Early Aviation Guidance

     I posted about helicopters in February, including a trip I took in a very small chopper from Los Angeles to Birmingham, "helping" deliver a brand new Hughes chopper to the company from which WERC leased one for traffic reporting:

"We basically followed the interstates. Took 3 days, stopping overnight twice."

     I was reminded of that trip this week when I came across a story about a fascinating part of early aviation.

     When airmail was just starting, in the mid 1920's, the government built a series of huge concrete arrows, originally painted bright yellow, to show pilots the way across the country! The website DreamSmithphotos includes a page of them. So far as I can tell, none was anywhere near Alabama.



     I never spotted one of those early air mail arrows during that L.A. to Alabama trip, during which I kept an eye on a  paper map and watched the Interstate signs to know where we were (though as I recall, at dusk in Mississippi, I misdirected the pilot toward a military airbase rather than the commercial location where we wanted to land to refuel, and probably send the night.
     Glad we weren't shot out of the sky!