"We have 126 concrete arrow photos on our homepage, two destroyed sites, six metal arrow sites and five other type arrow sites," says Charlotte in an email. Each giant yellow arrow pointed to the next giant arrow in a system of sequentially numbered beacon stations that guided pilots safely along their routes. The site number was painted on one side of the shed's roof and the airway on the other side. Where no electricity was available, a generator shed, located at the tail end of the arrow, fueled the acetylene gas-powered lights. Beneath the rotating lights, two course lights pointed forward and backward along the arrow – flashing a code which identified the beacon's number. Here's how it worked: A series of horizontal 50 to 70-foot (15 to 21-meters) long concrete arrows painted bright chrome yellow were spaced approximately 10 miles (17 kilometers) apart.Īt the center of each giant arrow stood a 51-foot (16-meter) steel beacon tower topped with two rotating lights estimated at between 1.25 and 5 million candlepower which, in clear weather, could be seen by pilots for 10 to 40 miles (17 to 64 kilometers). In 1926, oversight passed to the new Aeronautics Branch. Under the direction of the Postal Service, the Airways Division of the Lighthouse Bureau created beacon stations with concrete arrows. Postal Service to build a ground-based visual navigation system. In 1924, Congress approved funding for the U.S. ![]() And yet, being a postman of the skies was still a dangerous and potentially deadly job: Of the some 230 men who flew for the Post Office Department (the predecessor of the United States Postal Service) between 19, 32 died in crashes – six in the first week of operation alone. By 1926, however, when the lighted airway was in place, a letter could be delivered from New York to San Francisco in just 33 hours thanks to the advent of the beacon system. Using this system, a letter zipping along as fast as possible in 1922 could take up to 83 hours to make it from New York to San Francisco. Because their open cockpit biplanes had no lights and landing fields weren't illuminated, they could only fly by day, or risk almost certain death.Ĭonsequently, early transcontinental airmail delivery was a hybrid situation that involved leapfrogging the mail around the country by air in the daytime and delivering it to trains that rumbled by night. Nearly a century before satellites, Siri and GPS made ace navigators out of even the most directionally challenged among us, pilots back in the day had to rely on their compass and terrestrial landmarks like mountains, lakes, rivers and railroad tracks to guide the way. But these giant cracked and edge-worn arrows do point toward history: They're the last vestiges of America's early transcontinental airmail beacon system – literally a highway of light – that guided early 1920s airmail pilots, in the days before radar and ground-to-air radio, safely to their destinations as they made night flights from coast to coast. Are they outcroppings of an ancient underground geometric civilization? Signposts created by aliens to invade Earth? Remnants of the Pony Express – a lost episode that never aired on the History Channel? Wikimedia Commons ( CC By-SA 3.0)ĭotted across the American landscape in rugged, isolated places where tumbleweeds roll, snakes skitter and coyotes howl in the night, huge, mysterious concrete arrows lie like forgotten monuments against a pallet of sagebrush and sand, or on high hills against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains. ![]() ![]() One of the last vestiges of America's early transcontinental airmail beacon system, this concrete arrow still remains, in the desert outside Walnut Creek, CA.
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