Scoop-Up Service

The U. S. Post Office Department, during the regime of Franklin Roosevelt often at odds with U. S. airlines, last week sent them an amiable invitation: to submit bids for mail contracts on two experimental hauls, a 465-mile route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and a 413-mile loop from Pittsburgh through Clarksburg and Huntington, W. Va. and back to Clarksburg. Catch: without landing, the mailplanes must pick up and deliver air mail at towns scattered from ten to 30 miles apart on each route.

Always interesting to aeronauts, scoop-up-&-drop mail service attracted the fancy of the 75th Congress, which directed the Post Office to call for last week's bids. Most popular scooping arrangement is a grapple hook dangling from the plane by a rope to catch another rope (with the mail sack attached) suspended between two posts. To deliver sacks without bursting them, experimenters have used nets, parachutes, hinged rods on the bottom of the sack which absorb the shock. The Post Office left the scooping method to the airlines, subject to approval by the Civil Aeronautics Authority. Deadline for bids: September 15.

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