In 1911, flying across the United States was widely considered impossible. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst put money on it anyway, offering $50,000 to the first pilot to cross the country by air in 30 days or less. The men best equipped to try it looked at the state of the aeroplane and declined. The man who actually did it was a 6-foot-4, cigar-chewing amateur named Calbraith Perry Rodgers, who had learned to fly barely three months earlier after 90 minutes of instruction.

He would not win Hearst’s prize. He would crash again and again, break bones, and take 49 days just to reach California. But when he finally rolled the tattered Vin Fiz down to the Pacific surf, Cal Rodgers had done what no one had done before: flown across America.

A prize the experts wouldn’t chase

Hearst announced his challenge in 1910 and gave pilots one year. The roll-call of aviators who said they might try read like a who’s who of early flight — Roland Garros, Thomas Sopwith, Henri Farman. In the end almost none of them started. Even Wilbur Wright was doubtful the machines were up to it.

Rodgers had courage to spare. Deafened by childhood scarlet fever and shut out of the naval career his family expected, he had turned to racing cars, motorcycles and yachts before flying seized him completely. He talked the Chicago meat-packing giant Armour into sponsoring him to advertise its new grape soda, Vin Fiz, painted the name under the wings, and set off.

Forty-nine days and a rebuilt airplane

Rodgers navigated by following railroad tracks, with the support train painted white so he could spot it from the air. It was just as well he had a hangar car full of spare parts: he crashed on his second day, and kept crashing. He hit a tree, a barbed-wire fence, blew cylinders, ran out of fuel over cotton fields, and repeatedly rebuilt the machine by the trackside. He blew past Hearst’s 30-day deadline before he was even halfway.

When he reached Pasadena on 5 November — 4,231 miles in 49 days by his reckoning — a crowd of 20,000 mobbed the field. Asked how he felt, the famously monosyllabic Rodgers played down the ordeal even as he cast doubt on Hearst’s premise.

He was not done. He insisted on flying all the way to the ocean. Days later, near Compton, the engine quit and the Vin Fiz slammed into the ground, leaving Rodgers with a concussion and a broken ankle. From his hospital bed, cigar in hand, he refused to quit.

On 10 December 1911 he did exactly that, taking off on a repaired machine and rolling down onto the sand at Long Beach — where the crowd pushed the aircraft into the waves — then limping away on the crutches he had carried strapped to the frame.

A short-lived triumph

Rodgers had little time to enjoy his fame. On 3 April 1912, flying an exhibition at Long Beach in a Wright Model B, he flew into a flock of seagulls; one jammed his control surfaces and the aircraft dived into the surf, killing him. He was 33. The much-repaired Vin Fiz outlived him and hangs today in the Smithsonian, a patchwork monument to sheer stubbornness.

Sources : HistoryNet / Aviation History; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; contemporary newspaper accounts. This article touches on fatal accidents and is presented as aviation history.