Coast-to-Coast: Follow the Arrows!

[Hauksbee 103]

Just received the following from my sister: a neverending source of fascinating internet snippets. It seems, that in the early days of Air Mail and passenger service, a series of visual directional cues were built across the country. I'd never heard of these, Great stuff!

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JUST A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY...

 

Every so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American

Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a

large concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, sitting in the

middle of scrub-covered nowhere.

 

What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn signals?

 

No, it's the Transcontinental Air Mail Route .

 

On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast

airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up

shop. There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to

eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. This meant that

flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about

impossible.

 

The Postal Service solved the problem with the world’s first

ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that

would extend from New York to San Francisco . Every ten miles, pilots

would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow. Each arrow would be

surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower and lit by a million-candlepower

rotating beacon. (A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the

beacon.)

 

Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter

of weeks, but in just 30 hours or so. Even the dumbest of air mail

pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight

out of a Tex Avery cartoon. By 1924, just a year after Congress funded

it, the line of giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs ,

Wyoming to Cleveland , Ohio . The next summer, it reached all the way to

New York , and by 1929 it spanned the continent uninterrupted, the envy

of postal systems worldwide.

 

Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete

Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how

this story ends. New advances in communication and navigation technology

made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned

the beacons in the 1940s. The steel towers were torn down and went to

the war effort. But the hundreds of arrows remain. Their yellow paint is

gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and

no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds.

 

But they’re still out there.

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[+Erik 1,731]

Yes and if you have good coordinates of the arrows you can look them up in google maps. It's good stuff.

[Stratos 3,167]

Thanks for sharing. Can you imagine doing that route once flying your own plane? I will love it for sure, one of my dreams!!

[HumanDrone 4]

Thanks for sharing. Can you imagine doing that route once flying your own plane? I will love it for sure, one of my dreams!!

 

I would too!  I just took my son on his first airplane ride at a local airport.  We flew over our house, etc - good stuff.  And the "bug" bit me again.  So I looked up about what it would cost to get a simple private pilot's license.  And, at something on the order of $13 - $15K, I thought, "Stick to your Saitek X52, chum..."  Yow!

 

But thanks for sharing, that's pretty cool.  Now if I ever come across one, I'll know what it is!

[Wayfarer 5]

I have never heard of these before, but I love that such a system existed.  If today had been April 1st I'm not sure I would have believed it.