William M. Leary - Pilots Directions: The Transcontinental Airway and Its History (American Land and Life Series)
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Pilots Directions: The Transcontinental Airway and Its History (American Land and Life Series)
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Pilots' Directions : The Transcontinental Airway and Its History American Land and Life Series
author
:
Leary, William M.
publisher
:
University of Iowa Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0877452784
print isbn13
:
9780877452782
ebook isbn13
:
9781587291326
language
:
English
subject
Air-pilot guides--United States, Air mail service--United States--History.
publication date
:
1990
lcc
:
TL726.2.P53 1990eb
ddc
:
629.132/5473
subject
:
Air-pilot guides--United States, Air mail service--United States--History.
Page i
Pilots' Directions
Page iii
The American Land and Life Series
Edited by Wayne Franklin
Page iv
The Transcontinental Airway and its History
Preface by Wayne Franklin
Page v
Pilots' Directions
Edited by William M. Leary
Page vi
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright (c) 1990 by the University of Iowa All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 1990
Design by Richard Hendel
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pilots' directions: the transcontinen tal airway and its history/edited by William M. Leary; preface by Wayne Franklin.1st ed. p. cm.(The American land and life series) ISBN 0-87745-278-4 (alk. paper) 1. Air-pilot guidesUnited States. 2. Air mail serviceUnited StatesHistory. I. Leary, William M. (William Matthew), 1934 II. Series. TL726.2.P53 1990 89-20479 629.132'5473dc20 CIP
Printed on acid-free paper
The transcontinental air route map, by R. E. G. Davies, is reprinted from Aerial Pioneers, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Press. The photograph of Otto Praeger is reproduced courtesy of the Praeger family, and the photograph of James P. Murray bringing the mail to Rock Springs is courtesy of Mrs. James P. Murray. All other photographs are courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum. Pilots' Directions was originally published by the Government Printing Office in 1921.
Page vii
Contents
Preface
Wayne Franklin
ix
Introduction
William M. Leary
1
General Directions to Entire Personnel
35
Pilots' Directions
47
Index
77
Page ix
Preface
By Wayne Franklin
Despite its utterly pragmatic purpose and title, the United States Post Office's Pilots' Directions of 1921 offers something more than practical counsel for would-be airmail pilots. It also provides an intriguing vision of how America looked from a largely newand wonderfully revealingperspective some seventy years ago. This seemingly modest little guidebook is crammed with incidental revelations that crop up throughout like a line of trees jutting in front of a low-flying de Havilland biplane. It guided pilots by mapping in sharp detail a cross section of the land over which they picked their way at no great altitude, from field to field, from crash to crash, through headwinds, bad rain, and blinding snow. Since the purpose of the book was to help pilots keep their senses in such conditions, it reads today like an infinite series of landscape photos. It shows us how the cultural designs of the United States had been inscribed on the clean slate of a continent that in 1921 had, over all its vast distances, a dominantly rural note.
By now we are so accustomed to what have become the cliches[clichs] of aerial imagery that we may forget how startling the first aerial vision of this continent must have been. Although imaginary views and balloonists' photographs provided a rudimentary glimpse of America from above long before the Wright brothers, most Americans before 1900 thought of their land pretty much as they saw it in their daily circuits over its surface. When they looked around, they saw an immediate collection of objects impinging on their senses. The patterns
Page x
which made those objects cohere, which made landscape as the pilot sees it, could not emerge easily from an earthbound perspective. The machine which conquered the land was also to give ordinary citizens a dramatic new appreciation for its beauty.
As if in preparation for this revealing new view, the patterns on the land itself were taking on a more nearly rational shape in the century before the Wrights. It was as if the land was being constructed to make its order more readily intelligible from the air. Generally speaking, American land east of the Appalachians had been subdivided and settled in earlier centuries according to local topographic conditions and the needs of the local populace. Along a line that roughly follows the Ohio River until turning south through Kentucky and Tennessee and then passing on toward the Gulf Coast, there is a strong contrast between the aerial crazy quilt of the East, produced by this traditional approach, and the stark symmetry of the newer national grid of the Midwest and the West. The mile-square sections of this grid were surveyed before settlement to aid government and settler alike in locating particular tracts. Their corners marked by posts or rock piles, the sections had only the faintest physical presence on the land at the start. Soon, however, farmers enclosed their sections or quarter sections (640 or 160 acres) with fences, giving the faint legal lines an indelible, three-dimensional inscription. Local roads ran as straight as a bee's flight, mile by mile, along the government's abstract gridwork. The fences gave the mathematical system imagined by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s an agrarian actuality as real as stone, wood, and wire.
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