Long Island to California nonstop flight took almost 27 hours — and 'opened up the world'

These days, the flight takes about six hours.

But 100 years ago, it took almost 27 hours to make the first nonstop transcontinental flight. On May 2, 1923, Lt. Oakley G. Kelly and Lt. John Macready took off from the dirt and grass airstrip at Roosevelt Field in a lumbering single-engine fabric-covered Fokker T-2 open cockpit monoplane.

Army Air Service pilots Kelly and Macready flew from Long Island to California in a transport built by the company responsible for the best German World War I fighters, including the triplane flown by the notorious Red Baron Manfred von Richthofe.

The 2,470-mile flight to Rockwell Field in Coronado, west of San Diego, took 26 hours, 50 minutes and 38.4 seconds at a speed of 93 mph — a feat later dubbed “The Greatest Record of All.” Some 20 years earlier, on Dec. 17, 1903, Orville Wright had made the first successful powered flight: a 12-second jaunt covering 120 feet at 6.8 mph over the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The 1923 flight from Long Island opened the door to worldwide air travel though it wasn't until 1936 that industrialist and record-setting pilot Howard Hughes made a nonstop transcontinental flight in under 10 hours and 1953 before airlines had the first nonstop commercial coast-to-coast flights.

Flight sparks possibilities

"At the time there were very few airfields in this country,” said Joshua Stoff, curator at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale. “There was no radio communication, no daily weather reports. There were no blind-flying instruments; they hadn’t been invented yet, and so they were flying on magnetic compass — a lot of the flight, just following railroad tracks. While this may seem primitive, what this flight did was show the future potential of aviation. Before this flight there were no airlines, no airliners. This is the flight that got people thinking about the possibilities.”

As Dorothy Cochrane, curator in the Aeronautics Department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., said: “People had basically been stuck close to home for centuries, most living their entire lives within 50 miles of where they were born. This flight was one of the incremental steps that opened up the world for everyone — condensing time, condensing space, condensing distance.”

The challenge to fly coast to coast was first proposed in 1910, when newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst announced a $50,000 prize to anyone who could do so in under 30 days.

A year later, Calbraith Perry Rodgers, descendant of famed U.S. Navy Commodores Matthew Calbraith Perry and Oliver Hazard Perry, flew his Wright biplane, Vin Fiz, named for a grape-flavored soft drink of the day, from Sheepshead Bay Race Track in Brooklyn to Pasadena, California.

Perry's trip took 49 days, with 75 stops and 16 crash landings; he left Brooklyn on Sept. 17, 1911, and arrived in Pasadena, California, on Nov. 5. (Perry was killed in April 1912 when he flew into a flock of birds during an airshow.) 

By the time Kelly and Macready made their 1923 attempt, most airplanes were little more than airborne covered wagons cobbled together from wood, fabric, glue and baling wire, their open-cockpit contraptions powered by engines reliable as anyone’s guess.

In fact, two previous attempts by the duo, made west-to-east in 1922, ended in failure.

Takeoff delayed

A 1964 account by the Smithsonian Institution said the fledgling U.S. War Department Air Service backed the venture to “illustrate the feasibility of transporting men, messages, equipment, or any other vital necessity, from one coast to the other in an incredibly short space of time.”

According to the account, the pilots delayed takeoff until 12:36 p.m. on May 2, in hopes of reaching Tucumcari, New Mexico, by daybreak the next morning. But, with Kelly at the controls, the 49-foot-long T-2 was dangerously close to maximum weight after being fitted with a 410-gallon fuel tank between the wing spars, a 185-gallon fuel tank, 40-gallon oil tank and 10-gallon water tank inside the cabin. At first, the plane wouldn’t even budge — and needed to be pushed by ground crew members to start its takeoff run.

Roosevelt Field was east of the present-day mall, Stoff said, referring to the current location of The Mall at the Source in Westbury.

Struggling to get airborne, the T-2 was still pinned to the ground when it reached the end of the mile-long strip, a 20-foot deep gully where the Meadowbrook Parkway now runs, between what was Roosevelt Field — the airport — and Hazelhurst Field, where Roosevelt Field mall stands.

“It became airborne only when it reached the gully, and slowly it gained enough altitude to clear the hangars at the end of Hazelhurst Field,” Stoff said. “But they flew for hours at treetop level, barely able to climb high enough to clear power and telegraph lines.”

Newspaper accounts documented sightings as the curious public came out to witness the transport lumber overhead: 2:30 p.m. over Altoona, Pennsylvania.; 4 p.m. over Wheeling, West Virginia; 6:50 p.m. over Indianapolis; 10:15 p.m. over Jefferson City, Missouri — the latter, in light rain at an altitude of just 500 feet.

“Pilots” Stoff said, “were the rock stars and sports heroes of the day.”

Its V-12 Liberty engine burning through 24 gallons of fuel an hour — a Boeing 747 burns one gallon every second — the T-2 crept onward in the dark, reaching Tucumcari, 1,670 miles from Long Island, at dawn on May 3. At 10 a.m. much of its fuel load burned off, and it managed to reach an altitude of 10,000 feet and cross the Continental Divide, landing safely at Rockwell Field at 12:26 p.m. local time.

Just 46 gallons of fuel remained on board.

T-2 replica at museum

Kelly, born in Pennsylvania in 1891, later piloted a T-2 named Ezra Meeker over the famed Oregon Trail, retiring as a colonel in 1948. He died in San Diego in 1966. Macready, born in San Diego in 1887, would set numerous world aviation records — including an altitude record of 40,800 feet in an open cockpit biplane and the first successful nighttime parachute jump from a stricken plane. He also flew the first crop duster, later serving with the 12th Air Force in North Africa in World War II. Retired from active duty in 1948, he died in 1979 and was indiucted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

The T-2 was on display for decades in the Pioneers of Flight Gallery at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, Cochrane said, but is now in storage. The Cradle of Aviation has a hand-built model replica of the plane among its exhibits. The accomplishment it represents, Stoff said, remains one of the most important in aviation history, along with Charles Lindbergh's solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic from Roosevelt Field to Paris in 1927.

“It’s really amazing to think that in the space of a single lifetime aviation went from the Wright Brothers to man landing on the Moon,” Stoff said. “Before, we thought of distance in terms of miles. Now when we say, ‘How far is California?’ we say: ‘It’s six hours.’ That’s how we measure distance now — in how long it takes to get there; in time, not miles — and that’s because of aviation."

"That’s because of flights like this.”

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”