Our Remarkable Experiment With Helicopter Mail Delivery

Jerry Banik, September 2023

Like so many advancements that emerge out of sheer necessity during wartime, helicopter technology surged during World War II when the military poured millions of dollars into their development.  When the war ended in 1945, not only did we have helicopters that were much improved, we also had a supply of helicopter pilots, trained in the military and available for potential civilian ventures.  Such was the scene in 1946, when the U.S. government, for the first time, authorized helicopters for civilian use, and launched what they declared to be a five-year experiment to test and develop helicopter air mail service.

Whiting and Robertsdale were part of that experiment.

Six metropolitan areas, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia and Kansas City were chosen for the tests.  The government loaned copters to the U.S. Postal Service, which staged test flights with the cooperation of the Army Air Forces.  To operate routes in the 50-mile radius around Chicago, United Airlines was among the first to commit to purchasing helicopters of their own, as they and other private enterprises requested operating authority from the Civil Aeronautics Board.

Here in Whiting and Robertsdale, as in the other test cities, people began scanning the skies in hopes of getting their first ever, up close look at a helicopter in action. Stories of sightings and visits to landing sites filled the gossip mills.

In the first phase of testing, flights were to leave Chicago’s Municipal Airport (now known as Midway), land on the roof of the Chicago Post Office and then on the roof of the Merchandise Mart building, which had its own post office station.

After Merchandise Mart came stops at Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Gary, and Lansing, and then back to Chicago.

Subsequent test flights included night trips, and tests of the ability to throw off and pick up mailbags without landing.  A bag of outbound mail was suspended between two uprights that had a nylon rope stretched between them.  The helicopter needed to catch the bag with a hook, and haul it up with a pulley.  In the end, this system was never put into actual use.

On October 1, 1946, Whiting and Robertsdale saw their first of many test runs.

Citizens were invited to witness the first landing, and many flocked to attend. The landing site chosen was “a field near the filtration plant.”  Whiting arranged to hold an official ceremony for the copter’s arrival. City officials welcomed the pilots, and the high school bands from both Hammond Clark and Whiting saluted them with music and their cheerleaders.

By October of 1947, testing in the Los Angeles Basin area was already complete, and helicopter mail service there was launched.  But here in Indiana, the testing of routes, schedules and sites dragged on.  No post offices in Lake County could accommodate helicopters on their roofs.  Multiple landing sites were proposed and then rejected.  Delays arose over questions of whether or not to allow or require passenger service in addition to mail.  The postal service sought to conduct a new study of truck service before they would approve helicopter service.

By June of 1948, United Airlines dropped out of the bidding for the contract in our area, despite having already purchased a Sikorsky S-51.

By the end of 1948, with service still not in place, it was said the post office was getting cold feet, but the Civil Aeronautics Board announced that service would begin by early April, 1949.

It did not.

There was still no final selection of landing sites.  Service, it was said, would begin in May.

It didn’t.

In June it was announced it would begin in August.  A week later, they changed that to “sometime in September.”

The air mail routes in Illinois had begun, but ours were still stuck on the ground.  Bell Aircraft experienced a workers’ strike in New York, delaying things further.  Yet another proposed landing site for Hammond was rejected.

Finally! Three years after the first test flights into Whiting and Robertsdale, actual service here began.  On November 21, 1949, at the landing site shared by Whiting and Hammond just south of the 41 Outdoor Theatre, Whiting’s Mayor Andrew Kovacik, Postmaster Levern Fortin and others greeted the first flight, in a ceremony attended by the public. Three flights per day began delivering and picking up mail before heading to East Chicago’s landing site at Block Stadium.  Unfortunately though, after such an inauspicious, three year “spring training” session, pessimism that helicopter air mail service was going to be successful here had already grown.

Skipping ahead to August of 1953, the Hammond Times reported, perhaps a couple of months prematurely, that helicopter air mail service to the Calumet Region had completed four years of service.  But in the end, the service never gained enough traction to become a viable, long term benefit to our postal needs. Among its many disadvantages, the maximum weight lift was said to be insufficient, and the helicopters could not safely operate within a cloud base under 500 feet. At the stage of development that existed then, helicopter air mail couldn’t be regarded as an economically attractive proposition for carrying mail, and it soon slipped into the dust bin of Whiting and Robertsdale’s history.