In 1919, in an effort to excite the public with the potential of air travel (and procure a larger budget for the Army Air Service and therefore, more power and prestige for himself), Billy Mitchell got permission to sponsor the first transcontinental air race in the United States.
Lancaster starts with the state of the air industry in the U.S. at the close of World War I (not great), covers the early efforts of the Postal Service is setting up air delivery of mail between New York and Chicago. But most of the book, as you'd hope given the title, is about the air race itself. The thing is set up in a whirlwind, with the route being planned and then Mitchell and his superiors trying to get airfields set up in the towns they've marked as control stops (where the pilots must land and stay at least 30 minutes.) In some cases, especially west of the Mississippi River, this requires marshaling the local Boy Scout troop to help clear and mark off some convenient field, while throwing together tents and fuel depots.
That's the part I find most interesting, is all the details Lancaster provides about just how challenging this was for the pilots. The airfields were often literal fields, and in one case, a treacherous salt flat. The planes were mostly fighters, designed for short stints, not covering thousands of miles in a few days. The planes are vulnerable to both rain and fire. There weren't any radar towers or radio communication. The instruments on-board might be limited to a compass (not always working) and an altimeter. Most of the pilots were using Rand McNally state maps to navigate because there wasn't anything standardized for much of the country. Lots of flying by feel and intuition, which is apparently really dangerous once you're in a cloud or fogbank.
Oh yeah, parachutes aren't a thing, either. There's a dire couple of paragraphs about the debate among pilots in wartime if it was better to jump from your burning plane or stick with it and see if you could get the fire under control (which a couple of pilots manage during the race.)
Lancaster focuses on a handful of pilots, from both the groups flying from New York to San Francisco and those going the opposite direction (although the race was hastily changed into a round trip flight eventually.) It's an eclectic group, as this predates any sort of broad training program. So you have career military men like Cary Spaatz, but also preachers (like eventual winner Belvin Maynard), mechanics-turned-pilots and everything in between.
Lancaster shifts frequently between them, even within chapters, as a way of comparing their progress with each other. So one pilot may make it out of St. Paul to Omaha ahead of a thunderstorm, while his nearest competitor is waylaid by a snapped strut or leaky radiator. There's a lot of turning back due to weather or mechanical issues, and several deaths, which the press seizes on as a question of whether this race is worth all this.
Lancaster, I think would land in the negative, while appreciating the feat the pilots accomplished. It hardly convinces people that air travel is safe, and given how few of the pilots actually managed the round trip, let alone in the three weeks allotted, it's not clear how much better it really is than a train unless everything goes right. Though it may have helped the Postal Service in convincing some of those small towns to maintain and improve those fields so they could get regular mail delivery by air.
'Early in the race, a DH-4 that landed near Stillwell, Indiana, in the midst of a rainstorm was set upon by hogs with a taste for aircraft linen. They gnawed two holes in the rudder before they could be driven away.'
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