National Archives and Records Admin. (28-MS-6E-1) [VENDOR # 54]

US Mail service pilot dressed in winter-flying clothing.

I remember laying out the night airways through the middle of the country, so they could fly airmail from New York to California, both ways, every day. And the middle section--1,000 miles of the middle of the country--had to be illuminated so they could fly it by night.

We found that, with our big powerful lights, we could get away with a minimum of one light every 100 miles. That seemed fine until we actually started flying and found that was fine in clear weather. But the moment the weather got at all hazy, soon, no matter how bright the light was, you couldn't see it 100 miles away.

So we had to have another beacon, and that we called the intermediate field beacon, which would be put in every 10 miles, and that couldn't be our bright light. We made that an incandescent lamp mounted in an 18-inch reflector, mounted on a tower. And what did we get for a tower? A windmill tower.

Instead of putting a windmill on the top of it, we put our incandescent beacon. That beacon, with a very bright Mazda lamp in it, rotated all night, turned itself on and off by a light control valve so that the beacons could be set out into the prairies or anywhere, with no attendant. But when night came and it got dark and the sun set, the light valve would turn the beacon on. It would start up and rotate, and would rotate until the sun came up the next morning, and that would turn it off.

And then the pilots started flying the airmail from 10-mile to 10-mile with the incandescent beacon, and then every 100 miles the great big beacon would be at an airport where you could land, and so on.

Question: Who was paying for this, the US Army?

Bassett: No. The US Army did pay for some of the development work, but the Lighthouse Bureau took care of most of the thing. After all, that was the lighthouse business; they were organized to help navigators with light, and so the Lighthouse Bureau had an airway-lighting department and took care of it.

Well, then, we're getting up to a point where the main activity was aeronautics. The airmail got to be something that was taking a lot of attention.

Some of the farmers started to complain. Their cattle and their animals in the field were not getting enough rest at night because these damned beacons were flashing all the time, and so we had to get the country used to them. But they didn't last. You know what ended them? Radio--radio and direction finders, and so on.

So airway beacons came and they went, but aeronautics didn't desert the need for light. We already had built light in one very important military thing, and that was antiaircraft. We'd built it second as beams--lighthouse beams for flying airplanes. Well, a third thing came along in the way of aeronautics, and that was in '29.

hed, the beacons were functioning, everything was going well, and suddenly a young fellow by the name of Lindbergh--who was an airmail pilot and knew all the ways to fly, in good and bad weather--decided that he was going to try the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh didn't have a modern equipped plane, but he had the best plane that could be equipped at the time of the airmail, and as an airmail flier he knew the plane very well; he went out and helped build it out in California. He was a very smart young fellow, and when he flew east to join the people at Mitchell Field--or was it Roosevelt Field?--well, the Long Island Field, he came as you might say a late competitor. The others were out there waiting for good weather.

Lindbergh was just smart enough. He knew weather very well, from being an airmail pilot, but he was just smart enough to consult a meteorologist and then do a little predicting on his own as a result of what the meteorologist told him.

If you wonder how I know this, I knew the meteorologist that Lindbergh consulted. The meteorologist told Lindbergh that everything looked as though the weather was going to improve steadily across the Atlantic, but it hadn't improved at that time. It was bad. It was raining, and it was awful. All the competitors that were going to try for the prize weren't starting out while it was raining.

Lindbergh, after his talk with the forecaster and the word that it was improving, knew enough about how the weather acted to come to the conclusion "Here's my chance, I'm going to go." And you know the story: He hauled his airplane out on a rainy morning and took off out of the mud and made it, and left all his competitors behind waiting for fair weather.

Lindbergh was right, but he was flying a plane equipped for fair-weather flying, and that's all there was available at that time. The reason Lindbergh's flight was considered so outstanding was the fact that he covered so many miles and had fair weather and accomplished it.

US Army Air Corps footage that shows how Lindbergh's cross-Atlantic flight brought Europe and the US closer together. (4:33 min)

Back in our laboratory at the Sperry Company--where I was sort of watching the whole field--myself and Elmer Sperry Jr. decided, if there's going to be such a thing as flying a distance, like Lindbergh did across the Atlantic Ocean, it cannot be a fair-weather project. It's got to be good weather or bad weather--the airplane has got to be able to do it, and therefore we have got to make an all-weather airplane. And that means instrument, which will take the place of vision, in case you can't see the ground or anything else.

So we started work at the Sperry Company developing what we called blind-flying instruments. They consisted of little gyroscopes mounted in instrument cases, and one determined the direction and the other determined the vertical or the altitude of the airplane. Starting with Lindbergh's flight, we went into intensive development on two blind-flying instruments: the artificial horizon and the directional gyro.

We no sooner started on them than we knew we were in for a tremendous development and flight testing. Fortunately for us, Guggenheim--who was putting up money in the form of the Guggenheim Foundation to boost aviation--had started a fund to boost better flying conditions right out on Long Island and appointed a young lieutenant at Mitchell Field to head up the experiments on all-weather flying.

The lieutenant's name was Jimmy Doolittle. So young Jimmy Doolittle joined our ranks on trying to make some instruments with which you could fly blind. And young Sperry, Jimmy Doolittle and I were a trio that tried out instruments on Jimmy's plane out at Mitchell Field, there, until we had two good instruments--one, the horizon, and the other, the directional gyro--equipped on Jim's plane.

Now, this all happened fairly fast, because--I've forgotten the date, but you remember there was a date just recently celebrated, the 50th anniversary of Jimmy Doolittle's first blind landing out at Mitchell Field--and there was just a little group of engineers who went out to see Jimmy actually try landing an airplane without vision. He was under a complete canvas cover.

I was one of that little group of engineers that stood on the sidelines and saw Jim take off, fly around blind, turn 180 degrees and feel his way in. He had more than our blind-flying instruments; he had a very sensitive altimeter and radio aids on the ground, and he felt his way down by our blind-flying instruments, down to near the ground.

I remember we were practically standing on one leg, sort of praying for him that he'd make it all right. And he felt for the ground and touched the ground and bounced and rolled. It was the first blind landing ever made. It's got quite famous now.

Q: Was that about 1929?

Bassett: Jim's landing was right around '29. You're right.

	Discussion
	Before Doolittle made the first blind flight in 1929, air travel was restricted by weather conditions and night navigation. How did blind-flying instruments developed at the Full Flight Laboratory revolutionize passenger and airmail travel routes used throughout the twentieth century?

Well, as soon as we had the blind-flying instruments, then long-distance flight started. And there were people flying across the ocean and flying across the continent, and the airmail adopted our blind-flying instruments and started to fly 100 percent of the time.

You don't remember, but in the early days the airmail pilots--most of them--when sudden fog came, they had to bail out. They were all equipped with parachutes and they would bail out, lose their airplane--apparently gathering the mailbags from the crash--and save their own lives.

But with the blind-flying instruments, airmail safety became 100 percent. They'd fly every day, and there were no more bailouts. Lindbergh himself, you know, had bailed out several times as an airmail flier.

Then Jimmy Doolittle's flight made it practical that there were blind-flying instruments. And it was just at that time that Wiley Post called on us, and he was a stolid, slow-speaking fellow. He said he wanted to fly around the world, and if we could equip his airplane with blind-flying instruments--so he could fly in spite of the weather--he and (Harold) Gatty would make up a team called Post and Gatty, and fly an airplane around the world.