World War I stifled domestic aviation for a time, but when it was over, the skills and techniques honed in the skies above France catapulted America into the air age. On July 15, 1920, General Billy Mitchell of the Air Service of the U.S. Army dispatched eight men and four airplanes of the Black Wolf Squadron from New York to Nome on the nation’s first cross-country flight. The exercise was one of Mitchell’s many demonstrations of the potentials of air power. Mitchell, by the way, was no stranger to Alaska, having worked as a young lieutenant on the military telegraph line between Valdez and
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