The Air Commerce Act was passed by Congress in 1926, giving the federal government the responsibility to establish new airways, fostering air commerce, making and enforcing flight safety rules as well as improving aids navigation. The act was passed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. This act saw management of air routes taken to a new branch of aeronautics under the Department of Commerce. The act was crafted by William McCracken Jr who was an expert in aviation law.
The legislation was passed because the United States had no policies regarding civilian aviation. With no such regulations, the leaders in the aviation sector believed that it would be essential to provide the transportation safety rules. President Coolidge then passed the act to establish regulations and safety policies for the commercial air industries (Komons, 1978). The Act was purposed to develop the commercial aviation since it would focus on the areas such as testing and testing of pilots, investigating accidents, ensuring proper maintenance on the aircraft as well as guaranteeing the worthiness of the plane.
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Another reason why the act was passed was that the postmaster general realized that the operators of airmail were only flying on the shorter routes within their zones because they were not getting paid the stamp money even in occasions when they went for longer journeys. In May 1926, the legislation was passed by the Congress, and the Federal Government was given several responsibilities that would deal with the airway rules (Komons, 1978). This act gave the government the authority to facilitate air navigation and to ensure that all the routes would be safe at all times. The federal government had the ramifications of providing navigation aids and developing steps for safer flights (Komons, 1978). The local government, for instance, found it hard to manage local control of the airmails.
In the long run, this act achieved to enact so many changes. Carriers of contract airmails flew many airmails even as the government pilots with the government airplanes continued to fly the transcontinental routes that connected Omaha, San Fransisco, New York, and Chicago. Later in 1927, the transcontinental line was divided into two segments. Boeing began to provide contract services for the western regions between San Francisco and Chicago in July 1927. The Eastern section was taken over by the National Air Transport between Chicago and New York in September 1927.
At this point, all the airmail operators had shifted to the private companies and were then flying their aircrafts and pilots. The Post Office Department under the Federal Government managed most of the airfields on the routing system (Komons, 1978). In July 1927, the Commerce Department took the responsibility of constructing and maintaining the incomplete transcontinental lighted airways (Komons, 1978). Apart from the hundreds of light beacons, the facilities of the airways included ninety-five landing fields that would be used for emergency and seventeen other radio stations which would provide weather information to the pilots.
The already improved aircraft technologies helped in increasing the volume of the freight and the mail that could be carried. Some airplanes started to carry baggage, passengers, and airmail. Water cooled engines got replaced by the air-cooled engines. The new engines could generate up to four hundred and fifty horsepower and greatly helped the airplanes to improve the average speed of one hundred and ten miles per hour. The United States had shown their might in as far as aviation industry was concerned. Even so, just a year after the armistice, France, and Britain had started operating scheduled flights between Paris and London. France already had an airmail system that outdistanced the fledging airmail service of the United States (Komons, 1978). The Germans, on the other hand, had a metal transport nearly ten years before one for Henry Ford was designed by William Stout.
Reference
Komons, N. A. (1978). Bonfires to Beacons: federal civil aviation policy under the Air Commerce Act, 1926-1938 . Smithsonian Institution Press.
