In the early days of airmail, inventors were still thinking along railway-post-office lines, particularly the way RPO cars could transfer mail while the train was in motion. 00:35 Though trained as a dentist, Dr. Lytle S. Adams (1881-1970) was an inventor at heart. He had dozens of patents to his name, ranging from a cable-laying machine (US1337184A, 1918) to home heating (US2932711A, 1957). But the bulk of his patents, and his life interest, was in the area of transferring mail and packages to and from airplanes in flight. In January 1929, Dr. Adams invited the press to see something that he’d been working on for several years—a horn-like apparatus that could snare and replace a mailbag suspended from an airplane passing overhead. In this film, he explains how it works before it is demonstrated for the press. P.S.: Dr. Adams’s most (in)famous invention was the “Bat Bomb,” and idea he had in 1942, in which bats equipped with small incendiary devices dropped on Japan would set buildings afire. 02:45 There’s almost no accompanying information with this film other than the date and location. It’s possible that this is an early demonstration of the Lowell Aero Pickup system, devised by Godfrey Lowell Cabot (1861-1962), the famous Boston-area industrialist. He was a flyer in World War I and got interested in the idea then. It doesn’t appear that anything came of it, though the All American Aviation system (see below) resembled it in a number of ways. 05:25 In 1930, Dr. Lytle Adams returned with an improved version of his invention. Picking up a heavy mailbag was placing too great a strain on the plane’s airframe, so Dr. Adams added a spring catapult to give the pick-up a boost. He brought his invention to Washington D.C. in an attempt to interest the postal service. They politely declined. In fact, his mail-catching horn had a number of technical and logistical problems, and by the mid-1930’s Dr. Adams had come up with a much simpler mechanism that used a line suspended between two poles. In 1937, he founded All American Aviation with the intention using his invention to run an airmail service to deliver to areas in Pennsylvania and West Virginia too hilly for airports. The service started in 1939 and ended in 1949. By that time Dr. Adams had been squeezed out and the company, now known as All American Airways, went into the passenger business. It changed names again, becoming Allegheny Airlines, then USAir and US Airways. 07:20 Lustig Skytrains was the brainchild of glider pilot Jack O’Meara (1912?-1941). The idea was that a single airplane could tow multiple gliders which would drop off in turn to deliver mail to cities en route. O’Meara brought in R. E. Franklin, pilot as well as designer of the PS-2 gliders used, and Elias Lustig, a New York haberdasher, who financed the venture. (The idea was not original with O’Meara—German and Russian fliers had made similar flights already.) The plan for the demonstration flight was to take off from Floyd Bennett Field in New York City, then land at Newark. Putting the “skytrain” back together again, it would take off from Newark and individual gliders would drop off at Camden airport near Philadelphia, Logan Airfield Baltimore, and on the ellipse in Washington D.C., with the plane landing at Hoover Airport in Washington. Bad weather forced the skytrain to return to Camden, where it took off the following day and completed the trip as planned. The film record here shows a takeoff, then a landing at Floyd Bennett field, followed by another takeoff with all three gliders. There are inflight pictures of the complete skytrain, followed three glider landings, the last in Washington, D. C. Though the flight generated a good deal of publicity (and thousands of philatelic first-day covers), it also demonstrated the problems with the concept. Regardless, it did not result in any airmail contracts for Lustig Skytrains. O’Meara did a similar flight from Miami to Havana the following year, but it also did not result in any business and the idea was abandoned.

• published: 27 Aug 2019
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