Out of the Hangar: 100th anniversary for first around the world flight (video) Published Oct. 23, 2024 By Joe Danielewicz, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Public Affairs WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFLCMC) - In the early 1920s, less than two decades after the Wright Brothers achieved the world's first controlled, powered flight, airplane trips were mostly local, while long distance flights were usually only by the brave or foolhardy. Aircraft remained largely constructed of wood and cloth and were nearly all still biplanes. Charles Lindbergh's captivating solo flight across the Atlantic was still a few years on the horizon. During this time, the Army Air Service, the forerunner to today’s U.S. Air Force, was looking for ways to maintain readiness and demonstrate its utility for national defense. Lacking dedicated funds to organize the equivalent of modern-day training exercises, the service aimed for world records for altitude, speed duration and distance to showcase its operational abilities and to also keep funding flowing to the still-burgeoning field. According to AFLCMC Chief Historian Kevin Rusnak, in 1922 the Air Service began serious discussion about an around-the-world flight. “We studied this process when we realized with enough planning and redundancy that this was a mission that we could in fact accomplish,” Rusnak states looking back at the 100th anniversary of this global trip in the latest “Out of the Hangar” video, a series that connects acquisition professionals to that of their predecessors. Mission planning and acquisition centered around McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, a predecessor for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. One of the largest tasks was to find a plane that could fly long distances, including long legs over water. The winning design was a modified Navy torpedo bomber, the Douglas World Cruiser. Planners decided that a single plane would attempt the trip, but as a group of four, each named after a U.S. city. The idea was that if a plane had mechanical issues or crashed - still a common occurrence - the other planes could complete the mission. On April 6th, 1924, the four planes began their expedition in Seattle, heading northwest towards Canada. During the 175-day journey, one plane would crash in the Alaskan wilderness with the fate of its crew unknown for several days, while another plane went down during the final trans-Atlantic flight between Europe and North America. Finally, on September 28th, the Air Service aviators returned to Seattle. “They were news all around the world. They were the first people to do this. They went down in history,” Rusnak states in the video, noting the team was compared to Ferdinand Magellan, the explorer who circumnavigated the Earth via ship in the 16th century. For the Army Air Service, the record-setting flight was another example to showcase the role aviation could have in military applications. “It demonstrated … that with enough preparation and the right tools, we could do something that had never been done before, and that would be a crucial warfighting technology that we might need in the future” Rusnak says near the end of the video.