target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9f5d03cf-0e73-5d76-a7d7-d11cb53522d7">3. In 1918, a trial airmail run was made between New York and Washington D.C., using Army pilots. The Post Office Department followed up using Standard biplanes, and later, with modified War Surplus DeHavilland DH-4 biplanes. By 1920, daylight mail flights extended from New York to San Francisco; railroads took the mail over at night. Next came night flights on which mail plane pilots followed revolving beacons. By mid-1924 revolving beacons flashed into the night sky from New York to San Francisco, with lighted emergency landing runways every thirty miles or so. Night and day airmail flights, weather permitting, were well established.
4. About 300 DH-4 light bomber and observation planes were sent overseas during World War I, but none were used in combat. At war’s end there were many surplus DH-4s,and the Postal Service started using them in the States for hauling mail. Before such use each plane had an engine, propeller and instrument overhaul, had the cockpits realigned, with the front cockpit with a hinged cover. The airmail pilot’s name was printed on the fuselage.
Army pilots referred to the DH-4s as “flaming coffins.” The fuel tank was placed low between engine and cockpit. Air pressure in the tank was used to force fuel to the carburetor. A punctured fuel tank or fuel line sprayed fuel. When that happened, a fire often resulted.
Ignition for the 440-hp Liberty engine was provided by a hot battery. A dead battery meant a stopped engine, and that meant the airplane had to immediately land.
5. Many of the colorful characters of the time had equally colorful nicknames, a custom that, sadly, has mostly disappeared in Alaska.
2
Noel Wien Arrives at Fairbanks
Noel Wien, born June 8, 1899, was one of five children born to immigrant parents—his father was from Norway, his mother from Sweden. He grew up in a log cabin on the family homestead at Cook, in northeastern Minnesota where the Wiens lived largely from the land.
Fascinated by mechanical things, cars were his first love. He was 10 when he first had a brief turn at steering a car—a four-cylinder Elcar. His father bought a used Model T Ford when he was 17, but, for a time, Noel was considered too young to be allowed to drive it.
He was a teenager during World War I, when he read about Mannock, Rickenbacker, Fonck, Guynemer, Nungesser, and other famous military fighter plane pilots on the Western Front. He soon became knowledgeable about the Curtiss JN4 “Jenny,” the main training plane for Americans at the time, as well as WWI fighter planes, the Spad XIII, the British S.E.5, the Sopwith Pup, the Nieuport 17 and others. He learned about airplane motors, (now called “engines”) used in various planes - the Hispano-Suiza (Hisso), Gnome, LeRhone, Liberty, and OX-5. In later years he wryly commented that it would probably have been better had he paid as much attention to his schooling as he had to cars and airplanes. His school attendance ended when he was 18, after he had completed eighth grade for the second time.
While still a teenager, he decided he wanted to spend his life flying, although he had never been near an airplane.
The summer he was 17, while continuing to live at home, he raked rocks on county roads at fifteen cents an hour; $1.50 for a ten-hour day. Next, for $2.50 a day he drove a two-ton GMC dump truck, hauling, instead of raking, rocks.
On his 21st birthday Noel bought a 1920 Overland touring car with the nearly $800 he had saved from his two jobs. He lost his truck-driving job and went to Duluth and worked at a harness factory riveting buckles on and oiling harness for $1.50 a day. Horses were still an important means of transportation and farming power. He lived at the YMCA, and ate one meal a day.
He sold the Overland and went to Minneapolis and Saint Paul and used the money to sign up at the William Hood Dunwoodie Institute, hoping to learn about airplanes. There was no airplane course, so he signed up for the auto mechanics course.
FINDING AN AIRPORT
He soon discovered the nearby Curtiss Northwest Airplane Company’s flying school which had a landing area that resembled a forty-acre hayfield. After that his life centered on airplanes and landing fields; he never returned to the Dunwoodie Institute.
In May, 1921, at the flying school, he finally laid his hands on an airplane and met Major Ray S. Miller, a well-known Minnesota pilot.
“I can teach you to fly in eight hours of flying time. It will cost you $40 an hour,” Miller told Noel. “A demonstration hop will cost you $10.”
The ten minute demonstration flight on May 6, 1921, in a Curtiss JN4, Jenny, extended into twenty minutes. Miller tested his prospective student by flying loops, spins, stalls, and wingovers. If he survived with a grin, the instructor believed, he might make a pilot.
Noel loved it. He had dreamed of flying for years, and now that he was in the air he could hardly believe it. He peered at the world below, seeing miniature buildings and farm fields and fences as through the wrong end of a telescope. He watched insect-size cars crawl along dusty roads. The dizzying aerial maneuvers Miller flew didn’t make him airsick; they thrilled him.
When they landed, he advanced $40 to Miller for the first four fifteen-minute instructional hops.
FLYING A JENNY
Miller taught him to fly in an OX-5-powered Jenny, a biplane (two wings) which had no airspeed indicator; he had to judge its speed by the pitch of the air passing across the many wires that held the airplane and its two wings together. There was no turn and bank indicator. A coordinated turn depended on the sensitivity in a pilot’s rear; flying was largely a seat-of-the-pants experience; wind on one side of an open-cockpit-occupied pilot’s face could hint at an un-coordinated turn or skid.
The water-cooled ninety-horsepower OX-5 engine of the Jenny required ten minutes to pull the airplane to 2,000 feet. Its payload was 490 pounds, which included the pilot, a passenger, gasoline, and oil. It was far from the docile airplanes of the mid-20th century; it could fall into a stall and spin with little warning. There was little glide to it; it dropped like a rock without power. He learned how, from altitude, to identify a corn field, other grain fields, or a potato field for emergency landings, which he could expect at any time. The OX-5 was not as dependable as later engines.
During his third hour of dual instruction, he landed the Jenny without the instructor touching the controls. By his fifth hour, he repeatedly took off and landed without the instructor’s help.
An occasional individual is born to be a pilot. It requires perfect coordination, an understanding of the controls and their use, and an appreciation that the airplane moves in three dimensions. Noel Wien was such a person. He was ready to fly solo after eight hours of instruction. At the time, a newly soloing pilot had to guarantee to replace a broken airplane before being allowed to take it up. Noel couldn’t afford to pay for an airplane, or the necessary bond that would allow him to solo. After eight hours of instructions, he left the Curtiss Northwest Company without soloing.
Flying was everything Noel had dreamed it could be. He was hooked. The sense of freedom that comes from soaring high, seeing the earth as the birds do, the ability to dive, turn, to skim near clouds, is almost indescribable. There is an intense delight in flying in an open-cockpit plane like the Jenny, the type that dominated the early years of aviation. He could look straight up into the boundless sky, or straight down to the earth; his vision was wide open. The airplane seemed to be almost a part of his body. He was not enclosed and bound, as in a cabin plane; there was a simple and wonderful
