The story of ERNEST M. ALLISON (1894 - 1976)(CNAC Pilot 1929-1937 and Operations Manager 1947-1949)
[CNAC = China National Aviation Corporation]
In a book, Yankee on the Yangtze by his daughter, Nancy Allison Wright.
Excerpts from the webpage:
1934:
1940 employed by CNAC as inspector/test pilot for rebuilding of five Condors, Glendale, California for use in freight. Purchased new DC-3 for CNAC.
January 25, 1941 became president of Harlow Aircraft Company of Glendale.
June 25, 1942 took temporary job organizing new company, Arizona Gliding Academy.
July 1942 Boeing production test pilot of B-17s in Seattle.
June 1943 - November 1945 Boeing chief test pilot for B-29 in Wichita.
February 1947 returned to China as CNAC operations manager.
That was very interesting! There were a lot of great links that I followed from that one you provided...a lot of impactful people who lived significant lives there.
I was interested in his time as a Air Mail pilot...this is one of my favorite pictures of those days that seems to epitomize what those men were like (this fellow was a famous pilot, W.C. Hopson who flew 413,000 miles and made 13 forced landindings in 1926 alone, who was later killed in a crash carrying mail...on that flight, he was carrying $100,000 dollars in diamonds, and when the crash site was reached, there were $40,000 of those diamonds missing):
It was incredibly dangerous work, and Charles Lindbergh had to bail out at night in storms twice when he flew air mail. There were no navigational aids, and large stones placed in the form of arrows on the ground or roofs of barns were painted or shingled to show the name of a town to aid Air Mail pilots. My wife and I stayed at a house that had one of the biggest barns I had ever seen, built back in the Twenties that still had the town on the roof.
I have always been interested in the Air Mail Crisis that began in 1930 with the passage of the McNary-Watres Act that in my opinion introduced a degree of government sponsored favoritism and corruption and resulted in Roosevelt cancelling all contracts for civilian pilots and giving the task of flying airmail to Army pilots, who were wholly unsuited by training and temperament to fly in those kinds of horrible conditions. (When conditions were that bad, military pilots simply didn't fly, but the Air Mail pilots did all the time and had experience in it, even though many of them still died doing it)
But when the Army pilots took over, it resulted in many more accidents and deaths, causing Eddie Rickenbacker (who was working for the precursor to Eastern Airlines, Eastern Air Transport at the time) to label Roosevelt's actions as "legalized murder". Eventually, under political pressure from the likes of Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh, the issue was resolved by Congress with legislation.
For Lindbergh, it was just one of the drops of water in the grudge that Roosevelt held against him that caused Roosevelt to blackball Lindbergh from taking any part in the effort to defeat the axis at the beginning of the war, where he refused Lindbergh's desire to rejoin active service in the Army Air Corps, and the Roosevelt administration pressured aviation companies not to hire him under threat of economic retaliation from Roosevelt. It was petty behavior by Roosevelt, and a lot of people felt that way.