Four open-cockpit biplanes left Seattle on 6 April 1924 to fly around the world. They had no radios. Their engines were surplus wartime Liberty V-12s. Their crews navigated by map, compass and coastline, and when they needed to cross an ocean they landed, swapped the wheels for floats, and carried on.

Two of them made it home 175 days later, and the United States became the first country to fly around the planet.

Built for the job, out of a torpedo bomber

The World Cruiser was a modified Douglas DT, a Navy torpedo bomber. The important change was fuel: capacity went from 115 US gallons to 644, spread across six tanks, with the plumbing worked out by a young Douglas engineer named Jack Northrop.

The other important feature was the undercarriage. Wheels and floats were interchangeable, so the same airframe could operate off a field in France and off the sea between Iceland and Greenland. They carried two sets of propellers as well — hard oak for water work, lighter walnut for land.

The Army was blunt about why it was doing this at all.

It was a race. Britain, Italy, Portugal, France and Argentina all had crews attempting a circumnavigation in 1924. Every one of them failed. In a detail that says something about the era, when the British attempt under Stuart MacLaren lost its aircraft, the Americans shipped him a replacement.

Losing Seattle, then Boston

On 30 April, three and a half weeks out, the flight commander Maj. Frederick Martin flew Seattle into a fogbound mountainside on the Alaska Peninsula. He and his mechanic Sgt. Alva Harvey survived the crash, then walked for ten days through snow, going snow-blind, before they were found on 10 May. Lt. Lowell Smith took over the expedition.

On 3 August, between the Orkneys and the Faroes, Boston lost oil pressure and had to come down in the open sea. This is where the absence of radios becomes vivid: Chicago raised the alarm by dropping a handwritten note onto the deck of a Navy ship. Both crewmen were picked up by USS Richmond. The aircraft itself was damaged while being hoisted aboard and sank.

Lt. Leigh Wade and Sgt. Henry Ogden rejoined the flight in Nova Scotia in the spare airframe, christened Boston II, and finished the journey — though that aircraft had not itself gone round the world.

Nobody expected it to work

Leslie Arnold, who flew as co-pilot and mechanic aboard Chicago, recorded the local mood in his diary before departure.

He was nearly right. Two got around, and only because the crews spent the summer replacing engines in the open, patching fabric, and flying legs across the Pacific rim, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the North Atlantic on dead reckoning and nerve.

Asked afterwards whether he would do it again, Lowell Smith gave the only sensible answer.

Where they are now

Chicago is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Seattle’s wreckage is at the Alaska Aviation Museum in Anchorage. Boston is on the bottom of the North Atlantic, and Boston II was scrapped.

La Nouvelle-Orléans survives, owned by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, but it has been disassembled in storage in Torrance, California since the museum that displayed it closed in 2002. One of the two aircraft that first flew around the world is currently in bits in a warehouse.

Period film of the flight:

More Army Air Service footage from the expedition:

And a compiled account of the 1924 world flight:

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; National Museum of the United States Air Force; U.S. National Archives, Prologue, Summer 2010; Santa Monica Daily Press, April 2024.