The Last Air Mail
Pioneer Pilot
By Nancy Allison Wright
At the age of
103 E. Hamilton
"Ham" Lee (shown right and below in his younger days) was the sole surviving
pilot of the U. S . Post Office Air Mail Service, 1918-1927.
He was also one of the last members of Early Birds of
Aviation.
Lee alone
among the 30 members of the Air Mail Pioneers (AMP), a last-man club composed of Service
employees, battled snow, rain and the gloom of night along the U. S. transcontinental
route to bring the mail through. In Curtiss Jennies and DeHavilland-4s, Lee, and his
fellow pioneer pilots, risked their lives to establish world's first scheduled air
transport system.
"At
the start," said Lee, "we had no radios, no parachutes and few instruments. We
flew mostly by landmarks - when we could see them. In a fog or thick clouds, we just flew
by the seat of our pants."
By the
time the Post Office Air Mail Service launched its inaugural flight, on May 15, 1918, Lee
had been flying for over two years. In l913 Lee made his first flight, riding on the wing
of a Curtiss Pusher, clutching the struts and looking over his instructor's shoulder.
Three years later, after accumulating five hours in the air, he soloed. His pilot's
license was signed by Orville Wright.
At first
Lee made a living barnstorming at county fairs: selling rides and performing aerobatics.
Then in 1917 when the United States declared war on Germany, he became a civilian
instructor with the U. S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force's predecessor. After the war
ended, Lee learned that the new U.S. Post Office Air Mail Service was recruiting civilian
pilots for air mail duty. Prior to this, during the three months the Post Office and War
Department shared the operation, the mail had been flown by Army fly boys.
Lee
began his career in the Service on December 29, 1918. Among the many aviation milestones
credited to Lee during his time in the Service is his participation in the country's first
pilots' strike. To prove to Congress that air mail was reliable, Post Office officials
insisted that the mail be flown in all kinds of weather. Consequently, Lee and other air
mail pilots took off in fog so soupy they couldn't see their wing tips or across their air
fields' cinder runways. They flew into the blackness of thunder storms that batted their
fragile craft like a leaf.
In July
1919 on a rainy, cloudy morning with visibility 200 feet and worsening, pilot Leon Smith
refused to fly the New York to Washington run until the weather lifted. Assistant
Postmaster General Otto Praeger, who had never flown a plane, responded with the order to
"fly by compass, visibility not necessary." Smith again refused and so did Lee
when he was asked to replace him. Both men were fired on the spot. In sympathy all the
pilots in the system went on strike. Three days later pilots and management reached a
compromise settlement. In times of marginal weather the field manager would go aloft and
check conditions himself. If he returned safely the flight would take place. If the field
manager was not a pilot, he could sit in the mail bin right behind the engine while the
pilot circled the field, checking the weather.
Under
those circumstances Lee agreed to return and was rehired. Still accidents were frequent.
Accidents killed 31 of the first 40 pilots hired in the first two years of operation. The
life expectancy of early Air Mail pilots was estimated to be three years. Although Lee was
one of the oldest and most conservative of the mail pilots, he was not immune to
misjudging flying weather. In March 1924 Lee ran into snow storms taking off from Iowa
City bound for Chicago and had to land three times to wait for conditions to improve.
Departing a field near Rock Falls, he flew straight into a "blind black
blizzard."
Attempting
to land he went through a fence and hit a tree stump, causing the DH to flip on its back.
Lee walked away from the accident with only a few bumps and bruises.
Another time the
engine of Lee's plane caught fire. To loose altitude fast, he side slipped.
"It
kept the flames away from my face and allowed the air stream to blow out the fire,"
he said. "It was touch and go but I continued the flight."
When the
Air Mail Service pioneered the transcontinental route between New York and San Francisco,
Lee was on hand to blaze the first air trails. In 1920 he inaugurated two feeder routes:
the Chicago to St. Louis run and the Minneapolis to Chicago leg. When the Service
experimented with night flying on the transcontinental in 1924, Lee flew one of the two
first legs out of Hazelhurst Field on Long Island.
In all
Lee spent 4,220 hours aloft in the service of the Air Mail and covered 382,426 miles. But
that was only for openers. After private industry took over the Air Mail Service in 1927,
Lee flew for Boeing Air Transport, then remained when BAT merged with other early lines to
form United Airlines. By the time he retired from United, Lee had flown 4.4 million miles
and logged a record 27,812 hours of flight time. He had been the first person to travel a
million miles off the ground.
Ham
celebrated his 100th birthday by co-piloting a DC-3 on a 30-minute trip from Ontario to
Van Nuys, California.
"I
just love flying," said Lee. "I always have."
Nancy
Allison Wright is editor of the Air Mail Pioneers News, a periodic newsletter of Air
Mail Pioneers. Her father, Ernest M. "Allie" Allison, was former national
treasurer and western division president of Air Mail Pioneers.
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