Varney Air Lines was an airline company that started service on April 6, 1926, as an air-mail carrier. Formed by Walter Varney, the airline was based in Boise, Idaho, United States. The airline is one of the predecessors of United Airlines. Historical background In 1925, the Congress passed HR 7064 entitled "An Act to encourage commercial aviation and to authorize the Postmaster General to contract for Air Mail Service" (aka "The Kelly Act") which directed the U.S. Post Office Department to contract with private airlines to carry the mail over designated routes many of which connected with the Government operated Transcontinental Air Mail route between New York and San Francisco. Varney won the contract for CAM-5 as the only bidder. Boise Postmaster L.W. Thrailkill had the vision that brought the city into the aerial age. He heard about the proposed northwest route and Varney’s plan and quickly drew up a petition and got signatures from three dozen postmasters from the towns surrounding Boise. Its first flight under contract with the USPOD was from Pasco, Washington to Elko, Nevada with an intermediate stop in Boise. That air freight contract grew into the birth of one of the world’s biggest airlines. Pasco at the time was a rail center, more or less midway between Portland, Seattle, and Spokane. Mail trains leaving those cities in the evening arrived in Pasco early the next morning. Mail could be transferred to and from the biplanes cutting coast to coast delivery by days. This was the logic for basing the CAM service in Pasco. First flight Pilot Leon D. Cuddeback flew the first eastbound CAM-5 flight, leaving in the early dawn hours from Pasco, Washington. Between 4,000 and 6,000 cheering people sent the pilot off with of mail. Cuddeback flew a Curtiss powered Laird Swallow biplane with a top speed of . The first westbound flight that afternoon was much less successful, however, as it was forced 75-miles off course by a storm en route from Elko, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, before making a forced landing near Jordan Valley, Oregon. The mail plane and its pilot, Franklin Rose, remained missing for two days until pilot Rose finally managed to reach a telephone on April 8 after carrying the of mail for many miles out of the wilderness by foot and later on a horse borrowed from a farmer. The westbound flown mail finally arrived at the