In 1934, all United States commercial air mail carrying contracts were cancelled due to controversy over how the contracts had been awarded. The United States Army Air Corps was charged with carrying air mail service, beginning 19 February 1934. Due in part to extremely bad weather, inadequate preparation of the mail pilots, and the inadequacies of pressing military aircraft into duties for which they were not designed, there ensued a series of accidents over the following three months, ending when commercial services were restored. In all, 66 major accidents, ten of them with fatalities, resulted in 13 crew deaths, creating an intense public furor. Only five of the 13 deaths actually occurred on flights carrying mail, but directly and indirectly the air mail operation caused accidental crash deaths in the Air Corps to rise by 15 percent to 54 in 1934, compared to 46 in 1933 and 47 in 1935.
The press dubbed this the Air Mail scandal, or the Air Mail fiasco.
This is a list of documented accidents and incidents involving Army Air Corps aircraft during that three month period of 1934.
Accidents and incidents
February
16 February Crash of Curtiss A-12 Shrike, 33-244, in bad weather at Oakley, Utah, kills two crew, 2d Lt. Jean Donant Grenier, from Fort Crockett, Texas, and crewmate 2d Lt. Edwin D. White Jr., 23, attached to March Field, California, while flying an advance route to determine time and distance for carrying the mail between Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Their plane came down in a canyon during a snowstorm. "The plane flown by the two men crashed in a blinding snow storm 60 miles east of Salt Lake in Summit county, 30 miles south of the Utah-Wyoming line." Orson Maxwell, a miner, found the crew dead in their cockpits shortly after 1700 hrs., near the head of the Weber River. They had departed the Salt Lake City airdrome at 0930 and army officers became concerned when their arrival at Cheyenne had not been reported by afternoon. The first word of their fate was phoned to Salt Lake City by Orson Maxwell, miner, who drove in a sleigh from the scene of the crash to Oakley, several miles distant. The call was received here [March Field] about two hours after Maxwell discovered the bodies in the wrecked craft. "Search had already started for them when a telephone call form [sic] Kamas, Utah last night told of their fate." "Lieutenant White was a San Francisco resident and a University of California graduate." He entered the army flying service in 1931. He was trained at Randolph and Kelly fields. [sic] Lieutenant Grenier, who was reported to have been piloting the plane, was a resident of Manchester, New Hampshire, and a graduate of the University of New Hampshire." Grenier Army Air Field, Massachusetts, later Grenier Air Force Base, is named in Lt. Grenier's honor on 22 February 1942. 16 February While on a familiarization flight for impending flights of the U.S. Mail, 2d Lt. James Young Eastham (also reported as James Y. Eastman ), "23, of the army air corps reserves," is killed in the crash of Douglas Y1B-7, 32-309, in fog at night near Jerome, Idaho. Second Lieutenant James Y. Eastman, seventh bombardment group, March field [sic], was burned to death here last night when the twin engined Douglas bomber he was flying from Salt Lake City to Seattle in preparation to the war department carrying the mail, crashed and burned. It was misty at the time of the crash and witnesses said the plane was flying low just before the crash. According to Mrs. Clarence Wilson, eyewitness, the plane came skimming in low over the trees, its motor roaring. It passed over the house, she said, then suddenly crashed into the ground about one hundred feet beyond, bursting into flame. Mrs. Wilson immediately ran into the house and called the sheriff at Jerome, six miles from the scene. The Jerome fire department was rushed to the place. Eastman's body was dragged from the still burning plane and taken to the Jerome motuary [sic]. The victim was unmarried. His father is H. G. Eastman, who resides in Huntsville, Texas.