by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The rapid development of airline travel in greater Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties has been touched upon in several prior posts on this blog, including one from 2018 that featured a press photograph of a Ryan monoplane operated by the Pacific Air Transport Company as that firm finalized air mail service to Seattle. In the post, it was stated that the craft could have been parked at San Diego, where Ryan headquarters were situated, or in Los Angeles as the plane was ready to head for the Washington metropolis.
The post has been updated because it is now known that the Los Angeles location, if that’s where the photo was taken, was at a new airport located at 3717 S. Angeles Mesa Drive, south of Exposition Boulevard—those looking up that address, however, will be stumped because, while there an Angeles Mesa neighborhood, where an elementary school of that name has been profiled here before, that name was replaced with Crenshaw Boulevard.
Today’s featured object for this post is a “Flight Certificate” with the number 5874 and costing $2.50, issued by Ryan Airlines to “Miss M. Levesley” on 16 July 1926 because she “has taken our WONDER AIR FLIGHT over the City and surroundings” with pilot J. Barrow. Below the background image of the Ryan craft are the addresses of the firm’s San Diego headquarters, just north of Lindbergh Field, now San Diego International Airport, and the Angeles Mesa Drive address.
T. Claude Ryan (1898-1982) learned to fly when still in his teens, received training with the United States Army Air Corps at March Field in Riverside just after the conclusion of the First World War and then joined the United States Aerial Forest Patrol. He set up shop in San Diego in 1922 with his Ryan Flying Company and, as passenger service began to develop, he established what was termed the “Los Angeles-San Diego Airline.
The Los Angeles Times of 19 April 1925, under the heading of “San Diego Air Line Popular,” advised that no one had to envy the existing London to Paris route because “we have just as good a show right in our own back yard.” Business figures, it went on, could board the Ryan craft in the Angel City area at 9 a.m., be in San Diego in an hour-and-a-half, work almost a full day and return by 5:30 p.m. and it noted “along with the business men travel tourists and pleasure seekers of the home or garden variety” could make the jaunt, as well.
Such a trip, launched six weeks prior, wouldn’t cost a fortune by hiring a plane and pilot for a private flight, which would involve “riding out in the open cockpit—where the wind howls and puts a sandpaper finish on the skin you think someone loves to touch.” Instead, a traveler could go to the Los Angeles-San Diego Airline field at Western Avenue and 99th Street and climb in as the roof was lifted into a “swell little cabin” which “resembles the interior of a small coupe” with two seats for passengers, one behind the other.
The airline, however, soon moved its field. The 9 September edition of the Los Angeles Express (it was the 75th anniversary of California’s admission as the 31st state in the Union) ran a feature “Use of Airplane Growing Steadily” with a photo of a craft parked at the Angeles Mesa Drive airport. Observing that “the use of the airplane as a vehicle for business and pleasure transportation is growing all over the United States,” the paper continued that,
Nowhere, however, are conditions more favorable to this growth than in Southern California. Although the service has been used by thousands of people, many Los Angeles citizens will, no doubt, be surprised to learn that daily airplane schedules are being maintained between Los Angeles and San Diego by the Los Angeles-San Diego Air Line, whose terminal is now located at 3717 Angeles Mesa Drive.
A regular business traveler expressed his satisfaction is using the airline, while a Chicago visitor enthused over the views and the pleasure of flying, stating she looked forward to being able to take a plane from her home to the Coast. Manager J.B. Alexander recounted to the Express that 20,000 passengers flew on the route without a mishap and a sole forced landing to date.
When Ryan decided to offer passenger service from the Angel City to Tijuana in Baja California, México, just over the border from San Diego, and where Americans could not only bet on the ponies at horse races at the Agua Caliente Race Track but also legally drink alcoholic beverages and then fly home without having to take a chance driving while intoxicated, photos in the Times of 22 November showed a Ryan craft in flight, as well as its interior (with a Photoplay film magazine tucked away in a pocket in front of one of the seats.)
On the last day of 1925, the Times reported on the formation of the Pacific Air Transport Company, capitalized at a quarter million dollars, and which was to carry U.S. mail between Los Angeles and Seattle by April 1926. Vern Gorst of North Bend, Oregon and a bus line operator won the mail contract and incorporated the firm in San Francisco, while also announcing that there were to be seven stops along the route and another company figure, R.L. Gardner, stated that there were to be three flights daily in each direction for the 37 hours saved with a change in pilots.
Pacific Air was to have a ten-plane fleet and was chartered to carry express mail, freight and passengers, though it was added that “until the company has established itself sufficiently to insure prompt mail deliveries, little freight and no passengers will be carried.” Notably, Claude Ryan was one of the incorporators and the article concluded that, once the existing route was fully operational and successful “the corporation will make arrangements for extension to San Diego through the airline operated by Ryan,” meaning the Los Angeles-San Diego.
The 3 January 1926 edition of the Times included an article about the need for a 640-acre airport within six to eight miles of the downtown post office and, while that didn’t happen and the larger facility, which is some 3,500 acres, ended up as Mines Field, now Los Angeles International Airport, and roughly double that distance. In a chart of 14 local fields, Ryan, leased by the company, was shown as covering about 1.4 million square feet, having an adobe surface for its 2,500 foot runway and having as an obstacle that it was “boxed with wires.”
A week later the paper reported that Ole Hanson, a former Seattle mayor and the developer of the newly launched San Clemente in Orange County, built an airport as a stop for the Los Angeles-San Diego airline. The Hollywood Citizen of 12 February published the planned air mail schedule, to take effect around the 1st of May and using Ryan craft with a speed of 115 mph and being built in San Diego.
The Times of the same day commented that “plans are practically completed” for the air mail service, while citing Gorst for the statement that “arrangements are under way for the establishment of a passenger line over the same route.” Moreover, he continued, passenger service “will start as soon as suitable equipment can be obtained and airports established.” Ryan’s test flights were successful, so Pacific Air Transport executed contracts for a half-dozen 200-hp planes, with one delivered. Gorst also told the paper that, “the company will use the Los Angeles-San Diego Airline flying field pending establishment of a municipal or government field.”
Nine days later, the Times reported on a conference of “air notables” who were to discuss “steps designed to give Los Angeles an ‘airplane union station,” not unlike long-gestating plans for a railroad union station (this latter finally opened in 1939). The gathering, at the Studio Inn in what is now Koreatown, was to include findings of a committee of the regional chapter of the National Aeronautic Association, including J.B. Alexander of the Los Angeles-San Diego Airline and Harris Hanshue of Western Air Express.
The committee was not going to recommend any specific site, but reveal a survey that included the need for a fog-free site with good connections to downtown and rail lines among other attributes. The confab was said to be “one of the most representative ever held in Los Angeles so far as men of prominence in the world of aeronautics are concerned,” with Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I flying ace who’d developed airports in Buffalo and Cleveland and was working on one in Boston, providing an overview of what was desired in a field.
The 26 February edition of the Pasadena Star-News noted that, as the air mail service was being readied, including a pending Los Angeles-Salt Lake City route, as early as the 1st of April, it was remarked that “according to news sources in postal circles a field near Maywood, south[east] of Los Angeles, has been agreed upon as the airport of both the air mail lines.” The suburb along the west bank of the Los Angeles River was said to be superior to a field at Griffith Park and Ross Field, home of the World War I-era balloon corps, in Arcadia.
About a month later, the Times of 25 March observed that Claude Ryan establishing a new record time of six hours and forty minutes in a flight from Seattle to San Francisco, easily besting the previous mark of eight hours. The craft was that first of the planes made by his company in San Diego, but it was also noted that,
Ryan’s return to the local field at the Ryan Airport on [Angeles] Mesa Drive was marred by a slight accident when his landing gear collapsed as he turned at the far end of the field and stated to taxi back to the huge crowd that awaited his arrival. Neither Ryan, nor his companion, C.N. Comstock, vice-president of the Ryan Airways Company, who was a passenger from San Francisco, was injured and the plane was slightly damaged . . .
Yet, Ryan officials explained that, in the rush to finish construction of the craft, the company used regular carbon steel instead of chrome molybdenum steel that was called for in mail plane specs. When Ryan hit a rut in the field, this caused the collapse of the gear. In any case, the Los Angeles Postmaster, P.P. O’Brien, was photographed greeting Comstock and Ryan as they climbed out of the craft to commemorate the record and arrival. The Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News published a photo of the Ryan plane as it approached for landing.
A little tangent concerning the Angeles Mesa airport was in a typically colorful and self-serving advertisement by oil operator and con-man C.C. Julian that appeared in local papers at the end of March. In it, Julian boasted that, in securing a doctor needed to work on an employee of Julian’s Nevada copper mine, he “grabbed the telephone and called the Ryan Airport, and inquired as to how soon they could have a plane ready to leave for Tonopah, Nevada, and the “FLASH” they shot me right back was, “RIGHT AWAY.” A surgeon was soon secured, an operation successfully performed and Julian could be a hero for those reading his ad.
Another flight record was shattered in mid-May, this time from Portland to Los Angeles, with the Times of the 16th commenting that “a large grey monoplane circled like a bird out of the sky and landed gracefully on a local flying field,” that is, the Angeles Mesa airport, “bringing an end in a nonchalant manner a record-breaking flight.” This was also the first non-stop trip, with no refueling, between the two metropolises.
Lee Shoenhair, flying for Pacific Air Transport on the test flight, and arrived some 25 minutes early in 8 hours and 50 minutes (today’s flights between the cities is 2 1/2 hours) after the 900-mile flight with an average speed of 110 miles per hour. Shoenhair handed over film of the craft photographed by a journalist in the Rose City before leaving Portland, one of these published in the Times article, and also delivered a pair of letters to Angelenos.
The next day’s Express added that the flight “is said to practically cut in half the previous nonstop flying time between the two cities” and that “made primarily to test the reliability of equipment, the flight was pronounced a success both from that standpoint and from the angle of increased speed.” The 9 June Long Beach Press-Telegram published a photo of a newer, faster Ryan craft that had a speed of 135-mph and could carry 1,600 pounds with the owner piloting the plane from San Diego to that local city.
The mail route to Seattle, however, did not begin until the end of summer, with the Los Angeles Record of 8 September citing Postmaster O’Brien as stating that service was to begin in a week. The schedule had the Ryan plane coming in from the Northwest metropolis at 5 p.m. and leaving the Angeles Mesa field at midnight. Service was still being handled from that airport as late as December 1928, though no reference to the facility could be found after that.
This was a couple of months after the important National Air Races at Mines Field, which officially opened on 1 October after the show’s conclusion and which was rechristened as Los Angeles Municipal Airport in 1930 and a grand opening held on 7 June. This certificate is notable as a reflection of the massive growth and rapid changes in aviation in greater Los Angeles, which had the climate, space, workforce and other conditions to become a key aviation center.