Pick-up

Airmail service is a big-city luxury. U. S. airlines, hungrily eying the enormous potential postal business for them in small towns, have had to pass it up, since collecting mail on a "milk-route" would be slow because of many stops, uneconomic because of the high cost of landing fields.

But last week citizens of Coatesville, Pa. (pop. 14,582) saw a demonstration of a new brand of service which requires neither stops nor flying fields, were told that beginning May 12 it would be given daily to Coatesville and 54 other towns in Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia and Ohio by All-American Aviation, Inc., under Government contracts.

Coatesvilie's pick-up station, which was set up on the airport, could just as well have been set up in a pasture, on a building roof or a hilltop, where towns without flying fields will have to set theirs. Between two 40-foot poles, 50 feet apart, stretched a rope with a mailbag attached to it. From the sky one of All-American's Stinsons, trailing a four-pronged hook from its belly on a cable, bore down and passed over the rope between the poles. Out of the Stinson tumbled a bag of Coatesville mail. Neatly, the dangling hook snagged the stretched rope with the mailbag attached (see cut). As the monoplane picked up speed and began to climb the mail clerk in the cabin hauled in the bag by a winch, quickly had it aboard for sorting.

The man who sold the pick-up plan to Civil Aeronautics Authority is All-American's socialite president, Richard du Pont, crack airplane and glider pilot. Enthusiastic advocate of air mail for Main Street, he is confident his mail-snagging line will soon have counterparts in every part of the U. S., has cannily offered his pick-up device for sale. If the service proves widely popular the railroads may have something else to worry about.

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