Episode 69: 90 Miles and Minutes to Spare

To understand why anybody cared about a 90-mile hop between Key West and Havana, you have to understand what 1927 felt like.

Five months before our story even begins, a 25-year-old airmail pilot named Charles Lundberg climbed into a single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, and flew, alone, no autopilot, no radio, just him, a compass, five sandwiches, and an enormous amount of nerve, from New York to Paris, 33 1⁄2 hours, solo, nonstop.

When he landed at Le Bourget Field outside Paris, something like 150,000 people were there to meet him.

He came home to a ticker tape parade in New York bigger than anything the city had thrown before.

America didn't just admire Lindbergh, America went crazy.

In the words of newspapers of the day, airplane crazy.

Suddenly aviation wasn't a stunt for daredevils and barnstormers, it was the future and everyone wanted a part of it.

Which brings us to a very particular 90-mile stretch of water between the southern tip of Florida and the northern coast of Cuba.

Here's the thing about that stretch of water in 1927.

It wasn't really about Cuba.

It was about everything south of Cuba.

The U.S. Post Office Department had a plan.

If American companies took the airmail contracts connecting the United States to Latin America, those companies would build the airfields, the fuel depots, the radio stations, the entire infrastructure for regular air travel throughout the hemisphere.

Whoever controlled that infrastructure would effectively control commercial aviation from Florida to the tip of South America, for a generation.

The U.S. government very badly wanted that whoever to be American, because it was already looking like it might be German.

Down in Colombia, there was an airline called SCABTA, the Colombian-German Air Transport Society.

It was on paper a Colombian company.

In practice, it was staffed, financed, and largely flown by Germans, a number of them former World War I pilots, and it was very, very good at what it did.

SCADTA was already flying scheduled international routes years before most American airlines had figured out how to keep mail contracts solvent.

To officials in Washington, particularly in the War Department, this was not just a business story.

This was a national security issue.

On March 14, 1927, three Army Air Corps officers, Major Henry Hap Arnold, yes, that Hap Arnold, future five-star general and father of the U.S. Air Force, along with fellow majors Carl Spatz and John Jewett, incorporated a company called Pan American Airways.

They went on to secure a foreign airmail contract for FAM-4 to carry airmail between Key West and Havana, Cuba.

As you

mentioned, SCADA was already entrenched in Latin America and, in theory, could have posed a threat to the Panama Canal.