From Signal, November-December 1951. (Copyright by and reproduced by permission of Armed Forces Communications Association, publishers of Signal.)
Events in Korea have just completed a strange cycle in military history. The Army Signal Corps, which hatched the Air Force by buying the first American military airplane from the Wright brothers before World War I, is now hatching a new but smaller air service. Today over the dusty, arid hills of Korea it is operating one of the world's biggest little airlines.
The midget airline performs an important job, which is as old as warfare: getting the messages through. While most people think of battlefield messages flitting back and forth via telegraph, telephone, or radio, there is still a great bulk of documents, maps and photographs which must travel by messenger. In one recent month the airline hauled 34,000 pounds of messages between Eighth Army and its corps headquarters.
Carrying messages by plane is nothing new, but in Korea it has become important. Jeep, or motor messenger service, had always received more use until the Korean campaign made getting messages from one battlefield to another more difficult. There are few roads there, and all of them are rough. It doesn't take many miles of bouncing over Korean roads to ruin a vehicle even as tough as the Army jeep and with so many other military vehicles on the narrow, dusty roads it takes too much time to get from one point to another.
The answer to the bad roads was the light airplane, the L-5, or "mosquito." While it took a jeep two days to make a run from army field headquarters and back, the light airplane does it in four hours or less. In fact, the first plane the Signal Corps recruited for this kind of work put fifteen to twenty jeeps out of work.
Today with five planes, five pilots and a ground crew of seven, the Air Section of the 304th Signal Operation Battalion is a busy outfit. Since September, when it got into operation, it has hauled a total of 82,000 pounds in payloads. Charts in the operations hut show its planes are making eighty flights a month. Each pilot puts in about seventy-five hours of flying time a month, which means he has to make a flight every day of the week with few exceptions.
There is nothing fancy about the way the airline operates. Each day before noon a jeep brings out the messages in mail sacks and tosses them inside the door of the operations hut alongside the dusty airstrip. A clerk inside tallies them in and marks them for different corps headquarters. Sometimes there is a passenger, but the maximum payload is limited to four hundred pounds. At 1300 the pilots walk back from the little mess hall and climb into their planes. The ground crew—one mechanic to a plane—has already given the planes a final check and squared away the baggage in the rear compartments. With a wave from the pilots the planes waddle out to the end of the strip and take off.
If nothing unusual happens they will be back before sundown. They follow routes carefully plotted on the map in the operations hut. Each pilot picks his route from the weather information given him before taking off, tells the clerk which route he will use, and when he arrives at his destination he sends word back by telephone which route he will use on the return trip. These precautions are always taken so that if a pilot gets into trouble a search plane will know where to look for him.
Except for these measures, the Mosquito pilot is left on his own to get from one temporary landing strip to another with his cargo. There is no radio beam to guide him, and though he carries a radio its range is too short to be of much help and, even if it were longer in range, there is no one to listen for his distress signal.
He travels like an Indian scout, checking his position with known landmarks along the way. Rivers, mountains, roads, lakes and villages spread out below him in a great map. Usually he flies within view of main supply roads where he could get help if he had to make a forced landing. And, if he is forced to land, the broad, flat banks of the Korean rivers make good places to bring down a light plane in an emergency.
The little airline has an excellent record for both safety and faithful service. So far no plane or pilot has been lost. Yet, in a country notorious for poor flying weather, the pilots have admitted only ten times in eight months of operations that it was too dangerous to fly.
The light-plane messenger service fills a gap between jeep messengers and big-plane courier service. Most division and corps headquarters manage to clear a landing strip nearby, but there isn't always room enough for the big planes or the improvised fields may be too soggy after a rain. That's where the light plane "brings in the bacon."
In World War II light planes did a similar kind of job, but it was not recognized until recently that what was needed was genuine
operateit-yourself, light-plane messenger service. Pilots and planes were recruited from the infantry and artillery, where the light plane has been in use as an observation and spotter plane. The world's biggest little airline has been born and the Signal Corps has its early wings back again.
