![]() He flew from there, over Bevier, and landed at Callao, about nine miles west. McMillen (shown with his wife about 1909) was flying a Curtiss Model D pusher plane that he had purchased from Glenn Curtis, himself, after graduating from the Curtiss Flying School, a competitor to the Wright Brothers school, when he arrived at the United Aviators field in the northern part of Macon, Missouri on November 29, 1912. C., and Philadelphia in May, 1918.Įlvin believes the three cities linked on the first REAL air mail flight were Callao, Bevier, and Macon, Missouri on December 4, 1912. The Postal Service says the first regularly scheduled airmail service in this country was a route linking New York City, Washington, D. Louis to Chicago for a while, crashing a few times along the way-which didn’t discourage him from thinking he could fly from New York to Paris. They had averaged about fifty miles an hour.Ī lot of folks know that Charles Lindbergh flew the mail from St. They suffered from the altitude (two miles), went through a frightening storm over Lake Erie and Niagara Falls, and eventually came down into a tree near Henderson, New York, almost one-thousand miles from St. Louis climbed into the basket hung below a balloon of varnished Chinese silk, carrying a bag of mail, and headed for New York. Six weeks before that puny little hop in Indiana, four men in St. The National Postal Museum put out a stamp several years ago commemorating that flight.īut we Missourians know the postal service was wrong. The first official airmail flight is considered to have been another balloon flight that began in Lafayette Indiana in August 1859, but was terminated by weather at Crawfordsville, thirty miles away. Some say the first air mail fight in this country carried one letter in 1793-from George Washington in Philadelphia to whomever owned the property where the balloon came down. The problem with writing something was the “first” is that different people have different interpretations of “first.” We got a snail mail letter a few days ago from Elvin Smith in Macon, who had heard our Across our Wide Missouri radio program story about the nation’s first air mail flight, suggesting we look into the story of the nation’s first air mail flight by airplane (as opposed to hot air balloon), which he said happened in December, 1912 on a biplane flight between Callao, Bevier, and Macon. The upper box is labeled “air mail.” But an increasing number of people passing by have no idea what it’s all about. ![]() Every now and then we still see a now-ancient attempt at humor-a mail box on a tall pole above the regular mailbox. ![]() ![]() At least one generation has never known a time when someone would pay extra for a letter to be stamped “Air Mail” when it had to get a long way away, fast. ![]()
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