History of Air Cargo: From Balloons to the Berlin Airlift

Introduction

The history of the air cargo industry, in a very real way, mirrors the history of air transportation itself. This paper reviews the history of air transportation and how the visionaries who pre-dated the emergence of commercial air transport helped the industry grow and spread. It also covers the advancement of air transport during World War II and the way in which air cargo developed throughout the twentieth century.

Early Balloon Flight and the Origins of Aviation

Before there could be air transport, mankind first had to learn to fly. The first demonstration of a "lighter-than-air machine" occurred in Annonay, France, in 1783 — six years before the French Revolution of 1789 (Rumerman, 2007). The brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier witnessed the phenomenon of smoke pushing a paper bag upward due to the hot air from a fire below, and so they built a device of paper and linen, open at the bottom. When they saw it float upward, they were ready to test balloons on a larger scale.

When those initial tests proved successful, the Montgolfier brothers were ready for their major demonstration. Using a balloon ten meters in diameter, they made a successful flight on June 4, 1783. Filled with hot air, the balloon rose approximately 6,562 feet, according to Rumerman, citing the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission. Later, on September 19, 1783, in Versailles, France, the brothers flew their very first passengers: for the eight-minute flight, a duck, a rooster, and a sheep were on board. Witnessing this maiden passenger flight were King Louis XVI, the entire French court, Marie Antoinette, and approximately 130,000 spectators. By October of that same year, the Montgolfier brothers had taken humans aloft in their hot air balloon.

Their challenge was that they were using plain air, which rises when heated but causes the balloon to sink as it cools. Eventually, hydrogen was used — albeit hydrogen is highly flammable — and the first crossing of the English Channel in a balloon was accomplished on January 7, 1785. The first known casualty of balloon flight was Pilatre de Rozier, who was killed on June 15, 1785, when the hydrogen in his balloon exploded (Rumerman, 2007).

Balloons in the American Civil War

Hot air ballooning underwent many transitions between those initial flights in France and the time of the U.S. Civil War in 1861. The very first U.S. balloon created specifically for military use was called the Union, built by the Union Army, according to the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission. Americans Thaddeus Lowe and John LaMountain demonstrated to President Abraham Lincoln — using a tethered balloon that rose to 500 feet — that balloons could be valuable for reconnaissance, and they subsequently received federal funding for the project.

Using gas from local sources, Lowe piloted his balloon to upward of 1,000 feet near Arlington, Virginia, on September 24, 1861. Crossing the Potomac River, he could see Confederate troops more than three miles away at Falls Church, Virginia. He began telegraphing that intelligence to Union troops, and when Union guns opened fire on the Confederate position, it marked the first time in known military history that troops fired on an enemy they could not see from the ground, but could observe from the air (U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission).

Due to that successful reconnaissance mission, U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron ordered four additional balloons, soon followed by two more. The success of Lowe's reports in September 1861 was followed by other achievements, including hourly transmissions on Confederate movements in April 1863 (U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission). In time, the Confederates built their own balloons for reconnaissance in 1862, although they used hot air rather than hydrogen because hydrogen was not available to them in the field.

The Wright Brothers and the Dawn of Powered Flight

Orville and Wilbur Wright began experimenting with flight in 1896 in their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and by 1902 they had built a glider that made "more than 700 successful flights" (Eyewitness to History, 2003). The real challenge, however, was powered flight. No automobile manufacturer of the time could supply an engine "light enough and powerful enough for their needs," so the brothers built one themselves.

On December 17, 1903, at a beach in North Carolina, the conditions were, as Orville later wrote in his diary, "perfect for flight." After warming up the engine and propellers, Orville took off and flew for 12 seconds. The brothers made several other short flights that day and experienced difficulty stabilizing the craft, but the achievement was real: the Wright brothers had flown a propeller-driven craft for the first time in history. Remarkably, only one local journal made mention of the event, although several newspapers had been invited to witness the flight (Eyewitness to History, 2003).

The Birth and Growth of Commercial Air Cargo

The one-hundredth anniversary of the first commercial air cargo flight was observed on August 19, 1911, according to Sylvia Gersti's article in 100 Years of Air Cargo. In the fall of 1910 — seven years after the Wright brothers' first flight — businessmen approached the Wrights and asked to use one of their airplanes "as a revolutionary means" to transport silk. The deal was struck for $5,000, and ten bales of silk were transported from Dayton, Ohio, to Columbus, Ohio, a distance of one hundred miles. This reportedly opened the door to commercial air cargo transport in the United States.

In August 1911, the German company Berliner Morgenpost arranged apparently the first air consignment in Europe, shipping cargo from Berlin-Johannisthal to Frankfurt. On July 10, 1912, the first airmail in Germany was flown on a biplane nicknamed "The Yellow Dog" (Gersti, p. 1). In 1917, the German Air Freight company (DLR) was launched, and shipments of daily newspapers followed shortly thereafter. The DLR biplanes were not fast by modern standards — reaching about 99 MPH — but they could carry a decent load of mail and newspapers, and air cargo had thus established itself in Europe (Gersti, p. 1).

On June 10, 1912, the first large-scale airmail service featuring dirigible balloons was launched in Frankfurt, Germany, according to John Skilbeck's History of Air Cargo and Airmail from the 18th Century (2005). By 1926, the newly formed German Lufthansa airline was already transporting cargo, having moved 926 tons. The next milestone came on February 3, 1934, when Lufthansa carried the first trans-oceanic flight between Germany and South America.

In the United States, a converted Handley-Page bomber was used to transport 1,100 pounds of freight from Washington, D.C., to Chicago. A mechanical problem forced the aircraft down in Ohio, but the trip from D.C. to that point still represented the second known instance of goods sent by air — the first being the silk shipment of 1910. By the 1920s, growth in the air cargo sector was accelerating rapidly. In 1927 — the same year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs — the air freight business moved 45,859 pounds of goods (Siddiqi, 2007, p. 1). By 1929, the figure had grown to 257,443 pounds, and by 1931, air freight was moving more than one million pounds annually (Siddiqi, p. 1).

Henry Ford, renowned for his use of the assembly line in automobile manufacturing, was also a significant early participant in air freight. Ford's company carried approximately one million pounds per year beginning in 1925, and by the end of 1929, his express company was averaging more than three million pounds annually. The National Air Transport company, opened in 1926, began flying freight between Dallas and New York in 1927 (Siddiqi, p. 1). Another early entrant was the American Railway Express — renamed the Railway Express Agency in 1929 — which launched air freight operations in 1927. General Air Express entered the market in 1932, and the two companies merged in 1935 due to the difficulty of competing profitably against each other.

Other companies that entered the industry as the twentieth century progressed included: United Airlines, which operated the first all-cargo service in U.S. airline history using Douglas DC-4 aircraft to deliver mail between New York and Chicago; Air Cargo, Inc., formed in 1941 by a consortium of United, TWA, American, and Eastern Airlines; Slick Airways; Flying Tiger; and California Eastern (Siddiqi, p. 2). Air Cargo, Inc. operated only from December 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, through November 1944, after which individual airlines developed their own freight services. In time, the major passenger airlines began offering freight forwarding, largely eliminating the need for dedicated all-cargo carriers (Siddiqi, p. 2). Only Flying Tiger remained strictly an air freight company until the 1980s, when Federal Express entered the picture.

Conclusion

While many factors and visionary individuals contributed to the development of flight and, subsequently, to the use of aircraft to transport goods, the most dramatic demonstration of air cargo's potential was unquestionably the Berlin Airlift. Fifteen years after the Allies delivered 2,326,205 tons of supplies over 277,728 air cargo flights, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin and, standing before 120,000 Berliners, declared: "As a free man, I take pride in the words, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'" — "I am a Berliner." The era that ushered in the enormous future potential of the air cargo industry was the post-World War II era, defined above all by the achievement of the Berlin Airlift.

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