Around the world in just four days, not eighty
Howard Hughes did not make the first round-the-world flight, but in 1938 he shaved nearly four days off the previous record for doing so, held by noted aviator Wiley Post. Hughes’s achievement was one of his first to grant him national acclaim as an aviator, rather than as a wealthy playboy with a taste for making movies and dating Hollywood starlets. Motivated by the desire to prove that aviation was a viable and safe means of long-distance international travel, Hughes flew a Lockheed Super Electra and carried a crew of four.
The Super Electra would benefit from the favorable publicity by becoming a popular airliner, with Northwest Airlines, Aer Lingus, and KLM all using it in their fleets. The famous picture of English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain disembarking from an airplane waving a copy of the Munich Agreement was taken as he left a British Airways Super Electra.
Acknowledging the dangers of extended flight over water Hughes had the Electra packed in every available nook and cranny with ping-pong balls as an aid to flotation in the event the aircraft was forced down in the sea. Medicines and a still to convert seawater to freshwater were included with the life rafts, and fishing gear was another demand by Hughes to increase the odds of survival if adrift.
Radio transmitters were included with the life rafts and in order to ensure transmission over distances, Hughes himself designed a kite for each raft to carry the antenna aloft. When it occurred to one of Hughes’s crew that an absence of wind would negate the value of the kites, balloons and a supply of helium to inflate them were added to the survival gear. Parachutes were added as well, in the event of a disaster occurring over land.
In the event the survival gear was unnecessary. The flight departed New York’s Floyd Bennett Field to Paris on its first leg, arriving at the French capital’s Le Bourget – where Lindbergh had landed – without incident. The next stop was Moscow, carefully avoiding a Germany which was in the process of preparing for another demonstration of military might throughout Europe.
After flying across the Siberian wastes with stops in Omsk and Yakutsk, Hughes crossed the Bering Sea to land in Fairbanks, Alaska; thence to Minneapolis and finally back to New York. Welcomed as a hero and given the honor of a ticker-tape parade, Hughes was more interested in the value of his contribution to the viability of long-distance air travel. Whenever he spoke of the round the world flight, he stressed the accuracy of the navigation and the time savings of flying over rail or sea transportation.