 In 1920, the post office department commenced the long distance carriage of mail by air. Because airplanes of the era were generally limited to achieving an altitude of 9,000 to 10,000 feet, airplanes going to and from California were fairly well limited to following the same routes as those followed by the Overland Trail and the Union Pacific Railroad. The limited range of aircraft also required division stations to be established in the same manner as that followed earlier by the Overland Stage and the railroad. At the division points, the planes could be refueled and serviced. With establishment of the first airmail routes, Cheyenne was established as the division point between Salt Lake City and Omaha on the Chicago to San Francisco run. Air service commenced in 1920.
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 Lindbergh got his nickname, Lucky Lindy, not from his successful transatlantic flight, but from his airmail service. Before he tackled the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, Charles Lindbergh had a career as an airmail pilot. Following stints as an army pilot, test pilot and barnstormer, Lindbergh flew the mail as a contract pilot. His nickname was given to him after he was forced to parachute to safety twice as an airmail pilot. While flying the mail on September 16, 1926, Lindbergh was forced to jump from his airplane during a blinding snow and rain storm after he had gotten lost in the darkness and his airplane ran out of fuel. As he drifted down to earth, Lindbergh heard his airplane start back up again. Apparently as it headed straight down, enough fuel was pumped back into the engine to start it up. A quickly unnerved Lindbergh watched as his airplane seemed to aim straight for him. As Lindbergh wrote up the incident in his official report: Soon [my airplane] came into sight, about a quarter mile away and headed in the general direction of my parachute. . . . The airplane was making a left spiral of about a mile diameter, and passed approximately 300 yards away from my chute, leaving me on the outside of the circle. I was undecided as to whether the airplane or I was descending the more rapidly and glided my chute away from the spiral path of the ship as rapidly as I could. The ship passed completely out of sight, but reappeared in a few seconds, its rate of descent being about the same as that of the parachute. I counted five spirals, each one a little further away than the last, before reaching the top of the fog bank.   James "Jack" Knight was part of the relay team of pilots that flew 2,629 miles across the country on February 22-23, 1921. These pilots were tasked with proving to a skeptical U.S. Congress that airmail could travel both night and day. Only one pilot dared to fly the mail through wretched weather in the middle of the night between Omaha and Chicago, saving Praeger's airmail service.  Jack Knight. This photograph was taken after his historic 1921 flight. He had broken his nose in an airplane crash the week before.  Telegram from Jack Knight relaying information of his historic February 23, 1921 flight.
-Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration  With air travel a regular part of daily life in North America, we tend to take the infrastructure that makes it possible for granted. However, the systems, regulations, and technologies of civil aviation are in fact the product of decades of experimentation and political negotiation, much of it connected to the development of the airmail as the first commercially sustainable use of airplanes. From the lighted airways of the 1920s through the radio navigation system in place by the time of World War II, this book explores the conceptualization and ultimate construction of the initial US airways systems.The daring exploits of the earliest airmail pilots are well documented, but the underlying story of just how brick-and-mortar construction, radio research and improvement, chart and map preparation, and other less glamorous aspects of aviation contributed to the system we have today has been understudied. Flying the Beam traces the development of aeronautical navigation of the US airmail airways from 1917 to 1941. Chronologically organized, the book draws on period documents, pilot memoirs, and firsthand investigation of surviving material remains in the landscape to trace the development of the system. The author shows how visual cross-country navigation, only possible in good weather, was developed into all-weather "blind flying." The daytime techniques of "following railroads and rivers" were supplemented by a series of lighted beacons (later replaced by radio towers) crisscrossing the country to allow nighttime transit of long-distance routes, such as the one between New York and San Francisco. Although today's airway system extends far beyond the continental US and is based on digital technologies, the way pilots navigate from place to place basically uses the same infrastructure and procedures that were pioneered almost a century earlier. While navigational electronics have changed greatly over the years, actually "flying the beam" has changed very little.
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