Did you know that there were no regulations in place for flying airplanes until 1926? And that pilot’s liscences, control towers, flight plans, flights schools and the FAA didn’t exist? You did? I don’t believe you. I didn’t know this until watching the above very nice short doc on what was known in the late teens and early twenties as ‘barnstorming’. Briefly, after the first world war there were a lot of trained pilots who had nothing to do with their skill set, given that there was yet not a real aviation industry. Air mail was slowly being introduced but passenger travel was unheard of and crop dusting and other local uses for planes was still fairly new. Accordingly, the idea of buying war surplus planes for cheap and flying around towns to demonstrate planes to people who’d never seen them became a semi-lucrative career for out-of-work vets who flew. Crazy-ass stunting was soon added to the attractions and I’ll let the doc do the rest of the talking. Below I’ve posted a scene from ‘The Great Waldo Pepper’, a very underrated George Roy Hill movie starring Robert Redford made in 1975. It was the ‘love project’ that Hill, a pilot himself, was able to get Universal to finance after the ridiculously massive success of ‘The Sting’. It flopped, of course–don’t these love projects always?–but it’s well worth a watch.