Soaring Surplus

Surplus military equipment is nothing new. Except for some new surplus, unused and made for wars that end before the supplies get used up.

When wars ended in the days before there was a Defense Logistics Agency or DLA Disposition Services, the armed services had to seek ways to get rid of piles, mounds, buildings and fields full of stuff.

At the end of the First World War, there was the usual excess stuff of ground pounders and cavalrymen. But this time, there were also hundreds of surplus machines that dreams and unthought-of industries would spring from.

Committees and boards and members of Congress struggled to figure out how to legally manage all that excess.

There were the millions of pairs of uniform pants and coats for soldiers. By one published estimate, there were 28 unneeded saddles for every horse in the Army.

And then there were those hundreds of contraptions made of wood and cloth, some hidden away in barns and large buildings, others disassembled and packed away in crates. Those waited for dreamers, daredevils and farm boys and city kids who spent the war at home reading all about them.

Excess aircraft they were. They were all over the country where there had been military aviation training. And the country had gone aviation crazy.

Jenny, I’ve Got Your Number

Up in Minnesota, a mechanically adept but socially inept kid wanted one. And in Chicago, a manicurist would own one after achieving what seemed a truly impossible dream.

They both wanted a Jenny, a biplane with fore and aft seats, a Curtiss JN-4. That’s where the “Jenny” nickname came from.

Nimble but controllable and slow, the humble Jenny had been a primary trainer for Army aviators in the United States.

And the geeky kid? He was Charles Lindbergh.

He knew how machines worked. As an unlicensed 14-year-old, he drove his mother from Minnesota to California, a 40-day road trip over what passed for roads in 1916. Then he drove her back home — another 40 days of driving — while figuring out how to keep the car running and repairing road damage when roadside assistance meant a farmer might come by with a team of horses to pull you out of a ditch.

Lindbergh went to college but dropped out. He enrolled as an aviation student. He learned how to build and repair aircraft and their engines. But not how to fly solo — not yet.

He became a barnstormer. Before he had flown on his own, he was paid to stand on the wing of a flying airplane (probably a Jenny), hang upside down and  jump off the wing wearing a parachute.

Finally, with some help from his father, he scraped together some money, climbed on his motorcycle and drove to Georgia. For $500 he got a Jenny with a spare engine and some other necessities. The Jenny was in flying condition — or would be after it was assembled. His was one of the many that at the end of the war had been crated for potential shipment to France.

And then, using what he’d learned and experienced as an aviation student and barnstormer stuntman, he taught himself to get off the ground and back down.

Eyes on the Sky-High Prize

As Lindbergh found the way to achieve his dream, that Chicago manicurist was still dreaming, with an audacity of hope.

She was Bessie Coleman, an African American woman who had come north to seek more opportunity.

In recent years, many DLA employees in offices around the country have heard her story. One was a March 2016 African American Heritage program in Battle Creek, Michigan.

The audience was asked if anyone knew who Coleman was. “She’s a pilot” was the only response that came from the room until a woman sitting at a front table raised her hand.

“I’m Gigi Coleman,” she said as she stood. She told the audience that Bessie Coleman was her great-great aunt.

The appearance had been secretly arranged. She came to the podium and told how young Bessie Coleman had been taken with the idea of becoming a pilot while in Chicago. But no pilot training program would take a black woman as a student.

She said Bessie then learned from a World War I veteran in her family that in France it seemed there was more opportunity for black people, as well as for women.

Bessie Coleman took classes to learn French. With financial help from the founder of the famed Chicago Defender newspaper, she sailed to France, where she took flying lessons that led to her receiving an international pilot’s license. Gigi Coleman said that made Bessie the first African American woman licensed as a pilot.

Then Bessie got her hands on a Jenny and became one of hundreds of young fliers who started earning a living in aviation with that wooden cloth-covered war surplus dream machine.

Like Lindbergh, she too became a “barnstormer,” performing acrobatics at county fairs, flying passengers for sightseeing, or strapping on a parachute to jump from an aircraft.

Gigi said that after Bessie was injured in one parachute jump, a family member tried to talk her out of flying again. But her great-great aunt responded that “up in the air she felt so free — the freedom she couldn’t get on the ground.”

The freedom she felt was short lived.

Less than five years after receiving her license, she fell to her death while rehearsing an airshow in Florida. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and when her aircraft lurched, she fell out.

Air Mail and the Air National Guard

But surplus Jennys became far more than platforms for stunts, safe or deadly. They were an aircraft of choice for the Air Mail Service of what was then the Post Office Department. Air Mail took off in 1918, when a trusty Jenny made the first delivery.

The pilot got lost, was found, and the mail put on another aircraft. The next pilot was told to follow the railroad tracks. It was not the Jenny’s fault, of course.

As the years went on, Lindbergh continued to fly and became friends with other young aviators flying from a field in the countryside near St. Louis. He was able to overcome his shyness around other pilots.

He went to work for three brothers named Robertson who had formed an aircraft company and gained the right to run the Air Mail route from St. Louis to Chicago. They had created what would become an Air National Guard flying unit — one of the first.

Their first aircraft? A Jenny, of course. The first members kicked in enough to buy that first aircraft and later were able to get three newer Jennys with more powerful engines from the military.

Even as flying became a more routine business and more modern postwar Jennys were replacing the war-surplus aircraft, the sturdy, dependable Jennys still helped satisfy a craze to be flying. The unit history of that first Missouri Air National Guard unit tells the story of how three people got flying time in a limited time aloft in a two-seater Jenny.

One man was in front, the second at the controls in the rear cockpit. The third? The third lay flat on the biplane’s upper wing. To share piloting time of course, they just switched positions while in flight.

The Jenny eventually left military service, both active and Air Guard. Barnstorming became old-school. Three pilots swapping positions in an open cockpit aircraft fell into some disfavor.

No matter. A Jenny had cost the taxpayers less than $5,500. Their far lower cost as surplus meant Jennys were at the center of crowdsourcing, 1920s-style. People were kick-starting their motorcycles. The Jenny kick-started an entirely new kind of business, industry and mass transit.

Lindbergh went on to fly across the Atlantic to Paris and become what some consider the first true international celebrity.

Like others who got their start in a Jenny, he also was one of the founders of a commercial airline. And along with other war surplus Jenny pilots, he showed the Army there was a place for citizen airmen.

Some of the Air Guard units that first took flight in Jennys still fly two-seat aircraft, with space for two pilots but certainly no third pilot hanging on the wing. The successor to that first Air National Guard unit in St. Louis, now operates from Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri. They are flying worldwide missions in two seat B-2 Stealth bombers. 

So if you could scratch the carbon composite skin of that complex airframe costing millions of dollars, you’d find DNA from a Jenny.


For more on the Jenny, visit the Museum of the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Humble Airframe, Philatelic Icon 

By flying the first Air Mail, a war-surplus Jenny also made stamp-collecting history. A surplus Jenny bearing the first airmail aircraft’s serial number was the central illustration on a 24-cent Air Mail stamp. There was a printing error, and a sheet of 100 stamps had the airplane printed upside-down.

When one of the surviving “inverted Jenny” stamps comes up for sale today, they routinely bring around $1 million. A 24-cent stamp showing a $5,500 airplane selling for a cool million or more.

If you tried to tell that yarn to the spirits of old barnstormers swapping stories around a heavenly hanger — they’d laugh you right off the cloud.

–Kenneth MacNevin