air transportation are most apparent over long distances. The air mail flies from New York to San Francisco in thirty-six hours, whereas a train requires nearly four days to make the same trip.
The United States, through the efforts of the Post Office and the Department of Commerce, is being covered with a network of air mail routes, and it is only a matter of the public using this service before nearly every city in the country will be served by airlines.
VIII
TWO EMERGENCY JUMPS
BY the first of April our organization was well under way and about a week before the inauguration day we took two planes over the route to make any final arrangements necessary.
On April fifteenth at 5:50 A.M. I took-off from the Air Mail Field at Maywood on the first southbound flight, and that afternoon we sent two ships north with the inauguration mail from St. Louis, Springfield and Peoria.