Today, an aerial photograph of Brownsville's airport taken around 1929 can look almost impossibly primitive. There are no great paved runways stretching toward the horizon, no jet bridges and no sprawling passenger terminals. Instead there is open ground, a scattering of buildings, airplanes sitting almost casually on the field—and two enormous hangars carrying words that announced Brownsville's new place in the world: PAN AMERICAN AIRWAYS INC.
For a brief but extraordinary period, Brownsville was not at the end of the United States. In aviation, it was a gateway to everything beyond it.
Airplanes had been appearing over the Lower Rio Grande Valley for years, but by the late 1920s aviation was rapidly changing from spectacle into transportation. Brownsville was almost perfectly positioned to participate. Mexico lay immediately across the Rio Grande, with Tampico and Mexico City beyond it, and for airlines attempting to establish regular service between the United States and Latin America, Brownsville represented a natural American gateway.
Even before the new municipal airport became an international aviation center, remarkable aviators were moving through the region. In February 1928, the Brownsville Herald reported on French aviators Joseph LeBrix and Dieudonné Costes, who had flown nonstop from Mexico City to New Orleans during their celebrated long-distance travels. Such flights demonstrated how rapidly aviation was shrinking distances that only a few years earlier had seemed enormous.
Brownsville intended to be part of that new world. In 1928, local voters approved bonds for the development of a municipal airport. Among the men closely associated with its early operation was aviator Les Mauldin, whose flying career stretched back to the World War I era. Mauldin became an early manager of the municipal field and a familiar figure in aviation throughout the Rio Grande Valley. He was also a flying instructor, and later advertisements would invite Brownsville residents simply to “Learn to Fly” under his instruction.
One surviving photograph preserved by the Mauldin family gives an idea of just how modest the early field was. A simple metal hangar stands on largely open ground with several airplanes sheltered inside. There is little in the photograph to suggest an international transportation center. Yet within an astonishingly short period of time, that field would become one.
Brownsville's location was increasingly drawing aviators engaged in long-distance and experimental flying. The Mauldin collection contains a photograph associated with Yantis “Buck” Taylor, an Army aviator remembered by the family as one of the men who helped teach Mauldin to fly. Taylor became known during the 1920s for long-distance demonstration flights, including a celebrated circuit around Texas. The photograph shows the sort of scene that was becoming increasingly common at Brownsville: an airplane surrounded by curious spectators, pilots and local residents who had come out to see what—or who—had landed.
Then came March 9, 1929.
Charles A. Lindbergh arrived at Brownsville from Mexico City carrying the first mail over Pan American's newly inaugurated international route. Lindbergh was by then probably the most famous aviator in the world, but this was more than a celebrity appearance. His flight represented the opening of a regular aerial connection between the United States and Mexico, with Brownsville serving as the American gateway.
An estimated 20,000 people gathered for the occasion. Amelia Earhart was among the aviation personalities present, along with record-setting and military flyers. Contemporary coverage described formation flying, stunt flying, parachute demonstrations, passenger flights and nighttime activity. Seven large trimotor airplanes were reportedly assembled on the field during the celebration. Newsreel companies came to Brownsville to record the event. For a remarkable few days, the new municipal airport became an aviation showplace.
The Brownsville Herald recognized what had happened. Its March 11 coverage declared that Lindbergh's flights and the inauguration of the international mail route had placed Brownsville's municipal airport before the nation.
Lindbergh, however, was becoming something more than an occasional celebrity visitor to Brownsville. His engagement to Anne Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador to Mexico, gave him another reason to travel repeatedly between the United States and Mexico City. Brownsville lay conveniently along the way.
One April 1929 newspaper account gives us a wonderfully human glimpse of those visits. Lindbergh landed at Brownsville early in the morning, had breakfast with Les and Etelka Mauldin, chatted with those present, had his airplane checked and refueled, and then departed for Mexico City. His breakfast consisted of corn flakes, scrambled eggs and toast.
He declined the Valley grapefruit.
That seemingly meaningless decision became an Associated Press story. The Herald jokingly suggested that Lindbergh's refusal might actually prove beneficial because people throughout the country who had never heard that grapefruit was grown in the Lower Rio Grande Valley would now learn about it. The newspaper reassured readers that Lindbergh had eaten grapefruit on earlier visits. Apparently, on this particular morning, America's most famous aviator simply wasn't in the mood.
A surviving photograph from the Mauldin family collection captures the relationship from an even more appealing angle. Les Mauldin stands nearby while Lindbergh works beside an airplane. There is no enormous crowd and no ceremonial reception. It is simply an airport scene—two aviators and an airplane—and precisely because of that ordinariness it provides an unusually intimate glimpse of Brownsville's place in Lindbergh's travels.
Lindbergh was only the most famous visitor. The surviving photographs and newspaper reports from 1928 and 1929 reveal something larger: Brownsville was becoming a working crossroads of American aviation.
Military aviators, civilian pilots, long-distance flyers and representatives of emerging airlines appeared at the field. In April 1929 the Herald reported on an Army navigation test involving Brownsville. Among those connected with it was Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger, already famous for pioneering long-distance navigation and for his role in the first flight from the continental United States to Hawaii. Other Army flyers used Brownsville in endurance and navigation flights. The airport was not merely receiving scheduled airplanes; it was becoming part of the rapidly developing culture of navigation, long-distance flying and experimentation that was transforming aviation.
Pan American Airways soon gave that transformation permanence.
The U.S. Post Office awarded Pan American the contract for Foreign Air Mail Route 8, linking the United States with Mexico through Brownsville. Pan American also acquired the interests of the Mexican airline Compañía Mexicana de Aviación, and Brownsville became the American port of entry for an expanding system that reached southward through Mexico. The Pan Am Historical Foundation describes Brownsville as both a gateway to Mexico and a laboratory for the development of instrument-flying techniques. (Pan Am Historical Foundation)
The aircraft changed as rapidly as the airport. Smaller single-engine airplanes were joined by large Ford and Fokker trimotors. Pan American facilities expanded, and the great company name painted across the roofs of the Brownsville hangars announced the arrival of an entirely different scale of commercial aviation.
That is what makes the surviving aerial photograph so remarkable. Seen casually, it is simply an old airport. Seen in its historical context, it captures a transportation revolution underway.
There was, however, a serious problem waiting south of Brownsville.
Weather.
The route from the Gulf Coast toward Mexico City crossed difficult mountainous terrain. Pilots could encounter clouds that completely eliminated the horizon and the visual references upon which early aviators normally depended. A pilot entering cloud could no longer safely determine the attitude of his airplane simply by looking outside.
Even more dangerous was the discovery that he could not necessarily trust his own senses.
Without visual references, the human body can convince a pilot that an airplane is flying straight when it is actually turning, or that it is turning when it is not. The old aviator's expression of flying by the “seat of the pants” could become deadly inside clouds.
Commercial aviation could never become truly dependable transportation if airplanes could operate safely only when pilots could see the ground and horizon. Airlines needed pilots who could fly by instruments.
At the time this was commonly called “blind flying.”
In 1929, the Mexican division of Pan American Airways opened a school for instrument flying at the Brownsville airport. The Texas Historical Commission today recognizes Brownsville as a pioneering training center for the technique and notes that the course developed there was subsequently extended to all divisions of Pan American Airways. (Texas Historical Commission)
Pan Am pilot Edward Snyder became one of the central figures in that work. Snyder had urged Pan American chief engineer André Priester to institute instrument-flight training because of the dangerous conditions pilots encountered along the Mexican route. Working at Brownsville, Snyder helped develop methods for teaching pilots something that went against their natural instincts: when deprived of outside visual references, believe the instruments rather than your body. (Pan Am Historical Foundation)
Some of the training techniques sound almost comical today. Blindfolded pilots were spun in a revolving chair until they discovered how completely their senses could deceive them about direction and movement. Trainees were then isolated with a turn-and-bank indicator, reinforcing their dependence upon objective instrumentation. Snyder's work was later continued by Harold Gray, who became one of Pan American's notable pilots and eventually president of the airline. The instrument-flying techniques pioneered at Brownsville were subsequently adopted elsewhere in Pan American's system. (Pan Am Historical Foundation)
That contribution deserves to stand alongside the more glamorous stories of Lindbergh, Earhart and the trimotors. The ability to fly safely without a visible horizon was one of the developments necessary to transform aviation from an adventure into a dependable transportation system.
It is tempting to credit Brownsville's first airport manager with everything that happened at the field during this extraordinary period, particularly because Les Mauldin appears repeatedly in the surviving photographs and newspaper accounts. The historical evidence gives us a more interesting—and more accurate—story.
Mauldin helped create and operate the aviation environment in which this transformation took place, while Pan American's own pilots and technical personnel developed the company's instrument-flight program. Mauldin's documented contribution is substantial enough without enlarging it. He managed the early municipal field, taught people to fly, participated in the Valley's developing aviation industry, and interacted personally with many of the important pilots passing through Brownsville. His career as an instructor would continue long after Pan American arrived.
His family also preserved something enormously valuable: the visual record of that period.
Photographs saved by Mauldin's wife Etelka, their daughter Junita “Junie” Mauldin and later members of the family preserve aircraft, pilots, hangars and everyday airport scenes that otherwise might have disappeared. Newspaper clippings saved alongside them provide names and circumstances that turn anonymous airplanes back into historical events.
Universal Airlines Pathfinder Ford Trimotor C-6894 -- night flying
One particularly evocative photograph shows a Universal Air Lines Ford trimotor standing on the field at night. A handwritten note preserved with the photograph recalls reading that the Universal trimotor performed the first night flying at the airport. That particular “first” still deserves further documentation before we state it as fact, but the photograph itself is wonderfully representative of what was happening.
Aviation was conquering darkness as well as distance.
Airports were being illuminated. Pilots were learning navigation techniques that freed them from familiar landmarks. Instruments were allowing airplanes to enter conditions in which pilots could no longer see the horizon. Airlines were establishing regular international schedules. All of these developments were occurring within the remarkably compressed period represented by the photographs preserved in the Mauldin collection.
And Brownsville was participating in all of them.
Within only a few years, the once modest municipal flying field had become an important Pan American operating center. Aircraft and passengers moved through Brownsville on their way to Mexico and farther into Latin America. Pilots trained there to trust instruments rather than their senses. Aircraft were serviced there. New routes radiated southward from the Rio Grande.
Look once more at the circa-1929 aerial photograph.
The surrounding countryside is almost empty. The aircraft seem tiny. The facilities look modest by modern standards. Yet across the roofs of those hangars are the words PAN AMERICAN AIRWAYS INC.
They tell us what Brownsville had suddenly become.
The city's geography—so often described in terms of being at the extreme southern end of Texas—had acquired an entirely different meaning. The border was no longer simply where the United States stopped. For the new airlines looking toward Mexico, Central America and South America, it was where an international network began.
By air, Brownsville wasn't at the end of the road.
It was at the beginning of the route south.
Sources & Acknowledgments
Brownsville Herald contemporary reporting;
Texas Historical Commission; Pan Am Historical Foundation
Photographs and family annotations from the Les Mauldin/Junita “Junie” Mauldin Collection.
