Palmer's field, Fallingwater, and the curve that conquered the Alleghenies
Latrobe to Pittsburgh to Altoona is a 100-mile arc through American industrial history. KLBE is Arnold Palmer's field twice over: he grew up less than a mile from the runway, watched the world's first official airmail pickup there on May 12, 1939, a Stinson Reliant snatching a mail sack slung between two poles without landing, a system a dentist invented, and later learned to fly on the same field. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater sits about 25 miles south. Pittsburgh's Allegheny County Airport opened in 1931 as the third-largest airport in the country and the only fully hard-surface field in the US at the time. At KAOO, Horseshoe Curve carried the Pennsylvania Railroad up the Allegheny Front on a manageable 1.85 percent grade, replacing the Portage Railroad's ten inclined planes, with the summit pierced by the 1854 Allegheny Tunnel; it was built with picks, shovels, and horses, targeted by Nazi saboteurs in 1942, and still turns trains through its 220-degree arc today. From the air, the horseshoe reads exactly like its name.