In the summer of 1927, a Hawaiian pineapple magnate offered a fortune to the first aviators who could fly from California to Honolulu — 2,400 miles across the open Pacific. Fifteen crews signed up, tens of thousands of spectators came to watch, and the newspapers billed it as a glorious sprint into the future. It became a bloodbath.

Before the Dole Air Race was over, ten people were dead and six aircraft destroyed. It stands as one of the deadliest publicity stunts in the history of flight.

A prize born of Lindbergh fever

Just weeks after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the pineapple king James Dole announced a race that would do for the Pacific what Lindbergh had done for the Atlantic: a dash from Oakland to Honolulu, with $25,000 waiting for the winner. Caught up in the excitement, aviators scrambled to enter, many of them in hastily-built, underpowered aircraft with pilots and navigators of wildly varying experience.

The story of the ill-fated 1927 Dole Derby.

Death before the start

The killing began before the race did. Three aircraft crashed while preparing, taking three lives. When race day came on 16 August 1927, eight machines lined up at Oakland before a vast crowd — and the carnage continued. Two planes crashed on take-off, and three more, including the little red, white and blue Miss Doran, sputtered back with engine trouble.

An Bord Miss Doran was the one person who drew more attention than any pilot: Mildred Doran, a 22-year-old schoolteacher from Flint, Michigan, and the only woman in the race. Warned that a woman had no place on so dangerous a flight, she waved the objection away.

Period newsreel footage of the 1927 Dole Air Race.

Lost over the Pacific

Four aircraft finally set out over the ocean. Two of them made it. Art Goebel’s Woolaroc reached Honolulu in just over 26 hours to take the prize, with Martin Jensen’s Aloha close behind. The other two — Golden Eagle Und Miss Doran — simply vanished into the Pacific. And when a search aircraft, the Dallas Spirit, set out to look for them, it too disappeared, taking two more men.

The U.S. Navy searched for days and found nothing. In Flint, factories shut down and flags flew at half-mast; Mildred’s fifth-grade class set flowers adrift on the sea.

The reckless glamour of golden-age air racing that the Dole Derby embodied.

The reckoning

Ten dead and six aircraft lost for a pineapple company’s publicity stunt: the Dole Derby horrified the public and shamed the aviation world into taking long-distance flying — and the vetting of its crews — far more seriously. The great ocean races of the era were exhilarating, but they were paid for in lives.

The winning Woolaroc survives to this day, preserved at the Woolaroc Museum in Oklahoma — a rare happy relic of a race that most of its entrants did not survive.

Sources: Dole Air Race (Wikipedia); Richard A. Durose, “Above & Beyond: Aunt Mildred,” Smithsonian Air & Space; HistoryNet; This Day in Aviation.