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tion up to a certain point is good but, if pushed to the extreme, it is ruthless and killing. Prices for flights kept coming down-from $15 to $10 to $8 to $5, and finally one day I saw a poster advertising a plane ride for 75c. We'd never cut our price; we charged what our service was worth. So we got out."
Behncke took it easy for a spell and then went on active duty with the 2nd Bombardment Group of the Air Corps at Langley Field, Va. He said he saw the trend toward larger planes and he wanted to get experience with them. He stayed in the Army as a second lieutenant for six months and then went back into commercial flying first as a mail pilot for Charles Dickinson between Chicago and the Twin Cities and later on the same route for Northwest Airways, Inc.-NW's first pilot. 

Airmail Pilot

He confesses that there he got the greatest thrill of his flying career. 
"My route led across my father's farm," he says. "I had ended up as an airmail pilot over the very stretch of sky where, as a boy, I had watched the hawks fly and dreamed of flying myself.
"I'll never get a bigger bang out of anything. With a kick of the rudder I could take in with a glance every scene of my boyhood."

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