Almost from the start aviation has been the vehicle to get “stuff” wherever it needs to go faster. The first commercial flight was in a Wright Flyer to deliver a bolt of silk to a department store in Columbus, Ohio. The flight was made in November of 1911 and followed the railroad tracks. Then the weather turned stormy and the Flyer returned to Dayton on a railcar, on the same tracks that the pilot had followed east.
There is a culture of aviators who proudly wear the title of freight dog. These pilots fly the “stuff” we all depend on, often at night and in all kinds of nasty weather. Flying has evolved a lot since 1911. Radio beacons have given way to Global Positioning Systems ... GPS and sophisticated electronic navigation tools which fit the information which was hundreds of pages of data into a smart phone or a tablet. And those wonderful tools stay updated.
Reliable and sturdy aircraft which carry people can also be adapted for cargo. The seats, the overhead bins all come out and the fuselage is filled with cargo. And cargo of all imaginable varieties. The familiar boxes from FedEx, UPS and the Post Office are just the tip of the icebergs.
The creation of “Just in Time” inventory systems for industrial companies does save them enormous amounts of money in warehouses and storage. But depends on the rest of the support industry to keep the production lines flowing with the various and essential parts which make up a finished product. Such as a completed automobile.
But the same can be said for just about any product.
When General Motors was a much larger element of the SW Ohio economy, with factories making parts, the supply chain, getting all the “stuff” to the final assembly plants was an industry to itself. Bringing the final assembly lines to a screeching halt was to be avoided at all costs.
When the inventory available got low and the over the road deliveries would take too long, then the parts went by air. Auto parts by their nature are heavy, so the aircraft has to be able to carry the weight of the freight.
The post WWII availability of cargo airplanes filled that bill. The cargo planes which carried paratroopers were now carrying auto parts. Soon purpose built cargo planes also began to appear. Airliners had big cargo doors added and some never carried passengers again.
Freight airlines were created, Flying Tigers, Atlas Air, Kalatta, Emery and even locally Hogan Air. The WWII planes could operate from smaller airports, near the factories, An entire new aviation business began to flourish.
One freight dog was a pilot named James Walker Ledbetter. He flew out of Michigan and was known for telling hair raising stories of flying the freight. He proved the saying that there are old pilots and bold pilots but very few old and bold pilots.
One episode he recounted were missions to fly auto bumpers from the plant where they were made somewhere in Ohio to a final assembly plant somewhere in Michigan. So you have to figure the cost of flying heavy chrome plated bumpers was less than the cost of shutting down production. The customer didn’t care that the weather was bad, they had deadlines. Now bumpers can be stacked together and loaded into the airplane. But all that just multiplied the weight. The airplanes often flew at max gross weight or more. But they flew.
One night’s flights were in twin engined cargo planes and the weather was pretty nasty. These flights were often at lower altitudes than passenger flights and that meant in the weather. The storms have dramatic updrafts and there the opposing downdrafts. Really rough flying. Most of the flights made it through but an unfortunate plane got caught in the wind shears which overwhelmed the structural integrity of the airplane and it began to come apart.
Ledbetter didn’t talk about the crews but after taking a long drag on his Pall Mall cigarette said . . . “Boy . . . it was raining bumpers”.
For WYSO, this is Dan Patterson wishing you Blue Skies and Tailwinds.
Blue Skies & Tailwinds is sponsored by Sinclair Community College and produced at the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
