Cal Rodgers and the Vin Fiz, the First Flight Across America in Nineteen Eleven

In 1911, Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first person to fly an airplane across the United States, piloting a Wright Model EX named the Vin Fiz. He left Brooklyn, New York, on September 17, 1911, and reached the Pacific in 49 days, surviving roughly 16 crashes and forced landings along the way. He missed the 30-day deadline for the $50,000 prize that inspired the trip - and finished anyway.

Who Was Cal Rodgers?

Calbraith Perry Rodgers was an unlikely candidate for aviation history. He stood six foot four, kept a cigar clenched in his teeth, and had been deaf in both ears since a childhood bout of scarlet fever. He couldn’t hear his engine - he felt it through the seat of his pants.

He also barely knew how to fly. When Rodgers decided to attempt the crossing, he had been flying for about 90 days and had roughly 60 hours of total flight time. He’d taken lessons from the Wright brothers earlier that year, and he was such a raw student that the Wrights were nervous about him.

What he did have was pedigree and nerve. Rodgers was a descendant of two famous Navy men named Perry - Oliver Hazard Perry, who won the Battle of Lake Erie, and Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to the West. He wanted his own piece of history.

The $50,000 Prize That Started It All

In 1910, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst offered a $50,000 prize - well over a million dollars in today’s money - to the first aviator to fly coast to coast across America in 30 days or less.

Many serious people believed it simply couldn’t be done. In 1911, the airplane was only eight years old. The Wright brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk in 1903, and now aviators were being asked to cross roughly 3,500 miles of deserts, mountains, and prairie with no radio, no reliable navigation, no weather forecasting, and no airports. You landed in a cow pasture and hoped the cows moved.

Most pilots of the era could barely stay aloft for an hour. Engines were unreliable and airframes were fragile - a hard landing could fold an airplane like a paper fan.

Why Was the Airplane Named After Grape Soda?

To fund the attempt, Rodgers found a sponsor: the Armour Company of Chicago, the meatpacking firm. Armour was promoting a new grape soft drink called Vin Fiz, and the deal was straightforward - Rodgers had to name his airplane after the soda and paint the name across the wings and tail.

Armour paid him $5 for every mile flown east of the Mississippi and $4 for every mile west of it. In a very real sense, the first transcontinental flight in American history was a flying billboard for grape soda. It reflects a truth about aviation that still holds: somebody always has to pay for the gas.

What Did the Vin Fiz Actually Look Like?

The aircraft was a Wright Model EX, a stripped-down, single-seat version of the Wright biplane built specifically for the run. Its engine produced about 35 horsepower on a good day - less than many modern lawnmowers.

There was no cockpit, no cabin, and no windscreen. Rodgers sat in a seat mounted on the leading edge of the lower wing, feet on a bar, hands on the control levers, out in the open air at fifty miles an hour and a thousand feet up. He flew in a business suit, because that’s what men wore, with his hat turned backward so the wind wouldn’t take it.

How Did He Navigate Across the Country?

Rodgers knew he would break the airplane repeatedly, so Armour assembled a special support train that followed him along the railroad tracks. That train was also his navigation system.

Without charts or a compass he trusted, Rodgers simply followed the rail lines west - a method early aviators called the “iron compass.” He flew above the tracks and let the rails point the way.

The train carried his wife, his mother, a crew of mechanics, and - most importantly - Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who had built the engine for the original Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk. Widely regarded as the first aircraft mechanic in history, Taylor rode across America with a boxcar of spare parts, enough to build the airplane over again twice. They would need nearly every splinter.

A Journey of Constant Crashes

Trouble started almost immediately. On day two, near Middletown, New York, Rodgers clipped a tree on takeoff and plowed into a chicken coop, wrecking the airplane and cutting his scalp. Charlie Taylor and the crew spent three days rebuilding it - three days gone out of thirty, and he was barely out of New York.

He crashed in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, and put the airplane into a fence in Indiana. By some counts, Rodgers crashed or made forced landings about 16 times over the trip. He endured broken wings, broken propellers, and a blown cylinder that drove a chunk of steel into his arm - he flew across Texas with the arm bandaged.

He flew through rain that felt like buckshot, froze in the mornings, baked in the afternoons, and once followed the wrong set of tracks when the railroad forked and had to be talked back on course.

By the time the airplane reached the West Coast, it had been rebuilt so completely that historians believe only the rudder and a couple of struts from the original machine made it all the way to California. The engine had been rebuilt or swapped multiple times. Yet the name on the tail never changed: Vin Fiz, all the way across.

He Kept Going After the Prize Was Lost

Somewhere around the Mississippi, Rodgers knew he could no longer make the 30-day deadline. The Hearst prize was mathematically out of reach - the $50,000 was gone.

He kept flying anyway. The money that had justified the entire enterprise was lost, and Rodgers decided to reach California regardless. It had stopped being about the prize and become about the achievement itself - being the man who flew across America and finishing what he started.

When Did He Finish the Flight?

On November 5, 1911, 49 days after leaving the Atlantic, Rodgers landed to a roaring crowd near Pasadena, California, and was wrapped in an American flag. He had missed the 30-day target by 19 days and never collected a cent of the Hearst money.

But Pasadena isn’t the ocean, and Rodgers wanted a true coast-to-coast crossing - saltwater to saltwater. On the short final hop toward Long Beach he crashed badly, breaking an ankle and ribs and landing in the hospital.

He refused to be denied. In December 1911, still on crutches, Rodgers flew what remained of the Vin Fiz to Long Beach and rolled its wheels into the surf of the Pacific Ocean. The crossing was complete.

In total he had flown roughly 4,000 miles, with an actual flying time of only about three days and ten hours in the air. The rest of the 49 days was spent crashing, rebuilding, waiting on weather, and healing.

What Happened to Cal Rodgers?

Rodgers did not live to tell the story for long. In April 1912, he was flying at Long Beach - the same beach where he had completed his crossing - when he flew into a flock of gulls. One of the birds is believed to have jammed his controls. The airplane went down into the surf, and Calbraith Perry Rodgers was killed at age 33, less than a year after becoming a legend.

Why the Vin Fiz Still Matters

Rodgers proved the airplane was not just a fairground novelty for staying aloft a few minutes. He proved the machine could go somewhere - that it could cross deserts and mountains and tie one ocean to the other. He showed that aviation would shrink the world down to something you could fly across in an afternoon.

Today a jet crosses the country in about five hours. Rodgers did it in 49 days, in an open wooden chair, bleeding and exhausted, following railroad tracks toward a prize he already knew he’d lost - and he did it anyway.

Surviving pieces of the Vin Fiz are preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The airplane looks impossibly frail - which makes the man who flew it across a continent all the more remarkable.

Key Takeaways

Cal Rodgers made the first flight across the United States in 1911, flying the Wright Model EX “Vin Fiz” from Brooklyn to the Pacific.
The trip took 49 days (September 17 to November 5, plus the final hop in December), far exceeding the 30-day deadline for Hearst’s $50,000 prize, which he never won.
He survived about 16 crashes, and by journey’s end only the rudder and a few struts of the original airplane remained.
His actual airborne time was roughly three days and ten hours across nearly 4,000 miles, navigating by following railroad tracks - the “iron compass.”
Rodgers died in a crash at Long Beach in April 1912 at age 33, less than a year after his historic flight.