Page 4 - Demo

7%u00a2 Jupiter commemorative stamp.Thomas Wood. The flight was hardly a success%u2014fiasco might be a better word%u2014because there was almost no wind. Even after rising to 14,000 feet, Wise could only drift south, instead of east as intended, and he covered a mere 30 miles before landing near Crawfordsville. Once on the ground, he handed the mailbag to a postal agent for the New Albany & Salem Railroad, and the letters were taken to New York by train. Today only one cover from the flight is known to exist, and it resides at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1959, the Post Office issued a seven-cent commemorative stamp to honor Jupiter%u2019s dubious achievement, and the stamp%u2019s first-day-of-issue was celebrated in my home town of Lafayette%u2014when I was 10 years old. As part of the anniversary celebration, balloonist Donald Piccard (son of high-altitude balloonist Jean Piccard, for whom Jean Luc Piccard of Star Trek, The Next Generation was named) took off with a modern hydrogen-filled version of Jupiter%u2014with 123 letters%u2014but was no more successful than Wise had been a hundred years earlier. After only 4 miles, Piccard was blown into some trees and had to be rescued by the State Police.Pioneer FlightsBetween 1910 and 1916, experiments in sending mail by airplane, called Pioneer Flights, were sponsored by the U.S. Post Office Department. In its catalogs, the American Air Mail Society lists six such flights that took place in Indiana, each in 1912, all part of aviation exhibitions. There was also a 1914 flight from Illinois that touched down in Indiana. By today%u2019s standards, none were particularly memorable. But, considering the primitive aviation equipment available back then%u2014only a few short years after the Wright brothers first successful flight at Kitty Hawk%u2014they were newsworthy events at the time. Covers exist for each of these Pioneer Flights, but are quite rare. In this album, I have included images of covers from each Indiana flight.