THE GREAT AIR RACE

A dramatic account of the massive 1919 cross-country air race, “the likes of which the world had never seen.”

In his debut, journalist Lancaster, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, focuses on Army Gen. Billy Mitchell (1879-1936), who rose to command all air combat units in France during World War I and returned after the armistice to fiercely advocate for an expansion of America’s air power, a campaign that included organizing the great air race. At the time, airplanes were built with fragile wood and fabric, with open cockpits, unreliable engines with a range of 150-200 miles, no navigation aids more complex than a compass, and no parachutes. The U.S. airmail service was already a year old, despite a litany of disasters, and air races attracted large crowds and media attention. Only months before the big race, Mitchell had overseen a widely publicized competition in which 40 planes flew between New York and Toronto. With only a few weeks’ notice, he announced a round-trip race across the continent, leaving from either Long Island or San Francisco. There followed a mass of publicity and torrent of applicants, mostly ex- or current airmen. In this well-researched text, Lancaster delivers an expert description of the planes (mostly ex–WWI fighters) and biographies of the volunteers, and he devotes more than half of the story to the precise details of the race. Primitive aircraft and unreliable weather forecasting, combined with the flyers’ fierce competitiveness, proved a deadly combination. More than 50 planes crashed; some were repaired and flew on, but nine men died. The media praised the courage of the participants, and while writers claimed that it sped technical and commercial progress, Lancaster quotes some skeptics. He agrees that it marked the beginning of a new age and ends with a lively, occasionally gruesome history of early cross-country airmail and the not terribly pertinent but still intriguing story of Mitchell’s eventual flameout.

Entertaining fireworks during the early days of flight.