The history of air travel in this country has been marked by a number of celebrated moments in history—the Wright Brothers’ first ascent, Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the crash of the Hindenburg crash of 1937 (that effectively ended the airship era) are among the best known. But the air race of 1919 that drew 63 flyers in a competition that pitted them against each other in an effort to cross the country not once but twice might have escaped your attention.
John Lancaster’s “The Great Air Race” documents the effort of these air pioneers who competed at a time with planes that lacked the many tools that help navigate the skies today and before airfields were fully established in many parts of the country.
It was a time—just after WWI—when airplanes were being looked at for transporting mail. Billy Mitchell, a military man who saw airplanes as a future necessity, is profiled as the catalyst for a race that would promote the potential of flight—even at a risk.
As Lancaster told Steve Tarter, nine people died (two on their way to start of the race) out of 63 entries, a pretty grim percentage. While the race drew attention and crowds who welcomed the brave, young men who flew and worked on the planes (a mechanic was a valuable addition at a time when gas-engines had a tendency to misfire in flight), it also drew the ire of editorialists who condemned the whole thing as a publicity stunt, noted Lancaster.
Planes that had been used to engage in wartime encounters were not built to cover long distances. They also lacked instruments to help pilots when they faced blinding rain, fog or snow, all conditions faced in the 1919 race.
Lancaster also tells the story of Belvin Maynard who won the race, an expert flyer and navigator who was fortunate enough to avoid the storms that slowed other participants. While meticulous in his approach to the great race, Maynard may have gotten complacent. He was killed at the age of 29 when his plane crashed at an air show just three years later.
A pilot himself, Lancaster also included a chapter on his own flight in 2019, recreating the course the flyers took 100 years earlier. Despite the many improvements and safety precautions, danger still lurked.
“More than the wind or any other aspect of the weather, fatigue was my biggest challenge,” he wrote. “Landing at a satellite airport near Salt Lake City after a memorable flight over the steep forested canyons of the Wasatch Range, I skidded my turn to final approach and let my airspeed sink dangerously low. It was the same sort of low-altitude carelessness that had killed Dana Crissy and Virgil Thomas just a few miles away and a hundred years earlier, on the first day of the race.”
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