Road Signs For Airplanes

“FLYING LOW TO MAKE OUT SIGNS ON RAILROAD stations or other buildings is dangerous, yet I sometimes has to be done,” wrote Amelia Earhart in 1932. Elsewhere she lamented: “And oh, for a country-wide campaign of sign painting! Coming down through a hole in the clouds, any flyer is thankful for definite information as to his location, even if it is only to check his navigation.”

Before radio navigation became widely used, at the end of the thirties, most aviators found their way by piloting —determining their position solely from landmarks they could identify. The author of a 1929 textbook on aerial navigation estimated that “not three cross-country flights out of a hundred are accomplished with the aid of any other method of navigation.” The radio beacon existed, but it generally was available only on well-traveled routes. In any case, few private planes were equipped with the necessary equipment.

Signs in big block letters on rooftops were especially useful, but they were also sometimes inconsistent and undependable. Town names and occasional arrows began appearing on some roofs by the late 1920s, but in varying colors, styles, and sizes. Some arrows pointed toward landing fields; others pointed north. One car dealer’s roof read, “ NEW BED FORD .” with an underline that an already confused pilot might mistake for a directional arrow.

At the time Earhart wrote her complaint, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch had adopted guidelines for air marking, but a concentrated effort to create a full, standardized network of the signs hadn’t yet begun. Before long the urgings of a team of pioneer women aviators would get the Works Progress Administration (WPA) on the job.

People had been trying to solve the problem for years. In early 1928, the Aeronautics Branch had announced that 2,000 towns and cities had been air-marked “by municipalities, aero clubs, factories, office buildings, fuel companies, and others.” The branch had provided specifications for more and asked state governments and businesses to help. Then that May an airway marking conference had been held in Wichita, Kansas, with attendees from all over the nation and five federal agencies submitting hundreds of plans for marking systems.

An airway marking committee convened the next month to establish the requirements for a standardized system. The committee “flight-tested” markings of various designs, sizes, and colors, painting them on large canvases and laying them out on the roof of the Commerce Department building in Washington. Nighttime illumination and visibility tests followed.

The committee’s report, dated January 23, 1929 (less than three weeks after tests were concluded), presented simple, standard guidelines for air marking as “one of the most immediately needed aids to air navigation at the present time.” It required each marker to include the name of its locality, a north arrow, and, if an airport was nearby, the direction and distance to it and its runway-length rating. The letters were to be chrome yellow and 10 to 30 feet high, with strokes of uniform thickness on a dead black background.

Still, in 1932 Earhart could lament that few towns were properly marked, and in some “the only words visible from above spelled the names of certain kinds of pills or liniment.” The cause finally got the support it needed in 1933, when a pilot named Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie was appointed special assistant for air intelligence of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA.

Omlie had broken the women’s parachuting altitude record in 1921, at age 18, after her future husband taught her to fly. He also taught her how to walk wings, parachute jump, hang by her teeth, and swing by trapeze from one plane to another in midair—all useful skills while the couple barnstormed as the Flying Omlies.

In the fall of 1935, she approached Eugene L. Vidal, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce (and father of the author Gore Vidal), with a plan to dot the country with air markers every 15 miles. Vidal agreed to coordinate the program, but when he could not obtain the necessary funds to carry it out, Omlie persuaded the WPA to take on the job, as a part of its nationwide airport improvement and construction program. Since the idea would still have to be sold to state and local WPA authorities, she appointed three well-known women pilots to be her field representatives. Helen MacCloskey and Louise Thaden both held aviation records, and Nancy Harkness would later head the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of the U.S. Air Transport Command. Harkness would subsequently be replaced by Helen Richey, the first woman airline pilot.

In August 1936 Omlie added a fourth flier, Blanche Noyes, Ohio’s first licensed woman pilot. By eerie coincidence, Noyes’s husband had died in a plane crash in December 1935 and Omlie’s had died the same way a few days before Noyes joined the staff. Omlie resigned her government job shortly afterward, while Noyes remained with the program until she retired as chief of the Air Marking Staff in 1972. The four field representatives could only persuade, not compel, but they accomplished a lot, talking to state and area WPA administrators and local leaders, helping with project applications, and giving technical advice. News-Week observed that the women “must be expert salesmen as well as pilots. A stubborn official can usually be convinced by flying him 15 miles from the airport and letting him try to find the way back.” Another wrote that “probably more air-marker jobs had actually jelled during those introductory flights than at any other time in the proceedings.”

Crews painted markers on roofs and on highways and even dug letter-shaped trenches and filled them with white stones. By 1936, 8,000 markers visible from at least 2,500 feet were completed or under construction in 30 states. A year later the WPA estimated that 10,000 of a projected 16,000 were in place.

But at the same time, technological developments were passing the markers by. Radio was steadily becoming more available and more necessary as the increased range of planes increased the burden on pilots and their navigational skills. Before long, air marking became, as it has been ever since, airport marking, involving the large letters and numbers that appear on runways and in the vicinity of airports. Today the Federal Aviation Administration issues the standards for airports. The Ninety-Nines, an organization founded in 1929 by 99 women pilots including Omlie, remains active in volunteering to do the actual marking.

In its day, air marking was a simple and, in good weather, effective way to help pilots. Those huge letters and arrows made flying a lot safer—until they themselves could be made obsolete.