Word: airmailing
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After years of running a flying school at San Antonio and starting a semi-scheduled airline, he landed an airmail route between Brownsville, Amarillo and Houston, sold out in 1937 to Braniff. When World War II began, Long organized four Texas flying schools at the request of the armed forces ("We pitched the textbooks out the window and taught with planes and parts"), turned out 20,000 pilots and 3,500 mechanics. In 1945 he got a CAB certificate, and began flying passengers between Amarillo and Houston. Later, he bought six surplus DC-3s, began using the name Pioneer...
Calm Air. Slick drummed up new trade (textiles, television and auto parts) and opened up new markets, flying Christmas mistletoe from Dallas to Manhattan, Texas okra to Detroit's big colony of Southern workers. Last year, after complaining to CAB that airmail-subsidized American and the big boys were still harassing his unsubsidized line, Slick slapped a $30 million suit on them, charging antitrust violations. After that, he says, they let him alone...
...braced himself against a cutting wind, and lifted a sack of mail to a goggled pilot in an open-cockpit Stout monoplane. The engine roared, and the little 100-m.p.h. plane lurched down the runway and took off for Cleveland, 91 miles away. It was the first flight of airmail under the recently passed Kelly Act. To airmen, it was the beginning of commercial aviation in the U.S. Until then, the U.S. Army and a few private operators had flown the mail for the Post Office Department on a spotty basis. The Kelly Act turned over the job entirely...
...week now the government has held up all rail shipments outside New England. They have also refused any airmail packages over two pounds. In effect, the "sick" trainmen have succeeded in forcing many students to wear the same dirty shirts for several days while their laundry is tied up at either end of the line...
...found in the five-inch shelf of flying literature was done by French Airman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras). He was that rare 20th Century blend, a courageous man of action whose deepest values were spiritual. On his long airmail flights over desert and ocean, and on military missions over doomed France in 1940, his brooding imagination conceived a vision of life in which God, soul and the brotherhood of man shone through and outweighed all commonplace striving...