Photo via here.īy World War II, radio was king and the airway beacons were obsolete. The Air Mail route from New York to San Francisco with beacon locations.Ī model of one of the arrows and beacons at the IPMS (International Plastic Modelers Socity) Nationals contest in Loveland, CO, which you a pretty good idea of the layout. These airway beacons are said to have been visible from a distance of 10 miles high. Painted in bright yellow, they were each built alongside a 50 foot tall tower with a rotating gas-powered light and a little rest house for the folks that maintained the generators and lights. In 1924, the federal government funded enormous concrete arrows to be built every 10 miles or so along established airmail routes to help the pilots trace their way across America in bad weather conditions and particularly at night, which was a more efficient time to fly. To get the planes and everybody’s mail safely across the country by air, the postman was going to need a little help.

Long before the days of radio (and those convenient little smartphone applications), the US Postal service began a cross-country air mail service using army war surplus planes from World War I, many piloted by former army flyers. ©Patricia Capron for the Bureau of Land Management History Mystery via Core77 This arrow may point your way out of the desert but it’s also pointing to the past.

If you’re ever really lost on a road trip across America, and I’m talking really lost (let’s say the battery on your smartphone just died along with that compass application you downloaded for situations just like this), perhaps you might be lucky enough to find yourself next to one of the giant 70 foot concrete arrows that point your way across the country, left behind by a forgotten age of US mail delivery.Ĭertainly a peculiar site to come across in the middle of nowhere, 50 foot, possibly 70 foot long, with weeds crawling through its concrete cracks, abandoned long ago by whoever put it there.

Transcontinental airmail arrows