Curtiss Jennys, county fairs and the cross-country routes that turned daring into cash.
This is Depression-era aviation, down to the routes, the planes, and the actual economics. The Women's Air Derby in September 1929. That milk run from Wichita to Los Angeles. A Travel Air set up for flying upside down. Here's how it worked: 50 people show up at a county fair in Kansas, you charge them two bucks a head, subtract what the fuel costs, what you owe the crew and whatever's left is whether you're eating next month. If those numbers matter to you—if you want to know the real circuit names, why wing-walking on a Jenny killed so many people and what kept the survivors alive—this is built for that.
What was actually at a county fair air show? Canvas tents, dust everywhere, castor oil smell hanging in the air. Spectators in their Sunday best watching Travel Air 2000s, Jennys with fresh paint, maybe a Waco 10 if the promoter had the money. Here's what those routes looked like when you were standing on the ground.
Not generic biplanes. The actual models that barnstormers flew. The Curtiss Jenny maxed out at 75 mph, stalled at 35 mph, and came with a Hispano-Suiza engine that never stopped demanding attention. Fly what they flew.
Wichita to Los Angeles. Kansas City to Denver. St. Louis through the Midwest crawl. These weren't random. Pilots had these routes memorized. County fairs, state festivals, air shows that came the same week every year. Navigate the real map.
The math matters here. Fifty spectators at a county fair paying $2 each meant a hundred dollars before you paid for anything. Fuel ran 25 cents a gallon back then. A two-hundred-mile hop ate into your profits fast. This is economics of survival, not some abstract number game.
Wing-walks, inverted flying, parachute jumps. Each one either pulls in a crowd or kills you. No second chances. People died doing these stunts in the 1920s. The simulation doesn't look away from that.
Amelia Earhart, Louise Thaden, Phoebe Omlie racing from Santa Monica to Cleveland. Real pilots, real competition, real money on the line. The race that showed women could out-fly most men and still couldn't get decent sponsorship.
The art style is period-accurate without obsessing over polygon counts. Canvas tents, dust, wooden ticket booths, hand-painted signs on everything. The look matters because it's not trying to fake authenticity.
Your aircraft isn't fresh off the line. Oil temperature climbs. Spark plugs get fouled. Long flights take planning, not just topping off the tank. The Jenny forgives mistakes but expects respect.
Not every field is a prepared runway. Some are just pastures. Some are hard-pan desert. One has a ditch that only shows up from certain angles on approach. Scope out your landing spot before you commit to it.
The Curtiss Jenny stalls around 35 mph. Travel Air cruises at 90. A Waco 10 handles like a truck but somehow stays airborne. Each one's got real limits, real weight, real fuel consumption. Fly one and you get why pilots picked specific machines for specific routes.
Ever wonder why the western loop went Wichita to Amarillo to Albuquerque? County fairs with real crowds and real money. The Midwest crawl hit smaller towns that paid steadily. Desert circuits were where you went to escape winter. You're not making this up as you go. You're following what actually happened.
Do you burn fuel getting to a county fair where maybe 60 people show up, or keep the money and skip it? Inverted flying gets the spectators' attention but risks the aircraft. Every stunt, every route, every fuel call is a trade-off. That's what makes it work.
Wing-walkers died constantly in the 1920s. No straps, maneuvers that could kill you. Parachute jumps failed. Spins went wrong and didn't come back. The sim acknowledges that history instead of smoothing it over.
September 1929. Santa Monica to Cleveland. Earhart, Thaden, Omlie racing each other while fighting sponsorship discrimination that would've stopped most of them—and the historical record shows it nearly did. You fly their race. You face what they faced.
Canvas tents, dust rising off the field, hand-painted fairground signs. The art respects the era without trying to be a photograph. Getting the Depression-era feel and the landing field conditions right matters more than rendering individual grass blades.
A Curtiss Jenny ran about $1,200 fresh off the line in 1920—call it $20,000 today. You could pick up a used one for $300 to $500, so a gutsy pilot with maybe $400 to their name could actually get started. County fairs paid out $2 to $5 per person watching. A good turnout meant 100 to 200 spectators. That $200 to $1,000 from ticket sales had to cover everything: fuel at a quarter a gallon, upkeep, replacement parts, and sometimes you cut crew in on it. Margins were thin. The real fliers—the ones with actual skill, who could fill stands, who walked away from their stunts—pulled in $200 to $500 weekly when business was booming, which felt substantial in 1928 and 1929. But most pilots made less, and plenty of them never got to enjoy what they earned. October 1929 changed everything. By the next year, county fairs had gutted their budgets. Nobody showed up. Routes that worked two years earlier were dead by 1931.
The people, machines and money behind barnstorming from the 1920s into the 1930s.
They built thousands after World War I ended. You could pick up a used one for three to five hundred bucks. Stall speed of 35 mph, maybe 75 at the top end. Easy to fly but underpowered—basically the only aircraft barnstormers could afford. Most either learned on a Jenny or crashed one.
Two to five dollars per ticket. A good turnout meant a hundred or two spectators. That translated to somewhere between two hundred and a thousand in revenue, which had to cover fuel, repairs, and paying the crew. Often it didn't. Once you factored in fuel at a quarter per gallon and a four-hundred-dollar plane payment, one bad fair could wipe you out.
This is what people came to see. Acrobats standing on the upper wing at 60 to 80 mph with nothing holding them in place, or parachutists jumping and hoping the landing didn't break something. Both killed performers all the time. Insurance companies wouldn't touch it, so performers just didn't get insured.
A cross-country race from Santa Monica to Cleveland. Amelia Earhart, Louise Thaden, Phoebe Omlie, and about fifteen other women showed they could navigate, fix an aircraft, and fly better than most of the men. Sponsors didn't want to support them anyway. The prize money existed but wasn't generous.
Wichita to Los Angeles. The long grind through the Midwest. Arizona in winter. Pilots knew which fairs happened the same week every year, which landing strips wouldn't destroy your landing gear, which towns had money and which ones might draw fifty people if you were lucky.
The stock market tanked. County fair budgets disappeared. Routes that worked the year before were gone by 1931. Nobody showed up anymore. Pilots who survived the stunts didn't survive the Depression. That was the end.
Actual questions people have about how accurate this is, whether the planes hanlde right, and what you're getting yourself into. No sales pitch.