During the recent airmail centennial re-enactment that included a Vancouver stop, organizers said there was more to celebrate than airborne letters.
The dawn of airmail service 100 years marked the beginning of commercial aviation, as well as a series of aviation advances.
One innovation that wowed our local folks more than 90 years ago became a key element in Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight.
That breakthrough was a single-wing aircraft that Claude Ryan built and landed at Pearson Field on March 19, 1926.
The monoplane was built for Pacific Air Transport, the company that won the contract for the airmail route between Los Angeles and Seattle. (While airmail service officially began in 1918, it took a few years to establish routes throughout the entire country.)
The Vancouver visit was part of a path-finding tour as Ryan flew company executives along the West Coast route.
In a couple of stories, The Columbian reported the local impact of the Ryan’s aircraft.
Considerable curiosity
“The Ryan M-1 is the first monoplane to have landed at Pearson field and aroused considerable curiosity because of its peculiar construction.” … “Both the motor and the ship are of a distinctive type developed for the purpose of carrying mail and cargo.”
And, “The plane is credited with having broken the flying record between San Francisco and Seattle, having made the flight in seven hours and three minutes actual flying time.”
That level of performance caught the attention of Lindbergh, a Midwest airmail pilot. He wanted to be the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.
Unlike other pilots chasing that goal, Lindbergh wanted a single-engine airplane: There was less to go wrong, he reasoned, and less fuel to haul across the Atlantic.
Ryan Aviation built Lindbergh a customized Ryan M-2 aircraft that became known, in a nod to Lindbergh’s sponsors, as The Spirit of St. Louis.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
