Inspirations
Jo and I just turned in the final draft for Steel Blues, the next book in our series the Order of the Air, following Lost Things. The Depression has hit hard, and Gilchrist Aviation is struggling to survive: they’ve lost their mail contract, their charter and freight business is way down, and they’re faced with the choice of somehow bringing in more money or having to sell off one of their planes. Only Jerry Ballard has steady work, and that’s teaching at the local high school - not quite enough for him to live on, never mind suppsrt three other people. There is just one remote and tantalizing possibility: the Great Passenger Derby, a transcontinental air race designed to promote air travel and provide distraction for a population increasingly worried about where its next meal is coming from.
Alma shook her head, unfolding the pages as though they might bite. The top sheet was typewritten, a form letter thanking "Mr. Gilchrist" for his interest in the race, and then the rest were mimeographed entry forms and half a dozen pages listing the legs of the race and the various requirements and extra contests.
"They're only allowing stock planes. And you have to carry a passenger," she said, skimming through the rules. "Someone who's not a pilot."
"Jerry," Mitch said, promptly, and Jerry shook his head.
"I'm out, Mitch. School's in session, remember?"
"Damn." Mitch looked genuinely stricken, and Alma shook her head.
"Nothing's decided. It's still $500 just to enter."
She turned over the pages as she spoke, eyes flickering across the blurred print. A full transcontinental race in six legs, Los Angeles to Coconut Grove -- a suburb of Miami, the route notes helpfully pointed out, with a private airfield. Six legs, one mandatory layover, with inspection -- well, technically they were expected to stay overnight in each leg's destination city, which made sense. Night flying was always a bitch.
The route took them across the southern states, probably in an attempt to stay in good weather during the early part of the year. Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Flagstaff to San Angelo, San Angelo to Little Rock, then to New Orleans for the mandatory stop, with full inspection. Then New Orleans to Pensacola, where they'd be expected to land, refuel, and stage a mail drop -- well, they'd done that half a hundred times in the mountains, that shouldn't be that hard. And then one final leg, from Pensacola across the Florida panhandle and down the coast to Miami.
There was something.... She flipped back to the beginning, frowning thoughtfully. Any passenger plane could enter, but the specifics meant that the advantage would go to the big trimotors like their own Terrier. The other contestants would be flying mostly Fords and Fokkers, and if they were, if Gilchrist had the only Terrier in the race, or at least the only Terrier backed by the manufacturer....
"Oh," she said. "We need to wire Henry."
"What?" Mitch blinked.
"I thought you didn't think that was a good idea," Lewis said.
"We can win this," Alma said. In spite of herself, she was smiling. "It might have been made for us."
The Great Passenger Derby is based loosely on a real air race held in 1930, the All-American Flying Derby, which was won by Lee Gehlbach and his Command-Aire MR-1, the Little Rocket. Like our imaginary race, the All-American Flying Derby offered an enormous purse - $25,000 to the first three finishers -and captured the imagination of the public.
I first encountered this race in the pages of the Arkansas Gazette, which I was reading as I researched an entirely different project. The Little Rocket, as you might guess from the name, had an Arkansas connection: Command-Aire was based in Little Rock, and Gehlbach’s entry was sponsored by a consortium that included Command-Aire’s owners and the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce. For Command-Aire, this was a desperate gamble: the Depression had hurt the company badly, and this was owner John Carroll Cone’s last chance to stave off complete dissolution. For the Chamber of Commerce, and the other sponsors, it was tremendous publicity, and the cash prize, half of which went to the sponsors, was just added incentive. The Gazette was happy to provide full front page coverage, and I followed along, thrilling to reports of bad weather and accidents, flyers forced to land in the desert, injured in crashes, and eliminated in various risky take-offs and landings. (And in other odd ways: Cecil Cofferin of Brooklyn collided with a car in the small California town where he landed for fuel, splintering a wing tip.) The race route covered 5541 miles, Detroit to Los Angeles and back again, and Gehlbach and the Little Rocket took an early lead and never really looked back.
After the win, Little Rock turned out for a parade in his honor, according to the Gazette, and the Chamber of Commerce brought Gehlbach and the Little Rocket back to town in the fall in an attempt to stimulate business, but the victory wasn’t enough revive Command-Aire. The company closed, and its owner ended up in Washington DC as an assistant director of the Air Commerce Bureau.
In designing the route of the Great Passenger Derby, we cribbed shamelessly from the first legs of the All-American Flying Derby: after all, if the fields could support the latter, they certainly could support our race. San Angelo, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas are on the route for precisely that reason. We also borrowed or were inspired by a number of the race regulations: the insistence on stock planes, for example. But the biggest thing we took from the All-American Flying Derby was the fact that it had happened - that a bankrupt aviation company had a chance to recoup all its losses by winning a single grueling race. How could that not become a novel?
Alma shook her head, unfolding the pages as though they might bite. The top sheet was typewritten, a form letter thanking "Mr. Gilchrist" for his interest in the race, and then the rest were mimeographed entry forms and half a dozen pages listing the legs of the race and the various requirements and extra contests.
"They're only allowing stock planes. And you have to carry a passenger," she said, skimming through the rules. "Someone who's not a pilot."
"Jerry," Mitch said, promptly, and Jerry shook his head.
"I'm out, Mitch. School's in session, remember?"
"Damn." Mitch looked genuinely stricken, and Alma shook her head.
"Nothing's decided. It's still $500 just to enter."
She turned over the pages as she spoke, eyes flickering across the blurred print. A full transcontinental race in six legs, Los Angeles to Coconut Grove -- a suburb of Miami, the route notes helpfully pointed out, with a private airfield. Six legs, one mandatory layover, with inspection -- well, technically they were expected to stay overnight in each leg's destination city, which made sense. Night flying was always a bitch.
The route took them across the southern states, probably in an attempt to stay in good weather during the early part of the year. Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Flagstaff to San Angelo, San Angelo to Little Rock, then to New Orleans for the mandatory stop, with full inspection. Then New Orleans to Pensacola, where they'd be expected to land, refuel, and stage a mail drop -- well, they'd done that half a hundred times in the mountains, that shouldn't be that hard. And then one final leg, from Pensacola across the Florida panhandle and down the coast to Miami.
There was something.... She flipped back to the beginning, frowning thoughtfully. Any passenger plane could enter, but the specifics meant that the advantage would go to the big trimotors like their own Terrier. The other contestants would be flying mostly Fords and Fokkers, and if they were, if Gilchrist had the only Terrier in the race, or at least the only Terrier backed by the manufacturer....
"Oh," she said. "We need to wire Henry."
"What?" Mitch blinked.
"I thought you didn't think that was a good idea," Lewis said.
"We can win this," Alma said. In spite of herself, she was smiling. "It might have been made for us."
The Great Passenger Derby is based loosely on a real air race held in 1930, the All-American Flying Derby, which was won by Lee Gehlbach and his Command-Aire MR-1, the Little Rocket. Like our imaginary race, the All-American Flying Derby offered an enormous purse - $25,000 to the first three finishers -and captured the imagination of the public.
I first encountered this race in the pages of the Arkansas Gazette, which I was reading as I researched an entirely different project. The Little Rocket, as you might guess from the name, had an Arkansas connection: Command-Aire was based in Little Rock, and Gehlbach’s entry was sponsored by a consortium that included Command-Aire’s owners and the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce. For Command-Aire, this was a desperate gamble: the Depression had hurt the company badly, and this was owner John Carroll Cone’s last chance to stave off complete dissolution. For the Chamber of Commerce, and the other sponsors, it was tremendous publicity, and the cash prize, half of which went to the sponsors, was just added incentive. The Gazette was happy to provide full front page coverage, and I followed along, thrilling to reports of bad weather and accidents, flyers forced to land in the desert, injured in crashes, and eliminated in various risky take-offs and landings. (And in other odd ways: Cecil Cofferin of Brooklyn collided with a car in the small California town where he landed for fuel, splintering a wing tip.) The race route covered 5541 miles, Detroit to Los Angeles and back again, and Gehlbach and the Little Rocket took an early lead and never really looked back.
After the win, Little Rock turned out for a parade in his honor, according to the Gazette, and the Chamber of Commerce brought Gehlbach and the Little Rocket back to town in the fall in an attempt to stimulate business, but the victory wasn’t enough revive Command-Aire. The company closed, and its owner ended up in Washington DC as an assistant director of the Air Commerce Bureau.
In designing the route of the Great Passenger Derby, we cribbed shamelessly from the first legs of the All-American Flying Derby: after all, if the fields could support the latter, they certainly could support our race. San Angelo, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas are on the route for precisely that reason. We also borrowed or were inspired by a number of the race regulations: the insistence on stock planes, for example. But the biggest thing we took from the All-American Flying Derby was the fact that it had happened - that a bankrupt aviation company had a chance to recoup all its losses by winning a single grueling race. How could that not become a novel?