Profits allowed the former aviator to buy a Lincoln Standard biplane. Why did Rodgers shift from terrestrial smuggling to an aerial form? He regarded the airplane as a ticket to "big time" smuggling. While others were already efficiently bridging the border with liquor smuggling, the internal infrastructure in Texas in 1919 was "not anything but … little chunks of paving with miles and miles of mud and sand and maybe a little gravel in between. Driving was hell. And there was all the chance in the world for getting caught on that long, slow creep across Texas."25

Rodgers soon moved into what appears to have been a close link with barnstorming and bootlegging. Barnstorming allowed aviators to move to new locations in border regions and distribute liquor broadly without drawing undue attention. Rodgers found that barnstorming quickly saturated a market that banked on the novelty of flight and that smuggling kept aviation interesting and profitable. If the public drew a strong line between bootlegging and more nefarious forms of aerial smuggling, Rodgers makes clear that line was easily crossed as he and his racketeer/supplier from the Mexican side of the border "operated together, six or seven years, dealing in liquor, arms and ammunition, watches, perfumes, silk, and even smuggling Chinamen in."26 He did so with the complicity of Army Air Services officers at Fort McIntosh in Laredo as well as at Brooks Field in San Antonio having bought them off with whiskey. A single load of Whiskey in the Lincoln Standard brought in $8000 (about $106,000 in 2014 dollars). Perhaps the most important observation from Rodgers' memoir is that the airplane was part of an integrated multi-modal transportation network that employed movement "by car, by truck, by train, sometimes even on freights."27 His movements were not without risk and the enormous profits created an equal zeal among federal law enforcement.