Lester J. Maitland
Lester James Maitland was an aviation pioneer and career officer in the United States Army Air Forces and its predecessors. Maitland began his career as a Reserve pilot in the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I and rose to brigadier general in the Michigan Air National Guard following World War II.
In 1927 Maitland and Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger completed the first transpacific flight from California to Hawaii, flying the modified transport Bird of Paradise. Although the recognition accorded them was less in comparison with the adulation given Charles Lindbergh for his transatlantic flight only five weeks earlier, Maitland and Hegenberger's feat was arguably more significant from a navigational standpoint.
Maitland continued his career in the Air Corps, serving in combat as a bombardment group commander during World War II. He later became the first director of the Wisconsin Aeronautics Commission and the Director of Civil Defense for the state of Michigan before changing professions and becoming an Episcopal minister.
Early history and World War I
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1899, Maitland graduated from Riverside High School in 1917. He enlisted as an aviation cadet in the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps three days after the United States entered World War I and was assigned to training at a School of Military Aeronautics on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin, Texas in the fall of 1917. His flight training took place at Rich Field in Waco, Texas, after which he received a rating of Reserve Military Aviator and was commissioned on May 25, 1918, as a 2nd lieutenant in the Air Service, National Army at the age of nineteen. After a stint as a flying instructor, he was sent to gunnery school at Taliaferro Field, Texas, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas.Between wars
Following World War I, Maitland was assigned to McCook Field in Ohio from November 1918 to April 1919 as a pilot with the Testing Squadron. Maitland was transferred to Luke Field, Hawaii, and assigned to the 6th Aero Squadron on May 13, 1919. He petitioned to remain in the Army, passed the required examinations, and received a regular commission as a 1st lieutenant in the Air Service on July 1, 1920, the date that the service was recognized by law as an organizational part of the Army. Leaving Hawaii in May 1921, Maitland became an aide to General Billy Mitchell in July and was selected as one of the pilots to take part in the sinking of the battleship Ostfriesland, a military experiment set up by Mitchell to prove the effectiveness of air power against ships. In September and October 1925 he acted as an aide to Mitchell during the Morrow Board hearings.During the 1920s, Maitland competed for the Air Service and its Air Corps successor in air races and pioneering flights as part of the service's program of generating favorable publicity. While Operations Officer for Col. Augustine Warner Robins at the Fairfield Air Intermediate Depot in October 1922, he was part of the Army team at the National Air Races held that year at Selfridge Field, Michigan. On October 14, he reputedly became the first U.S. pilot to fly faster than and received a letter of congratulations from Orville Wright. Flying a Curtiss R-6 racer over a course, Maitland finished second in the Pulitzer Trophy race, behind Army test pilot Lt. Russell Maughan but ahead of four Navy and eight Army racers, averaging and reporting brief blackouts during the tight pylon turns. On March 29, 1923, he set a world's absolute speed record of over one kilometer in the R-6, but the record was disqualified because he failed to maintain level flight. However he broke his own record in October when he flew at a recorded speed of 244.94 mph, also in the R-6.
On March 17, 1925, Maitland was assigned command of the new 18th Headquarters Squadron at Bolling Field, a position he held until June 4, 1925, when he returned to FAID. In November 1926 he began a three-year tour as Assistant Executive Officer to Assistant Secretary of War for Air F. Trubee Davison.
Flight of the ''Bird of Paradise''
While stationed in Hawaii, Maitland sought permission from the Chief of the Air Service to organize a flight between Hawaii and the mainland. Not until December 1926, however, was he granted authorization. Others had also been working on the project, including 1st Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger, former Chief of the Instrument Branch at McCook Field. Hegenberger had overseen the development of a number of navigation instruments that would make the trip feasible but like Maitland had also been transferred to Hawaii, where his repeated written requests for a transpacific flight were likewise refused. In 1926 Hegenberger returned to McCook, where he helped test a navigation system using signals from low-frequency radio beacons. The transpacific flight from California to Hawaii was then approved to demonstrate the difficult task of navigating to a small island using the beacons as a navigational aid.On June 15, 1927, Maitland and Hegenberger took the chosen airplane, an Atlantic-Fokker C-2 transport plane nicknamed the Bird of Paradise, and a team of aeronautical engineers cross country to check fuel consumption and the reliability of the aircraft and its navigational instruments. On June 24, while in San Diego, California, the results of the tests were reported to Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis and he approved the flight to Hawaii. The next day they flew to Crissy Field, at the Presidio in San Francisco, California.
On June 27, Maitland and Hegenberger made the short hop from Crissy Field to the newly opened Oakland Municipal Airport, whose runway was much preferable for the takeoff roll with full fuel load, and departed the next morning just after 7 a.m. for Wheeler Field, Oahu, with Maitland as pilot and Hegenberger as navigator. Although assisted as planned by the Signal Corps beacon on Maui, the directional radio receiver in the C-2 operated only intermittently before cutting out altogether. The earth inductor compass on the C-2 failed just after takeoff, and despite increasingly cloudier weather, Hegenberger navigated most of the charted Great Circle route by dead reckoning, using a magnetic compass and driftmeter supplemented by celestial navigation observations. Contact with several ships at sea was used to verify their position and adjust the original flight plan.
23 hours into the flight, before dawn on June 29, the crew observed a lighthouse beam on Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands at their estimated time of arrival, but still in complete darkness, decided to circle until daybreak before landing at Wheeler. The Bird of Paradise completed its trip of in 25 hours and 50 minutes, and was greeted by thousands of spectators. In becoming the first to make the transpacific crossing to Hawaii, Maitland and Hegenberger earned the third awarding of Distinguished Flying Cross by the Air Corps and received the Mackay Trophy for that year. Of the feat, the official history of the United States Air Force states:
The flight...tested not only the reliability of the machine but the navigational skill and the stamina of the two officers as well, for had they strayed even three-and-a-half degrees off course, they would have missed Kauai and vanished over the ocean.
In 1928 Maitland and Charles Lindbergh were invited together to the White House to meet President Calvin Coolidge.
Air Corps years
Maitland wrote Knights of the Air, a history of early aviation emphasizing "aviation firsts" that included his own transpacific flight, and was published in 1929. He then undertook writing Skyroads a serialized comic strip about aviation in 1929 with artist and fellow World War I pilot Dick Calkins. The pair continued to release Skyroads until they passed the writing and drawing duties to Calkins' assistant Russell Keaton in 1933.After his tour in Washington D.C. concluded in December 1929, Maitland served at Kelly Field, Texas, as a flight instructor in the Advanced Flying School. He was promoted to captain in 1932. Maitland served in various positions in the Training Command at Kelly, including senior instructor in Attack, to September 1934, when he entered the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field as a student in the comprehensive 845-hour, 36-week course. Making up the 59 members of his class were five majors, 40 captains including himself, 13 first lieutenants, and one second lieutenant. In addition to 49 Air Corps officers were four Army officers, one from each of that service's combat arms, two Turkish Army aviators, one Mexican captain, and three Marine Corps aviators. Among Maitland's Air Corps peers were future generals Muir S. Fairchild, Barney Giles, Laurence S. Kuter, Haywood Hansell, and Hoyt S. Vandenberg; and aviation pioneer Major Vernon Burge, who as a corporal in June 1912 had been the first certified enlisted military pilot. Maitland graduated in June 1935. From September 11, 1935, to July 16, 1938, he commanded the 8th Attack Squadron at Barksdale Field, Louisiana, flying the Northrop A-17 attack bomber.
On July 20, 1940, Major Maitland and his wife Kathleen "Kay" Maitland were sent to the Philippine Department for a two-year tour of duty in command of the 28th Bombardment Squadron. By seniority he was also made base commander of Clark Field, where the 28th BS was stationed. On March 13, 1941, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and command of the 28th BS passed to a more junior officer, but Maitland remained base commander at Clark. Shortly after, the Army extended the tours of all Air Corps personnel in the Philippine Department by an additional year, fearing aggressive Japanese moves against the Philippines, and ordered their dependents to return to the United States. This created a serious morale problem that Maitland combatted at Clark, at the suggestion of a subordinate, by issuing an order in May 1941 that all base personnel had to grow beards. He modified the order in mid-August, making beards optional, but he and many others maintained their facial hair.