The Radio Beacon Improves Aviation
The First military aviation flights were on Fort Myer, Virginia…
But College Park, Maryland is where aviation continued. It was first in 1909 when the US Army Signal Corps leased the acreage for the Wright Brothers to train the first military pilots. It would also be where Harold “Hap” Arnold first learned to fly. The US Army Signal Corps would only use the acres until 1912. Though other companies would launch their business operations along the edge of the acres. Among them were Curtiss-Wright and Rex Smith Aeroplane Company.
It would be several years later. 1927 in fact when aviation really began to take off. As more utility of this new form of travel/transportation presented itself, such as delivering the US Mail. A need to provide some navigation was set up at College Park, Maryland.
The Radio Beacon Show the Way
The first radio beacon was inaugurated alongside the airfield. A photograph above showing Dr. George K. Burgess, Director of the United States Bureau of Standards, and the aircraft radio beacon at College Park, Maryland, designed for guiding airplanes by radio. This is the first radio beacon for use of civil aviation and this station is but a forerunner of 40 other similar installations to be established at 200-mile intervals along the 8,234 miles of civil airways.The towers with a radio beacon would herald new advances in the aviation industry as additional applications of this technology would revolutionize the way the world worked, traveled, and fought.
A Time for Mercy (Jake Brigance)
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Images of America – Fort Myer is a pictorial chronicle of the first one hundred years of history containing over two hundred photographs, maps, and images. Beginning in the 1860s and carrying through the 1960s it provides a view
of what was over time.
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