Word: airmail
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...such Democratic talk the Republican answer might well have been that the $78,000,000 spent in three years on airmail was small potatoes to the hundreds of millions the present Administration has doled out to cotton and wheat farmers as a direct subsidy. If Mr. Brown was morally in error, so was the historic policy of the U. S. toward all new or weak transportation systems...
...dedicatory air meet had barely started when a howling thunderstorm broke, driving the crowd into nearby hangars and administration building, postponing the ceremonies. That disappointment was small, however, compared to the blow that fell next day, when all domestic airmail contracts were annulled. Shushan Airport's first big tenant was American Airways, which was expected to cancel its lease. Roared disappointed Col. Shushan: "New Orleans had just as well throw her field back into Lake Pontchartrain...
What provoked that remark was Col. Lindbergh's telegram to President Roosevelt protesting the domestic airmail contract cancellations (TIME, Feb. 19). The $250,000 referred to was reputedly a gift from Transcontinental Air Transport to the flying Colonel in 1928. Col. Lindbergh was popularly supposed to have amassed a fortune from the aviation industry in return for "technical advice." Was the aviation industry now getting back its money's worth by pitting the popularity of Lindbergh against the popularity of Roosevelt...
Today the record is a tragedy that will cause plenty of embarrassment before the airmail business is clarified. The private companies will get justice because they will be permitted to bid again. This will save the small stockholders and investors, too, but the mothers of the young flyers who were unnecessarily sacrificed on a peace-time job that had no relationship to national defense will not find any consolation in the excuses that will be made for the accidents...
...reflection on the army that it cannot carry the mail without accidents. Airmail flying is different from army aviation. The army flyers who crashed were many miles off their courses. In the whole year of 1933 the total number of total accidents to airmail flyers numbered fifteen, but in the short space of seven days the army lost five men. The airmail companies, of course, had such losses when they first started. But all the dishonesty in the aviation companies never was sufficient to warrant the sacrifice of five lives...