EAA493 Mailing List: Re: Fw: A Bit of Aviation History

[donald (donald]

Thanks to Gerry and Richard for the information about early navigation. Why 
don't we rent an Airco DH.4 and follow the route?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [EAA493] Fw: A Bit of Aviation History
From: Gerald Hatch via EAA493 <eaa493 [at] fly-web.us>
Date: Jun 23, 2015 9:18 AM
To: "Don Treadwell" <donald [at] treadwellphotography.com>
CC: "Gerald Hatch" <gf_hatch [at] yahoo.com>



      On Tuesday, June 23, 2015 8:44 AM, Richard <kj5rx1 [at] suddenlink.net> 
wrote:
   

   
    
                         70ft Cement Arrows  
 
 
 
 
 All over the country, 70-foot concrete arrows can be found in remote locations.




  Follow them, and they’ll point you out of the desert.              They come 
courtesy of the US Postal Service’s Air Force and will point you all  the way 
across the continental United States.    They were constructed in 1924 to guide 
postal planes in the right direction  as they carried mail from coast to coast. 
   These old planes couldn’t rely on radio as much at the time, so they used 
these  arrows, along with beacon towers, to navigate.      The arrows and 
beacons bisect the United States from San Francisco to  New York City .    The 
towers were 50 feet tall and fixed with gas lights that could be seen from  10 
miles away, in order to help lost pilots find their way. This is a model of the 
 arrows and towers in their heyday.    World War II brought new advances in 
radio technology that effectively  made the towers and arrows system obsolete. 
The towers were mostly  dismantled.    There has been an effort to restore and 
preserve some of them, however.       Like this one in New Mexico complete with 
its generator shack.      
This is a pretty cool piece of history, even if it was short lived. To think of 
those early postal pilots navigating  like this from coast to coast is mind 
blowing.                
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