The Graf Zeppelin hydrogen powered rigid airship pictured on today’s #stampoftheday takes us on a journey past two aviation-related milestones, both from the 1930s.

On June 23, 1931, Wiley Post, a famous aviator and his navigator Harold Getty, took off from Roosevelt Field to begin a record-setting 8-day around-the-world flight (with stops in Harbour Grace, Flintshire, Hanover, Berlin, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, Nome (where the propeller had to be repaired), Fairbanks (where the propeller was replaced), Edmonton, and Cleveland. This not only was the first flight successful aerial circumnavigation by a single-engine monoplane it also broke the previous record for an around-the-world trip, then held by Hugo Eckener who in 1929 had piloted the Graf Zeppelin, a on a 21-day around-the-world flight. Post, who died in a 1935 plane crash that also killed humorist Will Rogers, wasn’t honored on a stamp until 1979, well after my father had stopped collecting stamps in any systematic way.

The fact that Post’s trip was so much faster underscored the rapid ways that aviation was changing in the 1930s. In the late 1910s and the 1920s, as aviation began to take hold, most countries began offering airmail service for those who wanted faster delivery. (The other stamps shown in this posting were the first six US airmail stamps, three of them issued in 1918 and three in 1923.) By the late 1920s, there was growing interest in the commercial possibilities of transoceanic flight if not by plane then by airships, which had been used in Germany to carry passengers before the outbreak of World War I and then used by the Germans and Allied forces during the war. After the war, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, which had built and operated the zeppelins, were forced to turn over its airships to the Allies and to pay reparations. The company offered to build an airship for the United States as payment of its war debt. The US quickly agreed, but with one stipulation, the dirigible had to successfully complete a transatlantic delivery. On October 15, 1924, after 77 hours over the Atlantic, the ship arrived at the US Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey. It carried 55,714 pieces of mail.

With European countries lifting restrictions on German aviation, in 1925 Hugo Eckener, who headed the firm, moved to build a larger airship that could carry passengers and mail. The Graf Zeppelin, which had a 36-person crew and could carry 24 passengers, was christened in July 1928 and attracted huge crowds wherever it went. After its flight around the world in 1929, it began flying a triangular route between Spain, Brazil, and the US, a trip funded in part by the sale of special stamps issued by the three countries, including the one shown with this post. Over the next several years, it made a polar flight as well as many trips between Germany and Brazil, where there was a larger German community. When the Nazis came to power, they also began using the ship as a propaganda tool, a practice that continued until 1937 when the ship, permanently withdrawn from service about a month after the Hindenburg, another hydrogen propelled airship exploded in New Jersey. By the time it was retired after less than a decade in service, the Graf Zeppelin had made 590 flights, including 144 ocean crossings, covered more than one million miles, and carried over 13,000 passengers and 235,300 pounds of mail and freight.

The demise of hydrogen filled airships and improvements to gasoline powered airplanes led to a rise in commercial aviation and a concurrent rise in safety concerns about the lightly regulated airline industry and the lack of a strong federal air traffic control system. As a result, on June 23, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Civil Aeronautics Act, which created the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA), to provide a greater federal role in all aspects of aviation. The CAA was charged with operating the nascent federal air traffic control, regulating airline fares and routes, and investigating accidents. Two years later, Roosevelt split the CAA into two separate agencies. The CAA returned to the Department of Commerce and retained oversight of civilian Air Traffic Control systems, while a new Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) was put in charge of regulating airline pricing and routes, creating safety rules, and investigating accidents.

Despite these strides, accidents continued to happen as airway traffic increased in the coming decades. In 1958, the CAA was converted into the new, independent, Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), which was charged with improving and upgrading the air traffic control system so that it could accommodate the rapid rise in air travel that accompanied the introduction of commercial jets planes in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The agency was renamed the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1967 and made part of the new Department of Transportation (DOT).

The CAB’s regulation of routes and fares continued until the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter appointed economist Alfred Kahn (who had specialized in research on deregulation) to be chair of the CAB. Kahn spearheaded efforts that resulted in the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which specified that the CAB would he first federal regulatory regime, since the 1930s, to be totally dismantled, a process that was completed on January 1, 1985. Over the next several decades, the CAB’s demise led to massive changes and restructuring in the airline industry, including the rise of low-priced airlines, the introduction of frequent flyer clubs, and the concerted push to put as many seats as possible onto planes, even if they were amazingly uncomfortable. The federal government, of course, has continued to operate the air traffic control system, to investigate aviation accidents, and, to bail out the aviation industry during economic downturns.

So, if you ever fly again, and if your search for a cheap ticket leads you to an itinerary that includes stops in Harbour Grace, Flintshire, Hanover, Berlin, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, Nome, Fairbanks, Edmonton, and Cleveland you’ll be in good company. And as you try to relax in a crowded middle seat, you can try to imagine what it must have been like to be one the handful of passengers who travelled in luxury on the hydrogen fueled airships that, like the Graf Zeppelin, appeared to be the future of long-distance travel. And, when you (hopefully) arrive safely at your destination, you can give a nod to the people who run the air traffic control system and regulate airline safety, even if those operations seemed to be the cause of interminable delays and seemingly bizarre regulations.

All of that assumes, however, that one day we again will be travelling on airplanes, which right now seem to be as much of a pipe dream as those luxury air ships must have seemed to people (such as my father) who might have seen them floating overhead in the midst of the Great Depression.

Stay safe, be well, work justice and fight for peace.