Knight Flight
North Platte's Heroic Night Airmail Flight
By Linda Read Deeds
They had no radios, no lights and no brakes. Their runways were dirt, their landing fields hay meadows pocked with buffalo wallows. Their expected flying life was about 800 hours, or, as one historian put it, “less than a light bulb.”
The U.S. Mail pilot that went down the morning of February 22, 1921, in Nevada, was the fourth airmail pilot to die that month. He had been relaying mail to Utah, part of an historic effort to fly mail across the continent.
At North Platte, Nebraska, 28-year-old pilot Jack Knight was acutely aware of the crash. In spite of the tragedy, the mail had gone on. Now, at nightfall, it was at the small airfield next to the Platte River.
The biplane marked “U.S. Mail” waited in the flickering light cast by burning fuel barrels. Beyond them, the prairie lay locked in darkness. In a few minutes, the young pilot would climb into the open cockpit, lift off the dirt runway and into the star-filled sky. It would be the first night flight in airmail history.
“Night flying was so new, many doubted you could keep an airplane right side up in the dark,” fellow relay pilot Ernest Allison said in Nancy Allison Wright's “Remember the Air Mail Pioneers.”
It was a chilling thought. Already a dangerous venture, fate would up the odds even further. But the daring Knight would respond with a spectacular display of courage. By morning, he would be famous.
Flight in those early days was as erratic as the winds that buffeted the small biplanes. Mechanical failures were frequent. Storms or fog could be fatal. That year there had been 238 forced landings in January alone. Flying, the pilots said, was “hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror…”
The rest of the story appears in the Mar/Apr 2005 issue of Nebraska Life.
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| Jack Knight, above, sitting on airplane, survived many forced landings. The plane shown here went down in the South Platte River, five or six miles west of North Platte. The night airmail flight was more successful. Top of page: Knight went on to a long and distinguished career as a United Airlines pilot. Historic photos are from the Louis Drost Archive and appear courtesy of the North Platte Airport Authority Historical Committee. |
