The First Flight Around the World
Do you remember the young midshipman who spent his savings to go to see the Wrights fly their plane for the Army at Fort Meyer? After that it was not long before he decided to leave the Naval Academy to take up a career in the new field of aviation. By 1920 Donald Douglas was one of America’s most promising aircraft engineers. At the age of twenty-eight he was vice president of the Glenn L. Martin Company. At that age most young men would have been happy to be even close to a position like that. But not Don Douglas. He still had his dream of great commercial airliners and he thought that California was the place to build them. He left his job with Martin and started in business for himself, at a time when half the aviation industry was struggling for its very existence.
Douglas went to Los Angeles, but friends and bankers alike could see no future in aviation, and advised him to get out of it. Discouraged but not beaten, he kept on trying. A chance meeting with a wealthy man in a barber shop gave him his starting capital and before long the former midshipman was building planes for the U. S. Navy. In 1924, his Army Douglas World Cruiser circled the globe, but his great airliners still were a dream.
It was between April 6 and September 28, 1924, that the first flight around the world was made. Four Douglas Cruisers, each carrying two men, started the flight from Seattle, Washington. A world-wide organization was set up to service the planes as they circled the globe. Two of the planes completed the trip 175 days later. The total distance flown was 26,345 miles and the total flying time was 363 hours, 7 minutes. A third plane was destroyed in a crash in Alaska early in the flight, and the fourth sank after a crash in the Atlantic on the last lap of the trip. The DWC’s used in the flight were powered with 450-horsepower Liberty engines, and the average speed was about 72 miles per hour. This round-the-world flight was truly a daring operation.