Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 99: Air Mail Scandal of 1934

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

sorry it's not PC part 2 donate to the Ukrainian Red Cross Society: https://redcross.org.ua/en/ Sources: https://www.historynet.com/airmails-first-day/ https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0308airmail/ http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/lindbergh-engine-racing-time-pennsylvania-railroad-locomotive-no-460/ https://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Fiasco%22+revisited%3a+the+Air+Corps+%26+the+1934+air+mail+episode.-a0220639031 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

.. Bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum, bum-ba da-ba-ba-bum. They're getting a copyright strike off of this shit, you know? We're not gonna get a copyright strike! No it's too good! Yeah that's what it is. People are gonna listen to us do that and go, Holy shit is that John Williams in a symphony orchestra?

I think we'll be thinking that as opposed to… Wow is that the theme from James Bond? Yes. Welcome back to Kill Indiana Jones. That's right. Don't threaten me with a good idea. It's not enough movies though, that's the issue. It fights the Nazis and then also the communists.

Well the problem with that is we'd have to do my original… There's a ton of young Indiana Jones like EU stuff though. Yeah there's all the video games but what I'm thinking is… Go back in time and kill young Indiana Jones. Oh my god. What we'd have to do is like what I was thinking of as the B-plan for Kill James Bond after we ran out of Bond movies which was not rebrand the podcast and watch other movies

but instead do all of the episodes again but we're not allowed to re-watch any of the movies. So we have to do starting from Doctor No but we only have our notes from watching it the first time. I mean, why doesn't he simply kill them? That's the question I'm talking about Doctor Now. Welcome to, well where's your problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters.

It's quiet. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him, okay go. I'm Alice Caldwell Kelly, I'm the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her, yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam Anderson. Oh fuck, my pronouns are he and him. I had to think about that for a second, did you?

Gonna be a they then by next episode. My pronouns, I actually identify as an attack helicopter. Why am I being shipped to the front? I don't want to go to the front. Actually, I sexually identify as a baractile TB2 UCAV. Oh god, Joe Cassavi, it's not gonna be pleased by that. Listen, how shitty do you have to be a transporting fuel to get domed by great value predator?

What you see on the screen, unfortunately, is not Pencentral Part 2. No, we had an emergency. Yeah, there was a situation. For one thing, all three of us had to go and join the Ukraine Territorial Defense Force. I will lay down my life for my ancestral home of Sweden and I don't care anymore.

Well, it is the same colors on the flag. Yeah, exactly, I don't have to learn too much. Today, we're going to talk about air mail. Yes, the famous preteen clothing store, Aeropostale. Yes, it's decline in failure. Man, what ever happened to Aeropostale? You don't see that shit. It's back.

Some hedge fund bought it. Yeah, I saw one in the Cherry Hill Mall and I thought I had time traveled. God, that's going to be a weird vibe if I ever see one of those over here. Incredible. I like that I searched Aeropostale. The first people also ask,

is Aeropostale for 12-year-olds? Aeropostale is the Team Fortress Red to Forever 21's Team Fortress Blue. You can pick one and you have to remain loyal to it until death, so. Oh, Jesus. Oh, man. All right.

But before we talk about this, we have to do it. There's still a thousand stores in the Americas. That seems crazy. We have to do the goddamn news. Well, all right, so Russia, Ukraine, who you got? Oh, Cubs and Five. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I'm going Broads and Seven.

Yeah, personally. Listen, I do want to get out ahead of as, you know, and say, if you're looking to us for expert nuanced geopolitical views, fuck you. Yeah, only look to me. I'm the only one who does those. These two jokers on the other hand.

But yeah, some news has occurred, some events have transpired. Stuff happened. Russia actually went for it. They did the thing that seemed politically impossible and everybody except me was wrong about and they actually tried to invade Ukraine and occupy at least some of it.

Perhaps all of it we don't know yet. Yeah, no one knows what the actual strategic goals are. Someone DMed me to call me a NATO shell, which. Oh, like a few days in, I've been, I've been a NATO shell. I've been a Putin shell. I've, you know, I get around, I guess. I've just avoided posting about it because I wanted to save all my bad takes for here.

I think Russia's got this one. I think they're going to do it. It's a foregone conclusion, right? Like Russia's going to crush them, obviously. Yeah, but it's taken an embarrassingly long amount of time. It's required an embarrassing amount of help from both Belarus and also Ramzan Khadarov and Chechnya to even get this far, right?

And it's like, this is really revealing some serious operational weaknesses in the Russian military. Oh, yeah. Just to still not have uncontested air superiority. At least still not. Still not, no. Embarrassing. Yeah, yeah.

It's like troops communicating on civilian radios using fucking balfangs like the guys who occupy the capital. The Taliban managed it with cell phones. Yeah, I mean, and the thing about a cell phone is you can... Turns out no one speaks Pashto, Raz. You can come out and detonate an ID with a cell phone. Difficult to do with a radio. But obviously this is...

It's rare to see someone who isn't the United States and who is in fact opposed to the United States do the unambiguously evil thing. Like the last big hit we got like this was ISIS, I guess. Oh, yeah. And now we have single-handedly, Putin has handed NATO a reason to exist. Yeah.

Oops. Driven Sweden and Finland into NATO. Oops. It badly embarrassed the DSA International Committee, not that that was that difficult to start with. And Jesus. I didn't think the statement was that bad. They said the U.S. should withdraw from NATO.

I mean, that's clown shoes. Yeah. It would be pretty funny. It would be. It would be. And this has led to sort of almost totally unexpected groundswell of support for Ukraine, not because people in NATO shells, although some are,

but because a lot of people are justly outraged by this. Russia has had to do a considerable amount of internal suppression of news and dissidents and protests and stuff. But also it means that now a shitload of airspace is closed to Russian planes. People are boycotting Russian products. Weirdos are filming themselves pouring out Russian vodka.

And we have here a rally in support of Ukraine in Santa City, Philadelphia, a spiritual home of the pod. Yes. Please ignore the red and black flag. Please ignore that flag. Please. Please ignore that flag. Please ignore that flag.

If you see this flag, make sure that flag is not at the protest. Yes. That's the Ukrainian insurgent army. They're the guys who work with the SS. You see, this is the thing, right? And one, right? Yeah.

There's, okay. So we should prioritize here, right? We're not saying every Ukrainian is a Nazi. We're not saying that Ukrainians are Nazis for wanting to defend themselves against the Russians. However, like every country in the world, and particularly in Eastern Europe, Ukraine has Nazis in it.

Ukraine has had Nazis in it for a long time. So does Russia. Yes. But what this is, yeah. What this is, is in the form of a helpful guide to recognizing your flags at a protest, right? Because a lot of the people, everybody's been so wrong-footed by this.

Everyone's been so surprised by this. So there hasn't been time for a lot of the sort of like, if you like the PR aspect of this on Ukraine's side, to like work itself into a narrative. And so as a consequence, what you have are the people who are already there. And there are a lot of like Ukrainian, diaspora communities in the US, in Canada,

of whom the people who are most interested in Ukrainian sovereignty tend to be, let's say, ideological, right? Yes. And this means that the people who like, say you want to buy like a, I don't know, a Ukrainian flag to show your support for innocent civilians being bombed by the Russians, right?

The guy who is most ready to sell you a Ukrainian flag at this moment is also a guy who knows a surprising amount about the SS division Galicia, right? And you should perhaps, like, it's not something to change the way that you feel about any of this, but it's something to perhaps keep in mind that this is the rare kind of process where if you see a half red, half black flag,

that's not a good thing. Yes. You know what else I just noticed? Slap. Oh. David Oh, city council person at large, has a tent back here. Ah.

Yeah. Ugh, David Oh. David Oh, he's our token Republican. David Oh, UN, if you like. The city charter says we have to have a Republican. He got stabbed, right? He did get stabbed. Yes.

Stabbed? Why did he get stabbed? Because we live in Philly. Because he lives in Southwest Philly. His bad things happen in Philadelphia. OK. Yeah. That's our way of insuring.

Boats go the way we want, is simply stabbing our opponents in the streets. Yeah. It's not easy work, but. The reporter who posted this picture on Twitter got dog piled for not knowing what that flag was, which I mean, I guess is understandable. Not many people know.

I guess so. Yeah. The UPA flag. Not what the UPA is. I know that. And like, yeah. Also, I should say the extent to which, because like, now Russia is trying to frame

invading Ukraine as a denazification effort. It's not a denazification effort. No. Partly because you're using like, guys like Kaderov's guys who are halfway Nazi already. They're like, just Nazi, but also Muslim. But partly because like, if you wanted to effect the best possible thing

for Eastern European Nazis, the best thing you could do would be a unilateral Russian invasion of a country that is not Russia. Because now even the fucking Polish Nazis are on board with the Ukrainian Nazis. Because now they have a narrative that seems to make sense, which is, oh, we have to be strong

and we have to be fascist in order to resist the obviously now very real Russian aggression. You know, this whole thing sounds, what is that? Spike TV television show, like Deadliest Warrior. Deadliest Warrior. Deadliest Warrior. All right, versus Taliban. Azov Battalion versus Chechens.

Yeah, Azov Battalion versus Kaderovtsy is, I hope they both lose. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh my God. All right. I have one thing, but hang on because I'm chewing. I'm also just this to fill time while you're chewing.

Don't freak out about nuclear war. There isn't going to be a nuclear war. If there is going to be a nuclear war, you will not have time to own me about it, but there isn't, right? No, I'll have time to own you about it. Yeah, I also will. Yeah, I'll get right in the group chat

and say you're on as I get on. There are two possible ways for a nuclear war to start here, right? Don't ask what the pushing cloud over south fell like. One is Russian troops enter a NATO member, like Poland or the Baltics. That's not going to happen because it was starting nuclear war instantly. The other is NATO troops enter Ukraine

and that would start a nuclear war. However, only one of these, to my knowledge, has people advocating for it because the fucking Libs and their fucking death drive determined that now what we should do is as a no fly zone in Ukraine, which is fully in nuclear war. That is starting.

I mean, there was a Twitter notification last night. Twitter pushes news notifications, right? You know, you can turn that off, right guy? Yeah, well, you know, at this point. It's never given me a heart attack before because the way it was phrased yesterday is it sounded like Biden had declared a no fly zone and no, it was actually,

Biden has restricted U.S. airspace to Russian aircraft. Which is technically a no fly zone, I guess. But, you know, that's... Okay, so the airfly can land here, whatever. That happened like three days ago, too. Yeah, when we say no fly zone, what we're talking about happening is NATO warplanes would go in and shoot down

Russian planes, which would be a shooting war between the U.S. and Russia. It's something Biden has already ruled out because he's more sensible than every fucking Rand Corporation foundation for the defense of democracy's vampire. Which is total lunacy, by the way. Yes.

That fucking... It wouldn't even fucking work. No, probably not. But I do have a question. Yes. Okay, so this was posed by my dad, which was... So he was talking about the old method

when he was redacted making Molotov cocktails. Where he was saying like, you know, he was talking about how he used to make Molotov cocktails back in the old days. Why? Now, because he's been out of the game, he understands that they use Styrofoam in them, and he was trying to quantify the environmental effects

of breathing in gasoline and dissolved Styrofoam. Yeah, I saw a video of you creating women making Molotov cocktails, and they're just grinding up Styrofoam with cheese graces. I assume the answer is don't breathe that in. You probably don't ask, yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't wear a mask when you're doing that. Because I was figuring you couldn't use the gasoline,

because now has Styrofoam in it, for a car anymore. So you just, you know, have a village well of Molotov makings, and you just put it in an oil drum in the center of your town. Yeah, it's like a poor man's napalm. This sounds like the Libs giving advice on how one guy can take out a tank. That's not a good thing. That was awful.

Use a paint, use a paint blue, or use the 900 million javelins you guys have lying around. I'm going to be honest. I mean, I think if Ukraine wins this one, the fact they armed all those civilians is going to come back to bite them. Oh, I think that's absolutely true. It's going to come back to bite everybody.

Like, the sort of the think tank determination now is now that we have caught Putin's dick in our mousetrap, we are going to try and make Ukraine his own personal Afghanistan. And I don't say this lightly, the insurgency in Afghanistan had some negative consequences for people other than the Red Army, not just even the Americans, but also the people in Afghanistan,

the people in the country's neighboring Afghanistan. So, yeah, no, this kind of insurgency shit, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Yeah, yes. But there probably still won't be nuclear war. You can quote me on that. Well, in other news... They're trying...

This is a miscarriage of justice. They're going to bring Brandon Boston to trial to say he was recklessly driving when he crashed the train back in 2013. I think this is one of the stupidest attempts at trying someone for a systemic failure ever. It's been rejected by all the lower courts several times over. The judge on this case has ruled, however,

that the defense can't use the argument that M-Track should have installed automatic train control on that track as an argument. I mean, they already kind of did a road version of this with that trucker in Colorado who was jailed for, I guess, manslaughtering people, right? Oh, right, yeah. Because he had a break shoe that was worn through

and like, nominally, he should have checked this and started the company. For context here, in 2013, a train was over speeding at the Frankfurt Junction Curve in Philly and came off the track, killed a bunch of people, the train wreck, that the engineer, Brandon Boston, had been distracted by reports of kids throwing rocks at trains,

which is something we do in Philly. Bad things happen in Philadelphia. Exactly, and lost track of where he was, so he didn't remember to slow down to 70 miles an hour for the curve, or 60 or whatever it is, and instead went through 110. So that was not good. He survived, and now they're trying to pin the accident

on him personally, as opposed to, you know, there's supposed to be automatic systems in place, and in fact, there had been automatic systems in place on this curve for 100 years, literally, but only on the southbound tracks, not the northbound ones. You know, this is going to be a very pro-union argument. If you recall back to our APT episode,

where I suggested that the strength of British labor unions was such that you needed like a six-man train crew, I feel if you're going to be giving train operators the responsibility of like, managing fucking information workflow about kids throwing rocks at trains, you need a second guy to do that, while one guy drives the train.

That's always something I thought was wild, is that freight trains need two guys in a cab, but passenger trains only need one. No, this is so... Josh Shapiro, who is running for governor in Pennsylvania, that is a member of my people. Sorry, did you want to put the fucking echoes on his name? Uh, yeah.

No, I... Listen, he's running for governor, and this feels like pure political opportunism, and it's fucking disgusting. What's his last name? I know his first name is... Brandon Boston. Boston. I almost said Bosco for some reason. Boscov.

Boscov. It's like, no, it's a tragic accident. Tragic accidents happen. This is a systemic failure. Brandon bought... It's a miscarriage of justice, and the state knows it, Josh Shapiro knows it,

we know it, you know it, I know it, the kids throwing rocks know it. Yeah, what's funny is that people went back on his... He posted on trainorders.com, or .org, which is the railfan forum you have to pay to join, and he had a series of posts about exactly this safety condition on Frankfurt Junction

that there was no automatic train stop on or automatic train control on the outer two tracks, despite the fact that there's a higher speed zone right before the curve and a higher speed zone right afterwards. Jesus. Overall, very safety-conscious person

who just got unlucky. I mean, I feel like if you select at random, right, it's shitty for it to land on the person who is alive to this problem and cares about it rather than the guy who just doesn't give a shit, right? Yeah. My God.

I suppose we'll all be punished for our kindnesses, right? This is true. Yeah. Speaking of, I should have put in a slide about the Texas Trans thing. I'll do that next episode. We were spot...

Yeah, we should put that in. Newp, Texas. And Florida, at every state. With ourselves. Mr. Putin, fire when ready. You know what else we should do? We should put some links to some Ukrainian humanitarian organizations

in the description that you can click on right now. That's true, yeah. Yeah, because if you can help by way of that, I don't think you can help by way of giving people advice on how to disable a tank. Posts? Do not post. Don't go to Ukraine and enlist.

But what you can do maybe is give to the Red Cross or something. That'll help a bit, maybe. I don't know. Although if you do enlist, please wear one of our t-shirts. Yes. Absolutely.

We got to work on the brand. I do love the idea of the WTYP battalion, which just tries to fight everyone. If you can gin up like some kind of cool laser-cut WTYP tactical patch to wear, send us a photo of that from Ukraine and we'll give you... Fuck, I don't know what we'll give you.

Something. Yeah, something cool. Yeah. So know that you should be fighting on the Ukrainian side. Do not join the Russian army. Don't do that. Please do not join the Russian army. Don't do that.

If you're thinking about it, if you're on the fence, don't do that. If you're on the fence, I recommend you fight for Ukraine and not for Russia. Absolutely. All things considered. All right, that was the goddamn news. Okay, so.

We're going to talk about air mail, but in order to get into that, we're going to talk about early air transport, right? We're going to talk about the Mongolia isn't shit. I actually skipped over that. I decided to talk about it. We'll talk about the first time mail was transported by air. Jean-Pierre Blanchard lifted off a balloon

from the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia on January 9th, 1793. Yes. Good things also happen in Philadelphia. Yes, it was a great public spectacle. And of course, Benjamin Franklin was said to be in attendance. Yeah. Using this as a diversion so he could steal from Graves.

That was a callback to our Hindenburg episode. Oh, well, Benjamin Franklin, like fucking Professor X hand to temple imagining the future of the Antonov-225. Well, no, he just attended every balloon launch he could. That's true. Man was crazy for balloons. True.

Loved a balloon. Loved an air balloon for gas. Absolutely. So one of the things Blanchard carried on the balloon was a personal letter from George Washington to be delivered to whomever's property the balloon landed on. That's a perfect 18th-century comedy thing. It's like, you are our 100,000th visitor ass fucking lesser

from George Washington, just like to whom it may concern. Check out this weird guy. Blanchard. I was listening to William Tecumseh Sherman's memoirs last night. And there's a woman whose house was spared because he had stayed with her family in like the 1840s. And apparently brought out the book she had him sign that he had given her as a gift.

It was like, no, no, see, see, I know William Tecumseh Sherman, please do not burn down my house. God, Sherman owned. So Blanchard drifted over the river and landed in Deppford, New Jersey. Oh, that's a shame. That's weird that there's a town named after Deppford, too. Like, I've been to our Deppford.

ours isn't much better. Perfect. This is the first time mail was delivered by air. And what was the, I guess it was at that point, the United States of America. Hmm. Even if you had to address it at that point as guy who's formed this lands on.

Yes. So have any heavier than air flight becomes a reality in 1903. Right. The Wright brothers do the first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Although the actual flight location now is within the municipal boundaries of Kill Devil Hills. Of what?

Kill Devil Hills. Kill Devil Hills. It's on the rules. Yeah, it's on the it's on the outer banks. It's too fucking crowded. I recommend if you want to go to the beaches go farther south. It's a lot less. There's a lot less stuff there.

You can relax better. He's right. Yeah. Sam's diner. Yeah. What else we got? I know it's called the Kill Devil Grill or something. I don't know.

The rules. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. Outer banks are sweet, man. And also North Carolina has Cape Fear and the Cape Fear River. Oh, yeah.

And they got, you know, you can go down. You can go see the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Shout out from, well, there's your problem. A salute from, well, there's your problem to the state of North Carolina. That's our hall of fame in Charlotte. You got a lot of you got a lot of cool shit in you. Last time I was down there, we stayed at a house at a town

called Waves that had a Dairy Queen and a general store. That was it. That's all you need, dude. That's all you need. That's all you need. Yeah. Anyway, so the Wright brothers did a couple short successful flights, right?

And then a wind picked up the right flyer and smashed it against a dune right before they were going to try and do a four mile flight all the way to the town center at Kitty Hawk. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So they, they boxed it up. They went back home to Dayton, Ohio, but they figured out pretty quickly how to make much better planes that weren't as

unstable as the Wright flyer. It's, it's so funny to me that Ohio is on this like first in flight thing because we had the Wright brothers, we had a shit load of astronauts, right? Like the only thing that tells me about Ohio is that everybody who's from there is very keen to leave it and so keen in fact that they're willing to do it in a vertical direction. Yes.

I would rather be an outer space than a discard for sake in hell. Send me up, baby. So by 1905, they could fly a plane for 30 minutes. Yeah. You know, going around 50 miles an hour or two. There's a bunch of Santos Dumont people in the mentioned to are mad at us right now.

Yes. The newspapers in Dayton love them and always reporting on them, but they didn't send photographers. So a bunch of other newspapers like Scientific American, you know, newspapers in New York, Washington, places like newspapers in Europe are like, this is made up. They're not actually doing it. Yeah.

You're welcome for not speaking German. Yeah. Except for you, Alice. Well, you speak German. Well, eventually someone took a picture and then everyone believed it. Yeah. And it still didn't help.

They still don't have a Cartier watch named after them, whereas Santos Dumont does. So, you know, Europeans will be partisan about this shit. Well, you need some kind of exclusive Dayton Ohio watchmaker. Actually, the Mallard was faster. No, it fucking wasn't. I would totally be on board with some kind of Dayton based micro brand.

Like until until they got canceled. Fucking Shinola in Detroit, making watches was like my jam for a while. So. So aviation before World War One was largely confined to fucking around, right? As it should have been, as to which it should return. As opposed to finding out, I guess.

Yeah. The first attempt to deliver air by, deliver mail by air. Deliver air by mail. Just a balloon with a stamp on it. I mean, it's just an empty crate. What is the difference with that and gamer girl bathwater? Not much. Yeah.

Yeah. You got a lesser address to whom it may concern of George Washington's Bathwater. Yeah. I don't like that. I like that. I like that sheen of oil on the top. Stop it.

No. It's like I got a wig powder substrate. Stop. Oh, yeah. I just ate lunch. Got a little bit of woody flavor from the teeth. Yeah. This tastes like ivory.

Is that? Is that? Is that syphilis? Is there? There was a. Mail was delivered by air. First time to organize us. In 1911 as a stunt, right?

From Garden City, Long Island to Miniola, Long Island. That's about six miles. Hmm. So it was like the one of those like machines that you stamp a penny in. Yeah. Yeah. They only did it once.

For reasons which we'll get into right now. The theory here was they could deliver mail just like they deliver it from a nonstop express train. Right? Oh, no. I know how you deliver mail from an express train. Yeah. They dumped the bag out of the airplane

as it passed over the post office at 500 feet. So they. So they just carpet bomb the mail. Okay. This is before the convention on cluster munitions. So it's fine. Well, you mentioned cluster munitions and that's appropriate because the bag burst

when it hit the ground. Bunch of the letters flew away. Oh, I feel. I feel like this could be a solved problem. You just got to give the bag a little parachute. Right. It could work. This is true.

By World War One, the advantage of flight for military use were obvious. Right. So planes got bigger. Planes became sort of semi mass produced. Right. So people could bomb each other and shoot at each other. Right.

Right. And observe artillery. Yes. Now the United States faced an issue which is they were going to have to enter World War One, but they didn't really have many pilots. Certainly not many pilots who were trained in flying long distances.

Right. So one solution. How far is the long distance in this case? I like, like, I don't know, 40 miles. Yeah. One solution that was proposed was scheduled airmail. Right. We train pilots in all conditions,

provide revenue in the process. Right. It's win-win. So this is. We'll get to that. The source on this is CV Clines. This was an article published in the May 1994 issue of aviation history.

I think there's also an online version. I'll put a link to it. So day one of airmail. Here we go. Colonel E.A. Deeds of the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army, because this is before there was an Army Air Corps. Right.

Offered to run the first airmail service for the post office. The route was going to go from Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia, to New York City, and back once a day, each way, five days a week. Oh, office hours. Yes. And this is because, again, the folks in Europe wanted more pilots with cross-country experience.

Right. So on March 1st, an agreement was reached to establish the pilot by May 15th. I want to say, what year was this? Did I not write down the year? You did not. I'm an idiot. I mean, just think about, like, the two methods of

gaining experience as a pilot at this point, if you were in the U.S. Army. It's 1918. Thank you. So go and join the French Air Force. Go and join, like, Escadron Lafayette, which, well, black pilots did, because they weren't able to do it in the U.S. Army,

and get killed in the first 15 minutes or learn, like, sort of a soul's born sort of learning curve, like you either die instantly or you learn, or you do this with mailbags, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, I'm always, I'm never going to pass up an opportunity to talk about Eugene Bullard. After this agreement was reached, no one did anything,

right, for a while. Cool. Again, this is May 15th, 1918, and this service is supposed to start. War's going to be over by November. And there's an issue here, of course. Washington, D.C. doesn't have an airfield. New York City doesn't have an airfield.

Philadelphia does have a little airfield called Busselton Field. I assume that's where Northeast Philly Airport is now? No, it's actually somewhere else. Yeah, it's not, it's not, I tried to figure out exactly where it was, and I couldn't figure out. Other than it's in Busselton. So anyway, Major Rubin H. Fleet, who is in charge

of pilot instruction at the Army Air Service. Invented. They hadn't invented normal names yet. Yes. Learned about the proposed route on May 3rd. On May 6th, Secretary of War, Newton Baker, told Fleet that he would be in charge of making it happen. Oh.

He has nine days. That's prompt, I guess. So Fleet protested this decision. He had no pilots with experience flying across country, no planes capable of that range. You know, their best option, the Curtis JN-4D Jenny. That's this plane here. It had a range of 88 miles.

Oh, right. And Baker said, you got to figure this out. What distance is it roughly between D.C. and Philadelphia? 150 miles. 150. And then it's 80 miles from Philly to New York, or 90 miles, excuse me. You got to land in a field halfway through

and then find a way to fuel up your plane. Oh boy, it gets worse. It's going to get worse, yeah. So the postmaster general had already issued a press release, right? The flight was going to happen. Oh. Yeah.

Don't like that. Don't like being down to a press release. So Fleet called up the Curtis Airplane Corporation, unlike one of those old timey funds, you know, where you have to hold the receiver, you know. Yeah, yeah. And speak into the thing on the wall. Yeah, he had to dial 12 for this.

Yes. Yeah, it was a long distance call, which means that it went, you know, 14 blocks over. Fleet called up Curtis Airplane Corporation to modify some of the planes with bigger fuel tanks and to remove the seat for the instructor, right? And add some larger engines, right? Yeah.

It's a superlegaria. Yes. And then Curtis made some, excuse me, Fleet made arrangements to use College Park Airport for the flight, right? College Park Airport is about nine miles north of Washington, D.C. And the postmaster general said, no, you can't use that one.

It's too far from the post office, right? OK, so they can't use the actual roof. They can't use the actual airport to land and take off the planes. So he finds an open field in West Potomac Park, the polo grounds. And that's where they're going to, that's the airplane staging point, right?

They go from that open field to bustleton field. And then in New York City, they wind up picking Belmont Park in Long Island, you know, it's a horse racing track, right? It's still there, of course. I mean, it makes sense, right? It's flat, it's straight. This is true, yes.

Until you get to that curve. Oh, well, then you just like, you pull on the stick and you just go around. That's a good point, yeah. And these are like old timey planes, you know, they take like 10 feet to take off and they take off at like six miles an hour. So Fleet had the job of choosing four of the six pilots

to be assigned to the route, two who were supposed to pilot the first flights were political assignments. Oh, yes. Now that's the graph that I've come to know and love from like early 20th century American politics. So lieutenants James C. Edgerton and George L. Boyle were selected by the post office for their qualifications

as pilots. They had a full 60 hours of training and were, respectively, son of a post office purchasing official and son-in-law of interstate commerce commission guy, Judge Charles C. McCord. How convenient for them. Yes, Knights of the Sky. Neither had any cross country flight experience

and in fact, both of them just graduated flight school a few days before, right? So on May 13th, Ruben Fleet took the train up to Hazelhurst Field in Long Island with the pilots to receive the modified biplanes. And he was happy to see that Curtis had delivered the planes in time, but he was not pleased to see that they were delivered in crates disassembled.

Ah, I see. I get aviation, baby. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So army mechanics scrambled to build the planes, right? It was less than 72 hours before the first flight. Army mechanics ever not had to scramble. Like, if you're an army mechanic, if you ever had the time

to fix something at your leisure, you're probably a shitty army mechanic. Yeah. By the afternoon of May 14th, two of the planes were ready to go. So Fleet took an unmodified Jenny and led Lieutenant's Howard P. Culver, who is the most experienced pilot of the pilots there, and Lieutenant

Edgerton to Busselton Field in Philly, right? Which again, he's in an unmodified Jenny with a range of 88 miles and is a 90-mile flight. How did we not end up with a kind of like belief in a Delaware triangle? Right. That's a good question, Alex. The Bermuda triangle exists because planes crashed

in it because people didn't know what they were doing, right? How did we not end up believing that this particular area of Maryland Delaware is not haunted? Oh, it's haunted. We'll get to that. I see. Actually, the crazy thing is that you may not know

this, but Roz is an incarnation of a downed pilot from 1921. You can tell by his grizzled beard that he was a flying man once. That's right. And he's come back to warn us of podcast's future. Ooh. That's right.

It's what happens if you get like a pair of old goggles and like the leather hat on me. I'm a leather daddy, but only for old-timey aviation. So they flew. They flew from Hazelton Field, which is about here over to Belmont Park. They refuel because you need to refuel after the

six-mile flight or whatever it is. Jesus. It's like a tractor engine in these things. And in the very late afternoon, they took off and flew in a general southward direction, right? Now, Fleet's plane was the slowest and he was supposed to be the leader, right? But Edgerton and Culver wound up flying ahead of

them and then disappearing into the distance, right? Although they got Flight 19. All three of them wound up crashing into different fields and then having to ask farmers for the directions and buy gas off them and then take off again. This is a very inefficient way to try and plow different bits of Virginia.

Somehow they all made it to Busselton Field, but they all agreed the planes are basically unflyable, right? All kinds of problems with them. One of them had a hole in the gas tank. So he was like, how? Well, I don't know. Apparently they plugged it with a pencil.

I know self-sealing gas tanks weren't invented until the 30s, right? But like, what were they making these things out of? Fucking tin? Yeah. Well, I had to come up with basically a whole modification scheme for the plane. Tin and canvas, Alice.

In a week. This is suddenly reminding me of the, because I have autism, because of the World War II, it's reminding me of the World War II British Army solution to transporting large amounts of fuel, which was not to use a jerry can, but to use something called a flimsy, which was literally just like a fucking rubberized canvas sort of

balloon that you filled with petrol and just kind of carried around and hoped for the best. It's just like milk in a bag in Canada. Exactly. Stop. Don't say the phrase milk in a bag to me again, please. I know it's real.

I know it's real. And I know our listeners are going to do the fucking weird shit where someone's either going to mail us milk in a bag or be. No. No. No, no. Don't mail us milk in a bag.

No, that's what I'm saying. Don't do that, please. It'll be spoiled by the time it gets here. I remember when we talked about jean jackets, someone did DM me a picture of themselves like just wearing a jean jacket and they're having glasses and I was like, thank you, but I'm taking it.

I'm sorry, ladies. All right. Hit up Ross for all your DM thirst trap needs. Well, so I'm checking and I am wrong about the flimsy. It was made of tin. It just had crimped seams. Oh, that doesn't.

Well. Oh, that sounds like a great way to just get a fuel bar everywhere you go. Absolutely. The army mechanics at bustleton field worked through the night to fix one of the planes, just one of them. Pathetic.

And fleet flew that plane down to the Washington Polo fields the next morning arriving 25 minutes before the mail was scheduled to depart. Now, Lieutenant Boyle, who was supposed to fly the first scheduled mail, he took the train. Spark. Yeah.

So with a lot of fanfare and pomp and circumstance and with President Woodrow Wilson, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in attendance. I have heard of that guy. Yeah. Pilot George L.

Boyle took off from West Potomac Park on May 15, 1918 with instructions to follow the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks to Philadelphia. Because that's the only navigation you can do. Yes. Yeah. They turned over the propellers and the plane didn't start.

They tried again. Plane still didn't start. They checked the spark plugs, which were fine. Then they checked the gas tank, which was empty. So the dignitaries stood around and waited 45 minutes while a truck brought gasoline in from the Washington Navy yard. Boyle took off, barely missed the tree line.

They said he cleared it by about three feet. Three feet a dream, baby. He had 140 pounds of mail to be relieved at a Bustleton airfield by Lieutenant Culver, right? Now, we've discussed a couple of times on the show, I think most recently in the Armored Trains episode, the con that the Philadelphia Baltimore and Washington Railroad, which is a Pennsylvania

Railroad predecessor, the con they pulled to get into Washington, DC, which was the main line was from Baltimore to Port Tobacco, Maryland, right? And then there was a branch line. I'm in air quotes there, branch line that went from Bowie, Maryland to Washington, DC, right? Yeah. Boyle made it as far as Bowie, Maryland.

Pathetic. Oh, no. And then and then he took a hard right and flew south. How hard? Along. Along, man. Along the Philadelphia Baltimore and Washington

Railroad to Waldorf, Maryland. 20 miles south of where he started. Very good. He ran out of fuel and he crash landed on a farm. He was unharmed, but the expensive and specially modified plane was upside down. The field, of course, was owned by assistant postmaster general Otto Prager.

So the mail was quietly trucked back to Washington, DC. The plane was repaired and flew back, culvert departed on time and arrived on time at Belmont Park in Washington in New York City, but he didn't have any mail. Um, Edgerton on the reverse flight arrived on time

with mail at the polo grounds in DC, right? So two days later, the postmaster general insisted against Ruben Fleets wishes that Boyle be given another chance. So Lieutenant Edgerton flew ahead of him as far north as the Susquehanna River, right? So they're on. Let me let me change colors here.

It's going to be yellow. You got all the way up to the Susquehanna River. I guess it's a little bit farther back here. Um, and then once he got to the Susquehanna River crossing, Edgerton's like, all right, there's no way Boyle's getting lost. He dipped his wings and flew back. Yeah, there's no way you can get lost.

Boyle immediately got lost. Yeah. I mean, I guess I get it, right? Like there's, you don't even have a paradigm for what like the earth is supposed to look like from above it. Yeah. You have no fucking ability to navigate other than visual reference and your field of no matter this.

Yeah. And this field of view out of this thing made of canvas that you can barely fucking hear yourself think. I get it. But like, come on, dude. Jesus Christ. Boyle got lost. He somehow managed to make a U-turn and followed

the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay all the way to Cape Charles, Virginia. Oh my God. Wait, wait, wait. South? Yes. This guy just loved going south. You don't have a compass?

Um, I'm not sure if I'm not sure if these were equipped with a compass or not. The problem with the compasses in these early aircraft is that they weren't shielded in such a way that the airplane that airplane itself would interfere with the. Oh my God. The compass, right? I'm not sure how that works exactly.

But the compasses in these were notoriously unreliable. Also the planes bouncing around, you know, it's all like crap. Anyway, so yeah. So he gets all the way to Cape Charles, Virginia, a hundred miles south of Washington. What we're developing is the most efficient method of the time to deliver mail from New York City to like rally North Carolina.

To a random location. Yeah, exactly. So, um, and I think Reuben Fleet said he would have gone farther, but he ran out of land. He landed, he ran out of fuel and crash landed in a field, asked a farmer for directions, bought some gas off the farmer. These planes are pretty good at crash landing, hey. That's about to say.

Yeah. And then he headed north and this time actually made it almost to Busselton Field. Oh, progress. Is it linear, baby? Yeah. That's what I have to say about that. He circled the city for a couple hours trying to pick out the

field, couldn't find it and crash landed between two trees at the Philadelphia Country Club, which is notably in Gladwin, not Philadelphia. Yeah. And so that sheared the wings off the plane and busted up the fuselage. I retract the thing about these things being good at crash landing. Well, he was unharmed. And the mail was going at six miles an hour.

Yeah. And the mail was again truck quietly to Busselton Field. So this is this guy, he was one of the ones with like political connections, right? Yes. He was the son of the Interstate Commerce Commissioner. Reasonable. Okay.

So that's a good reason to cover this shit up. Yeah. The post office department, again, asked Fleet for Boyle to be given a third chance. No. Stop going south. This time, this time Fleet put his foot down. No.

That was the first three days of post office slash Army Air Service airmail and Lieutenant Egerton, the other political appointment to his credit, flew 52 trips in all weather with only one forced landing due to mechanical issues. Jesus. All right. I'm sourcing the like wheat from the chaff, though. I was about to say, yeah.

So on August 10th, 1918, the post office took over airmail properly, and that's when the system started expanding. Right? Sure. Yes. So the USPS started airmail flights with their own aircraft, civilian pilots, USPS owned purpose built airplanes, right? This seems like a good idea.

Could they go north as well as south? Well, I actually got rid of the New York to Washington airmail service pretty quickly because it was slow. Let's compare it to the trains. Slower than the railroad. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a bit. I appreciate the arrow stamp here.

Yes. This is actually a very rare stamp, which shows the aircraft that was oiled. It was sick. Because I was in person. Yeah. It was a misprint, actually. A lot of these went out.

A lot of doing some top gun shit. That's a shame. I like it. It's just like bombing people with mail. It's quite like futurist in a way, you know? Yeah. So a fucking Daytona more is happening here. So they moved the DC area airmail operations to College Park,

where Fleet wanted it in the first place, but then they again, they discontinued it. College Park is always ready to party, but in this case, to send mail. They started scouting out areas where it could compete. The first obvious market was New York City to Chicago, right? And they did several months of Pathfinder flights, right? Which is, you know, we have to just go scout out where these planes

can fly. And at this point, World War I, the original rationale for this program to be in existence, ends. Yes. Yes. But man's fascination with sending things through the air, thankfully, never ends. That's not thankfully.

So New York to Chicago service, stopping in Belafonte, Pennsylvania. Just Belafonte, guys. Just Belafonte. It's just Belafonte, guys. It sucks. You gotta say as few vowels as possible in the name of a Pennsylvania town, I find.

Yeah. If it looks, yeah, just say it the way it's pronounced, except for school girl. And then just make up your own rules. Yes. Brian, Ohio, and then on to Chicago. That was Brian, Ohio. Brian, Ohio.

Yeah. They also stopped by Brett's house. That's the street fight radio section of the air mail. Yeah. Street fight air mail. So the New York to Chicago route was started by December 1918. Transcontinental air service was figured out by 1920, but the air mail still only traveled by air during the day,

right? Because you couldn't fly at night because you couldn't see anything, right? Hmm. So a lot of times the way this would work is, you know, the air mail would go by air during the day and then be put on a train overnight. And then when the date, when it was daytime again,

it took off the train. It's just like adding steps to add steps. Hmm. It's very slightly faster. Okay. Yeah. This is clearly worth me using a special stamp and putting on a special cool board at end of the month.

I mean, special stamps are as cool as hell. I like an air mail envelope. They're like a like red and blue sort of stripe thing. I think that looks neat. Yeah. Stamps are cool, man. Hmm. This is an official recommendation to light stamps

become a philatelist. Yeah. So the attempts to really strictly adhere to the schedule were foiled by a Wildcat pilot strike in July 1919. Awesome. That's an excellent series of words. Yeah. They were, they, they, they, they were forcing them to fly in

horrible weather and the pilots were just like, we're fucking being killed out here. Oh yeah. Yeah. So after that, air mail was only trapped, only delivered in fair weather, right? Hmm. But in the meantime, they slowly improved infrastructure for air,

air, air mail, right? So you could fly at night once they installed big light towers along the route. Right. They also put like a lighthouse or a light. Yes. Yes. They're like the.

That's cool. Or like the big, the big lanterns, the, the fires and Lord of the Rings, you know? Hmm. So it's not like marking an airfield or anything. It's just like flight towards this one, then flight towards this one. Yes.

There was, there was like a series of colorations, I believe, which would show you if this is an intermediate point or if this is a, an airfield and it would blink in Morse code to tell you which. What? Yeah. Oh, that's sick dude. Tell you which one it was.

I mean, like a beacon still do this. I want to say VOR ones, but like, yeah, no, having to do that shit in your head, like freezing. Yes. Bounty or fuck that. I regret to inform you. I'll be right back. It's gone without me.

Yeah. No, that's. I'm going to grab a backup beer then. Yeah. I'm going to grab a third beer. You know what? Edit this shit out because I'm not hot. I'm not helming this by myself.

Okay. All right. Fine. I'll poop my pants. We want to talk about Alice. No, just leave. All right. I'll poop.

Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want.

Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Aloha. Aloha. We are a beer loving podcast and only one of us is supposed to feel bad about it. Well, I mean, it is Ash Wednesday. That's right.

What is that? What is that? Like, I don't remember. My Catholic is very well. What does this mean? Ash Wednesday is the one when you get the palms. Oh, yeah. You got to have the little like things smudged on you.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, you get the things much done. Yeah. It's making a joke about the palms. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the two most attended masses.

Really? The other one being Palm Sunday. Gorgeous, gorgeous girls have gorgeous, gorgeous IBS. Do you think Christmas like midnight? You're midnight mass because my mom used to love midnight mass. No. But no. Palm Sunday and Ash Wednesday are the most attended because they give you a thing.

That's the lesson to the modern church is you got to give people a thing. What are you going to talk about? It's Ash Wednesday. Catholicism. It is Ash Wednesday. Yes. I used to do that. All right.

So we're just talking about the. I made you fast knots. What? I made you fast knots. I don't know what that is. Jesus, this beer keeps fucking like the head of it keeps expanding out. The fucking neck of the bottle. It's obscene.

What are you drinking? I'm drinking a Hobson's Brewery company Shropstar pale ale. The problem is with all of these I found is that opening them, the headaches and like they're so over carbonated that the head just keeps expanding. And it's done this like I've drank this off of here like three or four times and it keeps coming. I'm drinking a peanut on as hell. Let me say that could be a problem with the beer problem with how they stored the beer.

Yeah. What kinds of things that can cause that? Absolutely. I mean, so if you know right in also sorry to God for drinking beer, but it tastes good. The I also wanted to point out that Brian Ohio here does have a why like Brian from Street Fight. So, okay, they installed. We talked about the light towers.

They installed big concrete eras for guidance during the day. Right. Ah, that's cool. You know, they do that with helicopters still like particularly in Los Angeles. That's the thing is that the police helicopters will get lost otherwise. So they just have like reference things on like painted on the roofs of buildings like this is, you know, such and such a grid square so that you don't get lost. And so, you know, what a reference things.

That's what happens when your entire city is one story bungalows. That's true. Also reminding me of the guy. I'm going to misremember what cities these are, but the guy who is like lives under the approach to Cleveland Airport and painted. Welcome to Cincinnati. Yes. Just knowing that you're a cause of anxiety in the world.

Yes. Just putting that out into the fucking ether is very funny. So planes became more sophisticated, more reliable. They were faster by 1924. It only took 32 hours to ship a letter from San Francisco to New York City and only 34 hours to go the other way. Right. Wow.

I mean, I joke, but that's fucking like impressive for the time. Pretty good. Yeah. And that was that was again, I think about all the stops they're making along the way to refuel and crap. And it's sort of around like the Pony Express, you know, because the plane would land, they transfer the mail, that plane would fuel up. The other plane would take off.

You repeat over and over again. Really like working those planes to the point of destruction. Yes. But this was a problem, which is that government was doing something well. So the both both both political parties at this point were pretty fiscally conservative. Right. You know, both Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis, Republican and Democrat respectively, campaigned on small government limited regulations on and so forth.

Silent cowl, baby. Yeah. And then Senator Robert N. LaFollette, who was the progressive slash socialist slash farmer labor candidate. Minnesota, you son of a bitch. Yeah. Yeah. He campaigned on the opposite of that and he won 13 electoral votes in Wisconsin.

That was it. But Coolidge took the big prize and Republican Congress soon went about directing the post office to contract out airmail routes as well as other measures that would explode the economy in a couple of years. Right. Yeah. What if we made this all more speculative? Yes.

What if we made this all based on like Hockham and bullshit? This is not related at all to Web three or the mess of us or anything like that. No. What if instead of the government doing it, some guys with a plane did it? Yeah. What if that so contracting out airmail service? It was reasons right would be a cheap and easy way to rapidly build out the air transportation network, right?

You think it's going to be like railroads, you know, you're going to give it to like four guys in waistcoats and watch fobs and they're going to obtain the right of way by hook or by crook and mostly by crook. And then you can come in and like it makes sense. Yes. We're going to get 500 Chinese guys to dynamite through this cloud. And then we're going to deport all of them and it's going to work perfectly. Exactly.

Well, in practice, it was tough to find people to run the routes, right? Because a lot of airlines were just a guy with a plane. Weird bill. Weird bill. It's not himself. Weird plane. Yeah. Exactly.

Subsidies for moving the mail were extremely high, about $3 per pound per thousand miles, right? Jesus. So it was uneconomical to haul passengers, which is one of the intentions of this legislation is we'd have passenger air travel as well. But you need to charge about $500 a seat to break even. Imagine that. That's $519.20 too.

Okay. Yeah. Point taken. I mean, that's kind of how much passenger air travel should kind of cost now if we're factoring in the climate, right? This is true. Yeah. Now, this structure incentivize the airlines to move as much mail as possible, right?

The more mail you move, the more money you get. And the subsidy was higher than the postage. So naturally, they all found buddies in the junk mail business. Yes. Mailing nothing to nobody for no reason. And they shipped large quantities of junk mail by air and then split the profits, right? This is a truly American story. Yes.

I have nothing but admiration. Or they'd artificially weigh down the mail. Or they shipped bulky objects by mail. One airline was fond of mailing a cast iron stove back and forth. Yeah. I opened my junk mail and I'm like, honey, it's bricks again. There was a situation like that in, I want to say, Butte, Montana, the Anaconda Butte and something railroad wound up in a situation where the post office was giving them a massive

subsidy for the mail service. And one of one of the directors took that opportunity to mail a building. One brick at a time. I prefer to think of it intact, like throwing some kind of a massive thing of packing sheets over it and putting a single stamp on the door. It's a it's a whole new meeting for building envelope. We lose Liam. I think so.

I think he may be pooping right now. Nonetheless, we continue. Viavante. Yeah. Now, despite this windfall profits, these same aircraft operators usually under capitalized and operating on low margins, right? They're unwilling or unable to afford new aircraft and equipment. So the airmail remained slow, expensive and uncompetitive with railroads, right?

And it's a joke. And also, like, you have to figure a bunch of these pilots are getting killed, right? Oh, yeah, all the time. Sorry, I was just got a phone call telling me I didn't get a job. Oh, sorry to hear about that. They did the whole, like, we really like you and I'm just like, not enough. I'm really not that much. I'm putting the call out here now.

Hi, Liam. Hi, Liam, for your job. Thanks, guys. Yeah, I need to health insurance beyond what we have as my health insurance possess. And I don't know, just frustrated, but I'm good. I'm sorry I've been in and out. I don't know. That's fine, it's fine.

All right. Where are we? I apologize. We are talking about mailing cast iron stoves back and forth and the government. In terms of making things heavier than air flight, that's a quick way to do it. I will say that. So anyway, there's over 45 airlines maintaining the skeletal system of airmail routes. And, you know, this is like most fiscally conservative government policies.

The privatization of airmail was expensive, inefficient, rife with corruption, and just generally didn't work very well. It's important to note at this point, there are absolutely no parallels to anything else here. So this this next slide is kind of an aside, but I think it does demonstrate sort of the the airmail environment, the air freight environment, what the railroads can do. Yeah. Shout out to the guys, the me and the boys after the boys.

Yeah, me and the boys after COVID right here with Pennsylvania Railroad. Four hundred and sixty. Charles Lindberg, the United States and Nazi and killed his own kid. He was he was like the biggest, like the most famous American other than the president to like. Wait a damn. Yes. Wait a damn second. This is this is the Lindbergh engine, right? Yes. That's what we're going to talk about.

Oh, I was so excited. I knew what the Lindbergh engine was. There is a halfway plausible alternative history by Philip Roth, which posits becoming president of the US plot against America. I highly recommend it. The six is a more beautiful locomotive than anything the New York Central could have ever jumped up, and I will be hearing no criticisms. I don't say six.

You're saying beautiful locomotive. E sex is a good looking one. Yeah. Both of you are insane. You both have trained madness. I am backing against the door. I have like a revolver in my hand. I can't trust either of you anymore. Oh, four sixties of beauty.

You can go here. Yeah, it's in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. So anyway, yeah, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris nonstop on May 27th, 1927, right? You know, say he's the first guy to fly across the ocean. Actually, not the first guy to fly across the ocean, but the first guy to fly from New York City to Paris because a couple of people had flown from like St.

John, Newfoundland to Dublin. Yeah. And he flew around Europe for a while. He met all these tremendous crowds. He was awarded a bunch of distinguished national awards. Came back to the United States, board the U.S.S. Memphis creates a single almost single handedly created the sort of mythology of the pilot is a modern night of the sky.

Yes. You know, June 11th, he arrived at the Washington Navy and he was awarded a distinguished flying cross by Coolidge, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I don't care. It didn't invest in childcare very much. Yes. Well, it's a big, big media event, right? And all the newsreel companies wanted to be the first

to get their newsreels to theaters in New York City. And by this point, newsreel companies generally chartered flights for this purpose. But Universal International Newsreel, because I think a Randolph Hearst company, they decided to pull a stunt. I love how at any point in the 20th century, I guess it's still true now, but so few people do it.

You could just sit down and you could open your pocket watch and you could look at the time and you could say, OK, let's do some silly bullshit. Yes. I mean, what is this entire endeavor? But silly bullshit. What indeed? You're getting carpet bombed with mail. Like at some point, things are not going well for you.

I thought you meant the podcast. No, I get carpet bombed with mail when I open the goddamn P.O. box. Send me my shit, Liam. No, I'm not going to. It's mine now. So while the rest of the newsreel companies were racing to the airport, probably College Park Airport to get the get the newsreels onto planes, U.I.'s film guys arrived at Washington Union Station by car.

They ran through the concourse and onto the train on track eight. Right. And this was the Pennsylvania Railroad had provided a train composed of one baggage express car and one coach and E6 Atlantic type number 460. That's the locomotive thing. I'll say about the Pennsylvania Railroad. Right. You insult the six. We're going to fight. No, no, no.

This is this is one thing I'll say in its favor compared to the New York Central is that the Pennsylvania Railroad never saw an opportunity to do some dumb shit it didn't like. Yes, right. This was a railroad that was incorporated with the word send it like. So the to the train set off. It reached ninety five miles an hour before it left the city limits. See. Yeah.

In Delaware, they clocked it at one hundred and fifteen miles an hour. It only slowed down for curves and tunnels. Um, the train only made one stop because after taking on water at speed from a track pan, the water scoop and the tender broke. So they had to stop in Wilmington for water. That's incredible. So four sixty and the Lindberg special, as it was called,

reached Manhattan transfer in two hours and fifty minutes, which is about the same schedule as the fastest the cell I expressed today. Progress. Yes. At one point, a plane chartered by a rival newsreel company paced the train and then sped off into the distance after dipping its wings, right? The plane had made it there quicker. But International Universal had the last laugh.

The baggage express car behind four sixty was no ordinary baggage express car. It was a mobile dark room and film editing studio car. Yes. Fuck the rules. So they they took the news rail, they developed the film in route. They edited the film. They installed all the silent movie, you know, cards and all that crap. And and they duplicated it into ten reels.

So despite arriving in New York City later than the chartered planes, International Universal's newsreels were in New York theaters a full hour before the competition. Yeah, in the 20s, chartered air flight air freight could compete with the railroads in extraordinary circumstances. But where does that leave, you know, scheduled air mail, right? It was still kind of, you know, this is kind of a grift, right? There's not a lot of stuff that needs to move that quickly at this point.

It's only economical over long distances. You know, and the airlines are under capitalized. They're unreliable, you know, the airplanes are unreliable. You know, and this is it's not a great situation for air mail because it's a niche market at this point. Yeah. And the only thing that would really like save chartered air freight. I mean, a scheduled air mail at this point would be either massive governmental intervention or everybody in the country

somehow believing that they have access to, like, a small parcel of something they've ordered the previous day. Yes. Luckily, this will never happen. But one man came to the rescue. Oh, no. Herbert Hoover. Oh, Hoover has never come to any. Bastard. This is an anti-hoover podcast.

Yeah. Hoover's postmaster general, William Folger Brown, wanted to increase the efficiency of the private air mail system. So he retained a guy who had been assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics named William McCracken, Jr., who's now a private lawyer at this point. He they two plotted together to figure out how do we make this more efficient, right? And the idea was very simple.

If you have large airlines, they can deliver mail cheaper with bigger, newer and more reliable planes. You're doing fucking British British Railway stuff in like a weirder timeline where you're like, first we privatize it and then we consolidate it. But yeah, it's it's even it was even, you know, the big four the consolidation in the end. But yeah, so McCracken and Brown gathered the larger airlines together

for what became known as the spoils conferences, right, to divvy up cool routes and rates and structure what was to become the airmail act of 1930. And design a shitload of really cool posters. Oh, yeah. Now, these large airlines didn't really exist yet, but this is sort of where the structure was determined and how who was going to buy what so on and so forth. Right. So I think one one that's notable, of course, William Boeing of Boeing aircraft and Frederick Renscher of Pratt and Whitney, right?

Oh, you sons of bitches. They initiate a series of hostile takeovers even before the spoils conference to create a full transatlantic airline, which is also fully integrated with the aircraft manufacturing business called United Aircraft and Transportation Company, right? And that was that was Boeing Boeing aircraft, Sikorsky aircraft, and then breaking your guitar from that day to this. Yes.

If a losing your luggage, fucking getting you circling over New York airport for no reason, for for two extra hours. Yeah, this is where it will begin. It's United Airlines. Well, I mean, I'm still a customer, unfortunately. Yeah, you can't you can't not be, I guess. I'm not going to fly a low cost airline. That's that's some don't do it.

It's like, what are you not a podcaster? My dignity is worth more than that. But it's not. But still don't fly spirit. So, yeah, so they created that was the most ambitious organization. It was a full vertically integrated monopoly. Brown didn't like this because it happened before the airmail act and not after when it was supposed to happen.

But the act still passed and Brown's consolidation plan went forward. So 24 of the 27 airmail contracts at this point were in charge of just or in control of just three airlines, which were United Aircraft and Transportation, right? The Transcontinental and Western Airline TWA, TWA. Yes. And American Airways, right?

Ignore that it says airlines down here. That'll be relevant later. TWA, Transcontinental and Western, it actually had been formed by Brown, just strong arming a bunch of airlines that didn't want to merge into merge. Now kiss. Yeah. There was actually a fun aside here.

Transcontinental Airways or airlines are always transcontinental air transportation had the first transcontinental route, right? But it only flew during the day. And then the night you would transfer to a train. Oh, OK. That sounds like cheating. Then when you woke up, you get back on the plane. Mm hmm. So and that was why, you know, that their acronym was TAT.

And a lot of people said TAT stands for take a train. So the Air Mail Act also had another provision, which is contracts would be based on space for mail on the planes rather than by item or by weight of mail carried, right? So airlines would now be more incentivized to carry passengers rather than create mail and transport it. Than a shitload of ovens. Yes, corrects.

Things of this nature. So this consolidation plan worked pretty good. It halved airmail costs for mileage and increased reliability. These bigger companies were able to invest in better aircraft, right? Better pilots, better training, more ground based infrastructure. And you even have stuff like radio beacons at this point for like instrument flying, right? It also really pissed a lot of people off who own smaller airlines.

Well, there's at least like 24 of them, right? Yeah. So Charles Townsend Luddington and Amelia Earhart started Luddington Airline in 1929 to run hourly passenger flights between Camden Central Airport, which is right by where the that's Camden, New Jersey, right by where the the shopping center with the restaurant equippers and the Harbor Freight is, right?

They flew between there and Newark, New Jersey, right? Which that airport still in the same spot. And Washington Airport, which is now where the Pentagon is. Also had a really cool poster. Look at the fucking lines on this shit. I'm so into it. It's really cool. This is interesting because Luddington was as far as I can tell, the the sort of proper Philadelphia airline.

You know, this was the airline run by the same Philadelphia Protestants running the Pennsylvania Railroad. So, you know, they were going to run hourly flights, right? Every hour on the hour, as the poster says. And they had great service, frequent service, strong profits, even the depression. They couldn't get a mail contract, right? Even after they significantly underbid, you know, the current owner

of the contract, which is Eastern Air Transport, right? Blatant favoritism and corruption. Well, they bid Luddington bid 25 cents a mile in Eastern Air Transport bid 89 cents a mile. Oh, Jesus. Oh, this was the Luddington's bid, probably would have lost money. But it was based on Eugene Vidal's. Eugene Vidal was father of Gore Vidal and the

executive on Luddington. He believed airmail was going to get so big that 25 cents a mile. We'll be making that money back in like a year or so. Yeah, you do it as a loss leader. It's a loss leader and the short confidence in the airmail system, right? But yeah, they couldn't get the contract in Eastern Air Transport, subsequently bankrupted Luddington and acquired its assets in 1933, right? You motherfuckers.

But again, this is all according to Brown's plan, right? Small airlines are done to the people of Philadelphia. Yes. You know, small airlines would be shut out, swallowed up by bigger ones. Guys, I think I would be a libertarian now. Wow. Well, I don't think the libertarians liked Hoover. You know, I mean, yeah, small government, small government, big business.

The reporter for William Randolph Hearst heard this story while talking to an ex Luddington executive. He investigated it further. And when he published it, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama took interest. Right. Oh, boy. Interstate Commerce Commission hearings and a special Senate committee that was controlled by Democrats investigating, you know, essentially investigating the Republican Hoover administration

managed to find not very much actual substantiated evidence of fraud or collusion, right? Actually, by this point, Hugo Black, he disassociated from the Klan in 1925. Hi. Well, yeah, he was anti Catholic. He resigned from the Klan in 1925 because he gets appointed to the Supreme Court for being a tremendously loyal new dealer in 37. They throw him out of the Klan because of his last name.

Yeah, they were just like no blacks allowed, literally, figuratively. So other than the two contracts for the two transcontinental lines awarded to TWA and American Airways, right? Yeah. But it was an election year, right? Democrats felt they really needed to play this thing up. So they held hearings. They called up McCracken, the lawyer from before, right?

Brought up to testify as capacity as an airline lawyer. And McCracken cited attorney client privilege and refused to testify. And then also the fuck up Friday, shut the fuck up Friday. Yeah, also allowed one of his clients to remove and destroy documents which were under subpoena. You're not supposed to do that. Alice probably knows that better than I do. But it's it's your opinion. Yes. I think it was a guy.

I think it was a guy from Northwest Airlines. I would say that is still contained within the provisions of shut the fuck up Friday. He said he said the documents. Well, he said it was a personal document. And should. Yeah, what are you going to do? Call the bull. Burn it. Fuck off. Yeah. Oh, we're talking about. Northwest Airlines of D.B. Cooper fame, right?

Yeah, it was a long time later, though. This is. Yes. Ross D Cooper wasn't in the thirties. OK, we might have been alive in the thirties. I just want to make sure we don't confuse our listeners. So it was D.B. Cooper born, would you say? Well, we don't know, right? I mean, we know you have an idea of like roughly you think so.

Was it like in his forties? Isn't that the air we're going to fucking solve this D.B. Cooper shit, I feel. I I always loved the idea of, you know, once it's like we we branch out into true crime and working ass backwards. We solve all the true crimes. That's right. Stay sexy and don't get murdered. Oh, I hate crime, which we do.

We do a true crime podcast where we we make it as boring as possible and just solve everything. I'll remove the musty, really ruin the lives of women everywhere. I you know, I've been doing that for a while. The hard say I understand that, like, you know, I don't understand true crime podcasts, but I guess people listen to this, which is. I mean, it's exciting to feel like you might get murdered and to like give yourself an anxiety disorder. I got mine for free.

But like it is exhilarating. So I guess I understand. I mean, that's what I describe. That's what auto erotic asphyxiation is for. Our or in his case, auto rosic asphyxiation. Our our our podcast does not describe you being brutally murdered by a person, but rather the senseless, unseeing corporation. What we're doing is true crime, but for social murder.

Exactly. Oh, oh, that's spicy. I like that. Yeah, stay sexy and don't get social murdered. So McCracken was tried for contempt of Congress and convicted. And after a couple of years of appeals, he spent 10 days in jail. Oh, I feel like it would have just been easier to go to jail. Yeah. And this, along with a couple of economic problems that happened near the end of Hoover's administration. I've heard of these. Yeah. Yeah.

It was pretty well known for what I understand. Was enough for Hoover to lose, right? So. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assistant secretary to the Navy was elected. Yeah, well, fucking pink social Democrat as we could have had corrupt Huey Long communism in America. Every single one of you listening in the United States would to this day have a no show job, which paid obscene amounts of money that like was owned by one of Huey Long, the 19th cousins.

There would be twenty seven Supreme Court justices who had passed everything you ever wanted, all named long. I did really like that point you made, Alice, some time ago, which was that Roosevelt basically did just enough to for star revolution. Yeah, that was that was that was his thing, right? That was the thing you have to hold the United States together. And we know by this point that you should not try and hold the United States

together, because it's a terrible, benighted nation. And the way that you do that is you give people just enough. And it still didn't stop the capitalists from trying to fucking assassinate him. Like, I mean, I mean, I think if FDR had lived longer, you would have had a different situation just because, you know, during during World War Two, he and Stalin got along like a house on fire. Oh, yeah. The point. The point of the.

You're also here to go, which I learned. Yeah. He and Stalin were like just hanging out and freezing out Churchill and Churchill was just getting furious. There was a serious possibility that having delivered, you know, victory and peace, he could have, I don't know, done something more intense, but he never did because he died. So, unfortunately, because he was killed by the CIA.

Yes. It's the CIA didn't exist then because he was killed by the OSS. Wild Bill Donovan personally shot FDR. Basically how no one talks about this. Of course, you should stop believing this. Yeah. They hit him with the polio gun. Yeah, he was he was walking up until like the last days of the war.

And then that is how it happened. Favisley, of course, took him out. Yeah. FDR was elected. He and Postmaster General James A. Farley of the Farley Post Office in New York City, New York City. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no part of Penn Station. Yeah, everything eventually is part of Penn Station.

Headquarters is the strategic homeland division. I don't know what that is. I'm referencing a Tom Clancy game. Oh, I see. Great. Could have been a great game. Yeah, could have been. Had its moments.

They decided that despite the fact that much of the Black Commission's findings were a lot of hot air, the scandal was big enough and bad enough that it needed to do something to show that they were doing something. Yes, something must be seen to be done. Yes. Well, Roosevelt said, all right, we'll cancel all existing airmail contracts as quickly as possible and re-award them, right? On June 1st, 1934.

Now, this is in February of the same year, February 9th, right? Roosevelt and Farley needed to come up with an interim solution. Secretary of War George H. Dern mentioned the Army Air Corps could probably do it, right? I have a back to square one. Yeah. So Dern hadn't actually asked anyone if they could actually do that. But he had a meeting with the chief of the Air Corps,

Major General Benjamin Fowless. Foulois? Foulois. I like Fowlois. I like Fowlois. I'm going with Fowlois. Foulois mentioned offhandedly that, yeah, we could probably be ready in about a week or 10 days.

Now, what Foulois had assumed here was that the executive order to hand over the mail contracts would take a while to actually come down and they could be ready about a week or 10 days after that. And that most of the mail would, you know, just go by train anyway, right? You know, this is we don't. It would be the same kind of like silly bullshit as the first time the Army Air Corps or its predecessors have tried to do this. So after this meeting, he directed the staff to form a plan to carry the mail.

Then realized he probably ought to notify chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, about this development, right? Oh, no. As he was about to do that, a very angry General Douglas MacArthur burst into his office demanding the pipe first. Yeah. Demanding to know more about what he had just heard from a reporter, which was that Roosevelt had just canceled all the airmail contracts

and that on February 19th, 10 days from now, the Army Air Corps would handle all the mail. And then MacArthur to demonstrate his anger, shot a child. They probably ate that child. There are some cool photos of like specimen envelopes that they intended to deliver first using this, where it's like there's one of them with the cool Army Air Corps round on it. You know, the dot and the star.

The Army delivers the mail and it's like, ah, I love Rooseveltian social democracy. This is this is this is for a while here. The guy, not the planes. Yeah, he was actually a plane. Yeah. So despite they gave him that job, he looked so much like a plane. Yeah, there you go. So, you know, despite the waste in the private airmail system, right?

The economics had forced airlines to improve technology, right? Your airmail planes, they're large, they're fast. They can fly in all weather conditions, right? They had sophisticated instruments for flying in low visibility and radio for communication, right? The pilots were experienced. They'd flown all the routes many, many times over. And the airmail schedules required flights in all weather at all times.

And it was, you know, a routine achievement, right? The Army Air Corps did not have those things. No, you see, they have like a sort of a prototype fighter and a prototype, like, I guess, bomber here. Yes, I mean, they were recovering from years of systemic underfunding by the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. They had planes, which were mostly trainers and fighters, right? They had pilots who only trained in daylight in clear weather

close to their air bases. Love the idea of resurrecting this program and you get your mail via F-35. Yeah, it's about as reliable as this is. I can't believe it didn't work. Yeah, your mail, your Amazon package has not arrived because it rained in an airbase in Guam and that fucked up the like sensors on a fucking B2 Spirit, which is now crashed and incinerated your package. Your package arrives.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Your package arrives on a stinger missile. With the warhead replaced by the package. That is prop delivery. I'll tell you that. I mean, I guess it beats my other fun mail delivery system, which is the surface launch thing of Rocket Mail. Rocket Mail.

Yes, I love Rocket Mail. Rocket Mail only exists in stamps commemorating it now. But the idea was much as you would think it was kind of the navy's attempt round about the first at the time, the first instance of the army trying to get into mail happened. The navy just decided, hey, what if we just fired rockets full of mail at cities? Intercontinental ballistic mail. Exactly. It doesn't Elon Musk want to use the starship for that crap.

That whole whole like thing, like, oh, we're going to be you'll be able to go from anywhere to anywhere in 45 minutes. The thing about Elon Musk is that he. Hey, I'm not getting bleeped for once. This is a new development. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, two hundred and fifty pilots were assigned to the Army Air Corps mail operation, the AACMO. Well, that is a big ass that the gender, the gender reaffirming

gender affirming, I should say, not reaffirming. Hmm. No, stay away, mother fuckers. I will do I will do to you with the where with the vermark did, and I will take off your eyelids. Oh, my God. Jesus. Fantastic. I don't know. Forty of these pilots had less than two years of experience. You're actually threatening a Polish man, a POC with a pop. Yeah, a person of Polish experience with culture right now.

The Pope. The Pope. Yeah. His Holodist, the Pope, Ross. I mean, you can't say that like a second. Yeah, John Paul, the second was a person of Polish experience. Ross, you could be Pope, I believe it. Yeah, you'd have to get a pretty good pop. Yeah, you wouldn't be half bad. And we'd get it by you could get it by acclimation, right?

You'd be the kind of pope. You'd be like the John Paul first kind of pope who just gets pushed down the stairs a weekend. I wouldn't push it out. I just want to say any Cardinals listening to this podcast. Vote for me. It would be funny. It would be funny.

Your reminiscence is have you considered Justin Rosniak? And if he does do it, they're a pussy. That's right. That's true. And now they can't back down. I mean, listen, if fucking Zelensky can become president of Ukraine off of a joke, why can't you become Pope off of one? Mm, good point.

That's a good point. Anyway, 104 of these pilots for the ACMO had less than two years of experience. How many? I missed that. 104. 104 out of. Thank you. Out of 250 toes.

Oh, OK. Only 31 had more than 50 hours of nighttime flying. Oh, that feels worse. Only 48 had more than 25 hours of flying in bad weather. I'm trying to work out how all of these, like, intersect. And it's in my head. It's just coming back to, like, one guy. Only two.

I can tell you that. Only two had more than 50 hours of instrument time. Oh, I was right. I was right. And most of them were reservists, right? Now, they dedicated 122 aircraft to ACMO. Few of them had landing lights, navigation lights, or even lights in the cockpit.

Don't hit a mad's way. Yeah. Very few of them had radios. That way. None of them had instruments. That's why. Including things like an artificial horizon. Yeah, that's why.

Were you not listening? Oh, you're just drifting off, of course. Floyd, Floyd doubled down, right? He'd said to Congress on February 4th. Listen, if you can't believe in your subordinates, what kind of manager are you? Yeah, we have assigned to this work the most experienced pilots in the Army Air Service, he said.

We've had a great deal of experience in flying at night and flying in fogs and bad weather in blind flying and flying in other under all other conditions. This was flatly a lie. That's true, right? Yes. We have not we have not had the actual experience of flying over these scheduled routes.

But we feel that after three or four days of preliminary flying over those routes, we shall experience no difficulty in maintaining the regular schedules. I'm not sure how much I like the put me in coach approach to aviation. Two days later, three airmail pilots were killed on familiarization flights in Utah and Idaho. I'll do it.

That'll happen. That's tough. Now, Floyd, to his credit, ordered a program to fit all planes assigned to ACMO with instruments like artificial horizons and radios. But there are no mechanics trained on how to install them. Oh, we're not trained in how to use them. You just get in.

There's a loose altimeter lying on the seat. And yeah, it's like, great, I've got this now. Wow. Why is it still at zero? So the ACMO was going to run reduced service, right? Seventeen routes covering 11,000 miles. Now, on February 18th, right before the question we call it, right before ACMO was going to start, Eddie Rickenbacker from Eastern Air Transport

and Jack Fire from TWA pulled a stunt, right? Again. Oh, look, look at the time. It's time to do some silly bullshit. Yes, they flew. They flew their prototype DC. Lacey and Wee Man. They flew their prototype DC one clear across the country with fair paying passengers and mail in 13 hours,

smashing the previous record by five hours. The DC one was essentially the prototype for the DC three. Now, the following day, February 19th, the first airmail flights took off and ran straight into a blizzard that crossed the whole damn country. Most flights were canceled. People who flew did make it to their destinations, though, generally speaking.

On February 22, two planes crashed, killing the pilots and destroying the aircraft. Your mail has been incinerated along with a guy. The next day, another plane crashed and sank, drowning a passenger. Gee, this has happened within the first week. Yes, within the first three. I mean, the first fatalities were before the program started. The most vocal opponent of the ECMO scheme was

the hero of the nation and Nazi Charles Lindbergh. Hero of the nation, Nazi potential child murderer. Impossible to sell. He can't sue us. Yeah, it's true. He's dead. He sure is. Also, he was a pedophile.

Yeah. No. Like I can say it. You can say it. Yeah. He was a pedophile. Alice, I do know that to be true. Absolutely.

From from from knowledge and belief. Charles Lindbergh. Keep it together, man. I'm gonna get you some coffee. I had a solid sleep last night. How much coffee have you had? I haven't had any coffee. What?

That might be it. Yeah. Charles Lindbergh, I've seen. OK, you know what? No, it's fine. Charles Lindbergh act as a spokesman for the airline industry, which, of course, he had quite a large financial stake in. And his criticism of the scheme appeared in every major newspaper.

Additionally, Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Air Transport, also a war hero, also hated the New Deal. Little guy is going around. Thus, the plot against America, but also like the real life business blunt and stuff. Yeah. And he called Akmo legalized murder. OK, guys, it's funny how these guys can discover the concept of social murder when it suits them.

Yes. The legalized murder was the phrase that really stuck in the press. Right. Now. By March 9th, 10 pilots were dead and Akmo was already in shambles, right? One of their biggest issue was paying people and also getting getting like physically getting the money there.

People, weren't they the army? Wasn't there already a pay call? Like here's the issue is you are flying out of all these new airfields that are not controlled by the army, right? You are doing maintenance in all these locations as well. The pilots have to like, you know, they have to sort of be able to go to the store and buy shit. It's it was really difficult setting up like the the pay structure here.

I I I I I should have devoted more time to this. I didn't because there was it was a huge problem in the beginning. But it also meant that they couldn't, you know, procure things for like safety devices for the planes, like, for instance, thermometers. So, you know, when the plane has iced wings and is unsafe to fly. Now, the other thing is very few of the planes were actually suitable for carrying mail, right? They were mostly fighters and trainers with seats removed and baggage

compartments added, which made the planes unbalanced and difficult to control, right? Yeah, this mail like sliding around right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Army pilots who are lucky enough to have a plane with correctly installed instruments often chose not to use them. OK. Sure. Sure. Instead of relying on instruments, they would simply fly below bad weather

and rely on visual navigation. Right now, that's some fucking like William Langevich should kind of like just fly the damn airplane as kind of a conservatism. Morons, none of the instruments in the planes were installed consistently, right? So you wouldn't if you were flying a different aircraft, it may be the same model aircraft, but maybe your artificial horizon is somewhere else or the altimeter is somewhere else. Or, you know, maybe you got a maybe the radio is installed on the other side.

You know, so nothing was familiar to pilots. You had to familiarize yourself with the aircraft. I feel like built hand-built is not good in terms of aviation. It's a small batch, artisanal plane. Yes. Of course. Now, despite this, by the middle of the March, most of the mail was being delivered on time. Jesus, that's not bad.

I guess early March, after some of the last fatalities. But it was still a scandal from Roosevelt, right? Who summoned Folloy and MacArthur to the White House on March 10th. Folloy recounts in his autobiography. For the next 10 minutes, MacArthur and I received a tongue lashing, which I put down in my book as the worst I ever received in all my military service. You suck them off. Kind of weird, but OK, dude.

Sure. There was no doubt that what bothered Roosevelt the most was severe criticism. His administration was getting over the contract cancellation. He did not seem genuinely concerned or even interested in the difficulties the Air Corps was having. He was a Navy guy. What are the folks who give a shit about like airplanes? Yeah, just put the mail on a ship like an adult.

In response to this, Folloy grounded the aircraft for 10 days, right? When the planes started flying again, March 19th, the schedule was again cut back to it was now eight routes and much less flying at night. They lost another pilot on March 17th in the training flight. And just really like once again, like corks growing in. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress had finally found something to pin on the overwhelmingly popular New Deal Roosevelt administration, right?

Yeah, we don't have to just kill him. We can like social murder. Yeah, it's important. I think important context here that no ordinary person is sending anything by air mail. This is still kind of a niche operation. But the newspapers covered the scandal relentlessly. There are congressional inquiries and the ACMO was, you know, ruthlessly pilloried despite, you know, the safety record improving significantly

after the March grounding. Pretty soon, there were temporary contracts with commercial airlines supplementing ACMO service. Meanwhile, Senator Hugo Black and Dennis McKellar began drafting up a new air mail bill. I there's there's a future in which like the Libs. I mean, think about how much they would enjoy getting their mails delivered by the army, right? Yes, it loves that shit.

Imagine if the imagine if the the the mail truck was in camel. It had big tires. Absolutely. And was less reliable. So the Air Mail Act of 1934 proposed new competitive bidding rules for air mail contracts. It permitted it prohibited airline contracts from bidding on those routes entirely, particularly it targeted United Aircraft and Transport Company. You may remember was the only one that was not

not found to have corrupt ties. Gotcha. The airlines most affected. I mean, all the airlines were prohibited from bidding, right? What they did is they reorganized under new names. Well, it's clever. So American Airways became American Airlines. That's the reason why there's no consistency between

Airways and Airlines. Yes. And and that's why you have like three different flag carriers. Eastern Air Transport became Eastern Airlines. TWA added incorporated to the end of its name. I. They all they all won back their old routes. UATC, however, was divided into United Aircraft, Boeing Aircraft and United Airlines. Despite being the only airline that which fairly won the transcontinental route,

it was cut out entirely from air mail contracts. Lie, cheat, steal. Everybody is doing that. The long term effect of the airmail scandal was to drive airlines away from mail transport as a core business, right? They focused primarily on passenger transportation. A disaster for the climate. The effect on Roosevelt's popularity and the popularity of the New Deal

in full only suffered temporarily. God, if he used any of the like absorbent ability of his success is to do anything more communist. Yeah, I know. Right. The scandal was soon forgotten to basically everyone except those in the airline business, right, who remained bitter for decades. Amco's last notable flight occurred May 8th, 1934. They just had brand new B10 bombers delivered.

And they covered the distance from Oakland, California, the Newark, New Jersey in 15 hours, right? Just just an hour slower than Rick and Bakker and while covering more miles and making more more stops, right? The operation dissolved entirely except for one route, which was Chicago to Fargo, North Dakota on May 17th. That route was the last one handed over on June 1st. Major General Benjamin Falloy, under fire from a congressional investigation,

retired from the Army Air Corps. No, well, all he did was get a couple of guys killed, which for a major general, I mean, that's underperforming, really. That's your job. The airmail operation accounted for 12 percent of the air corps flying hours in 1934, yet it registered 31 percent of the fatal accidents. The Air Corps itself reformed training programs after this point to include simulator training, instrument training and more bad weather flight experience. You look up an old timey flight simulator, it's a pretty wacky device.

Um, because literally it's like just a miniature plane. And there's like hydraulics hooked up to the instruments and it like pitches back and forth. And then there's like a a matte painting of the sky around you. Oh, I'm just reading about this. Foulois, they didn't even offer him anything back when World War Two broke out. He spent the whole war in civil defense in New Jersey. Oh, my God.

The integrity of it all. Yeah. This also proved the obsolescence of open cockpit planes. Did I stop buying new ones, which they still had been doing up to this time? Good for that, man. Yeah. Lessons from the airmail scandal or the airmail fiasco, as I believe it's known in military circles, proved important for the United States Army Air Force in World War Two, resulting in pilots with more experience

flying in more weather conditions. And the subsequent Berlin airlift, of course, proved the Air Force's capacity to actually transport stuff. We figured it out eventually. Yeah, it's a straight line from like this. This plane upside down in the field to like the the military airlift command. Yeah. Airmail as a different level of mail service was ended in 1975.

You mean I've been buying those fancy envelopes for nothing? Sorry about it. No, today, they most mail travels by air wherever possible. Yeah. That's a special mail has those cool trains. That's true. We don't we don't do. That was that was another another weird effect is that I'm well, I don't think it was directly because of the airmail scandal,

but the USPS did stop sending mail by train like about a decade later. It's all trucks and planes now. Everything's trucks and planes. We have a couple of like Royal Mail operated class three to five trains, which sweet. If you'll indulge me a notable because the the number of each car is noted in a different font than it otherwise would be.

It's in Royal Mail's corporate funds and the Castelon funds. Oh, that's cool. So you can kind of tell if you were in doubt beside the giant red Royal Mail delivery, and I always thought those were really cool. Well, I figured how to privatize eventually. And the airmail scandal, I think this is sort of largely forgotten history, but it did became the name of a scenario in the urban games title transport fever, which the game that I break with mods.

And then I did like, well, that doesn't really narrow it down. But one of the games that I break with mods and then can't play. And of course, this this this scenario, like most scenarios in that game, born no resemblance to actual events and the only actual tangential relationship to history was that they did mention terror of the nation and Nazi Charles Lindbergh. Well, that's why you've got to mod it is because like as it comes, it's just like a grab bag of like weird transport things. They thought it would be cool to model.

There's nothing systematic about it. Yeah, there's a there's a I have a friend who mentioned, you know, the main problem with transport fever is they forgot to add the fun. Listen, I'll make my own fun, but you got to give me some like a more trains and play a little bit to start. You got to give me something to start out with. I mean, give me give me a sense of place is what I want. Give me some like trains from like Britain.

So I'm not using Swiss ones in my fake Britain map. You have to have a special kind of autism to get into that game. I don't have autism. I know, right? Well, I guess I have a special one that didn't show up on the tests. Mega autism. Yes, autism. Rastism. Yes.

Just called being a nerd. We're just appropriating the language of what that is true. That is true. I don't think I have autism. Well, I do like imaginative play and shit. I don't know. None of us might be autistic. All of us might be autistic.

Self diagnosis is weird, but if you want me to stop self diagnosing, you should probably fund my nation's health care system. So if I'm going to diagnose me for real, give her health care. Also, we're not trying to be ableist here. Sorry if we came off that way. There's a lesson here, I think, about rapid nationalization of stuff. Oh, for sure. You should do it. Well, yes.

But I don't think you can you can't just take an existing service and instantly hand it off to the army. You can. You just lose it. It comes with God. Just you just murder some people. Yeah, I don't know if you if FDR like, I don't know, we're going to nationalize the airlines. That would have made a lot more sense

because most of the same people would still be in charge. They could still run things properly. Probably would have had more lasting impact, too. Yeah. Yeah. Should have done it. Well, unfortunately, social democracy strikes again. It social democracy, it always fails. You got to you got to do big, corrupt, ever clear style communism.

Yes. And I mean, we we are all living in a time when with this character's death, the threat of prophecy is severed, but it's Huey Long. Yeah, imagine we could all work for the big Huey Long airline. We'd all be pilots. We were some of us would even fly planes. Well, there's a second one on this podcast called Safety Third.

Good morning. W. T. Y. P. P. C. Peoples. Interesting. What? Well, there's your problem podcast. I see. For a second, I thought that was actually like A. T. M. machine like a P. Well, there's your problem podcast podcast. So there's your problem.

Paul, Muniz, Karthi. Yes, I mean, it's Karthi. I hope I find you in Mary Spirits. Decent. Shouldn't have had three beers recording this, but I'll manage. What's she going to do? I'm on stuff right here. Yeah, but you're allowed to.

I'm not allowed to. And I'm doing it anyway. That's fine. We won't tell anyone. Thank you. No, none of you, the listeners, tell anyone either. I have for you a safety third for the great southern land of Oz, in which a man does not follow best practice.

In your episode on five over ones, you mentioned that it is now possible to design and build a house without being in contact with an engineer at all. And this is true. Instead of being in contact with an engineer, you're in contract in contact with me, your friendly neighborhood timber systems designer or trust and frame detailer, if you want to be old school about it. I have no degree.

I have a two year apprenticeship and a cert, a cert three. My job is to sit in office all day and design the trust and frame system for the hundreds of almost, but not quite identical houses that our building industry makes on the daily. The office I worked in at the time of this tale was attached to a timber yard and floor trust plant. Both of the yard and the plant were jurisdictions of the company's production manager, a truly terrifying man who lived and breathed trusses.

That's so evocative. That's I'm getting Isambard, Kingdom Brunel vibes there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There were almost no incidents in the yard or plant because of him. He's like a fucking heart to buy an advisor. You just like add him to the board. He, however, did not have jurisdiction over the Chippies who installed the trusses on site.

I don't know what I don't know what a Chippy is. I assume it's affection of the Australian for carpenter. That's what I would think. That's that was my thought. Yeah, you know, joiner, I suppose we'd say here, yeah. The top and bottom cords of the company's the top and bottom cords of a floor truss are made of wood. And in shorter trusses, the webs are made of breast galvanized steel

to decrease production time. Beautiful example here. Beautiful example here. You have a top forward, you have a bottom cord and you see the galvanized steel, right? Is here we should note the trusses are only strong in one axis, the tall one. On the flat, the trusses have the equivalent strength of the timber that forms the top and bottom cords, which isn't that fantastic. When it's five meters of 90 by 45 MGP 10.

I don't know what that is. Maybe it's 90 by 45 meters and then whatever a GP 10. Where a GP 10, a GP 10 is a type of locomotive. Yes, it was a GP 10. I GP 10 lumber. We're going to figure this shit out. I don't know. Oh, it is MGP, it is MGP 10 machine graded pine.

Interesting. OK, that makes sense. I don't know anything about wood. I only know about steel. It's well, you don't you don't have to feel bad. This is specifically an Australian classification. I'll do it. The trusses can either be mounted with brackets between beams or sit directly over the top plate of the wall frame.

Secured at the supports by either four skew nails driven through the bottom cord and top plate, or by a couple of small galvanized steel brackets. Brackets are usually about 40 millimeters tall, and the trusses are usually 450 millimeters deep to stop the trusses from falling over when supported in the latter way. Bracing along the end webs is installed as well as strong backs to the center spans when necessary.

I'm getting confused here. OK, without this bracing, the trusses are very unstable. I have included for reference for reference the do not section of the relevant Lord Trust installation guide. I like this guy on the bottom right. Don't be doing this shit. I see. Don't stack materials on unbraced trusses. Don't allow the stack to lean on the walls or be in a concentrated area.

So they overlapped the trusses. Don't be in a concentrated area. So they overload. OK, yeah, so on and so forth. Is that because that we can tell they have the dental? OK, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm in the office and I receive a call. A chippy has fallen two stories while installing some of our floor trusses,

breaking at least one of them, as well as several of his arm and leg bones and a few of his ribs. Oh, we head to the site and see what might have happened. What befalls our eyes is a veritable bingo sheet of safety violations. I'm reading. I'm sorry. I am reading this in Australian in my head. A veritable bingo sheet of violations. Good day, mate. Offshore prison camps.

All right, off me fucking truss. A bingo ate me chippy. The House. We love you, Australians. Please keep sending these in. Wtypport.gmail.com. Thank you. The House in question is a three story townhouse with a large opium atrium at the front and an indoor first floor balcony and master bedroom directly above. That sounds ostentatious. Oh, it's a fucking McMansion.

The chippy in question was stacking large sheets of psychon, psychon flooring over a section of newly installed and as yet unbraced floor truss that formed the ceiling of this double height space. Oh, he stepped on one, didn't he? Oh, figure figure figure 20 here. I said, you don't step on them. See figure 16, 17 and 20 of the installation guide. Yes. When one of the trusses he was standing on rolled sideways underneath them.

See, it's good in one axis, but it moves if it's not braced. It's not braced. Yeah. Well, this chippy was not a small man. In combination with. Yes. Show me a delicate construction joiner. I you every once in a while, you run into like a really tiny laborer. You know, I'm generally speaking, though, you get your CSCS card or whatever the equivalent is, you gain about a hundred pounds as soon as you sign the fucking thing. In combination with four or so sheets of flooring impacted the truss figure 18.

On the wide section, breaking it near neatly in two. He plummeted about seven meters, landing on the psychon panels and a pallet of boxes containing various fixings for other parts of the build. The truss haves still somewhat attached to the wall frame, swung in towards their end supports, then detached and fell a neat distance away from him. It's very clean. You know, that's like one of those bridge construction games. Yeah. Once it fails perfectly in the middle, it just swings down.

By the time we arrived, he was already on his way to the hospital and the rest of the Chippies had moved on to the next building until the site could be secured by WorkSafeSA. South Australia. Bound for South Australia. I was about to fucking do that. You'd never been born in South Australia. I was born. Great song.

Yes. When it became obvious that the truss had been used outside of recommended parameters and it wasn't our fault and after it had been inspected and photographed by the WorkSafe investigators, we took it back to the plate plant to be de-webbed and disposed of and then produced a new one to replace it. The lesson here, kids, is not to score a four out of five on the dumb fuck bingo card, including on the site. Site safety is important. Yeah, it's got it's got a thing over it.

So, you know, not to do it. Yeah. Do you not moonwalk across the top of one of these trusses? God, it really does look like he's moonwalking, huh? It does, though. Yeah. Hmm. That was some. Yeah. Well, that was. Safety, third safety, third. Shake hands with danger, shake hands with danger.

Right. Thank you. I love you. Really appreciate that. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster. Does it mean any commercials before we go? Listen to kill James Bond. We are very we're now out of James Bond movies. We're very, very soon approaching the time where we do a live show.

Keep your eyes peeled for that. We will do no time to die in the form of a live show in London, England. So be prepared to make your way to that go at a time. TBD, um, listen to trash. You should listen to Lion's Lead by Donkeys, listen to 10,000 losses. Still there's Franklin, possibly, possibly. Possibly central part two is coming. Yes. Sorry, this one was not pen central part two

and also is a little bit late, but we had some issues. We're working on a situation. We're also going to work on getting much better. Basically, uh, think think of us like your dirtbag boyfriend, right? We know we fucked up, but we're going to we're going to be better from now on. Yes, we will not be. But we'll say we're not going to be and that's the important thing. Yeah, we're we're we're fucked.

But, you know, you've stuck out this far, so we're such a fucking mess, dude. All right. Well, that was a podcast podcast. Thanks, everybody. Yeah.