Cal Rodgers and the Vin Fiz, the Grape-Soda Biplane That Crossed America in Eighty-Four Days and Arrived Held Together by Almost Nothing

In 1911, a tall, half-deaf adventurer named Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first person to fly across the United States, piloting a fragile grape-soda-sponsored biplane called the Vin Fiz from New York to the Pacific. The journey took 84 days and roughly 4,000 miles, during which he crashed or force-landed dozens of times and rebuilt the airplane so completely that almost none of the original machine finished the trip. He never won the prize money that inspired the attempt - the deadline expired mid-flight - yet he pressed on to the ocean anyway.

Who Was Cal Rodgers?

Calbraith Perry Rodgers came from serious American lineage, a family that counted admirals and War of 1812 heroes among its members. He stood nearly six foot four and was built like a lineman. A childhood bout of scarlet fever left him badly hard of hearing - deaf enough that he likely couldn’t have passed a medical exam had one existed.

He was drawn to anything fast: motorcycles, boats, and automobiles back when a car was still a rich man’s toy. In the summer of 1911, he traveled to the Wright brothers’ flying school in Dayton, Ohio, and learned to fly.

His total instruction before deciding to cross a continent? About 90 minutes of dual flying, spread over a couple of days. That was the standard of the era.

Why Did He Attempt to Cross the Country?

Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had offered a $50,000 prize - an enormous fortune at the time - to the first aviator who could fly coast to coast in 30 days or less, with the offer set to expire in October 1911. No one had claimed it, because the feat was very nearly impossible.

The airplanes of 1911 were built of spruce, wire, and doped cotton fabric. Their engines produced maybe 35 horsepower on a good day. They had no brakes, no meaningful instruments, and no navigation beyond a road map and the pilot’s own eyes. Pilots flew low and slow, following railroad tracks - a practice they called “flying the iron compass,” because the rails led to towns, and towns were where the fuel was.

Why Was It Called the Vin Fiz?

Rodgers wasn’t wealthy by his family’s standards, and the expedition would cost a fortune. So he did something strikingly modern for 1911: he found a commercial sponsor.

The Armour meatpacking company of Chicago had just launched a new grape-flavored soft drink called Vin Fiz. Armour agreed to bankroll the flight if Rodgers painted the soda’s name across his airplane and branded the whole enterprise the Vin Fiz flight. The deal paid $5 for every mile flown east of the Mississippi and $4 per mile west of it.

His aircraft - a Wright Model EX, a stripped-down single-engine pusher biplane - was christened the Vin Fiz. A grape soda gave its name to the machine that would end up in the Smithsonian.

What Was It Like to Fly the Vin Fiz?

The Vin Fiz was almost entirely open air. The pilot sat on a small seat out front, with the wing behind him and the engine and propellers behind that. There was no cockpit, no cabin, and no real windscreen.

Rodgers flew in a business suit and a backwards cap, cigar clenched in his teeth, with a 40-plus-mph wind battering him for hours. The engine sat directly behind his back, spraying hot castor oil and unburned fuel that coated his clothes and stung his eyes. It was also punishingly loud - a hammering, clattering, wooden-propeller kind of noise, right at the base of his skull, for a man already half-deaf.

The Journey: A Pattern of Crashes and Repairs

On September 18, 1911, Rodgers lifted off from a racetrack at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, before a crowd of thousands. He turned west toward a Pacific he would find with a road map and a line of railroad tracks.

Behind him ran a special three-car train paid for by Armour. One car was a rolling workshop packed with spare wings, rudders, skids, struts, wire, fabric, dope, spruce, and even a spare engine - because the crew understood Rodgers was going to crash, and crash often.

Aboard that train rode Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who had built the engine for the original Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk. As the first aircraft mechanic in history, Taylor is the figure every modern A&P technician follows. Now he crossed America patching up the Vin Fiz after each wreck.

The crashes began almost immediately. Within days, Rodgers came down at Middletown, New York, clipped a tree, and piled the aircraft into a chicken yard - badly damaging the machine, gashing his own scalp, and sidelining him for nearly a week while the crew rebuilt it.

That became the rhythm of the entire trip: fly a leg, suffer an engine failure or a gust or a misjudged farmer’s field, go over on the nose in a heap of splinters and wire, wait for the train, let Charlie Taylor work, and climb back on. Counts vary by how you tally a hard landing versus a true wreck, but Rodgers crashed or force-landed somewhere between 15 and 40 times crossing the country. He broke bones and was burned when a cylinder let go and sprayed him with hot metal and oil.

He Kept Flying After the Prize Was Gone

The 30-day Hearst deadline passed while Rodgers was still somewhere over the middle of the country. The $50,000 - the entire rational reason to attempt the flight - was gone, and he knew it. No one could have made thirty days.

He kept flying anyway. Bruised, burned, half-deaf, soaked in castor oil, and piloting a machine rebuilt beyond recognition, he pointed the nose west and continued. Asked about quitting, he said in essence that he had set out to reach the Pacific and intended to reach it, prize or no prize.

The “Grandpa’s Axe” Airplane

By the end, the Vin Fiz that left Brooklyn and the one that reached the West Coast were, for all practical purposes, two different aircraft sharing a name. Historians who later studied the machine concluded that only a couple of original pieces - a strut, part of a rudder - survived the whole journey. The wings, engine, skids, and frame had all been replaced, some of them more than once.

It was the old riddle of grandpa’s axe, the one with three new heads and four new handles that is somehow still grandpa’s axe. The Vin Fiz crossed a continent by being rebuilt beneath its own name the entire way.

Reaching the Ocean

On November 5, 1911 - 49 days after leaving New York - Rodgers landed in Pasadena, California, where a crowd of 20,000 wrapped him in an American flag. He had become the first human being to fly across the United States.

But Pasadena wasn’t the ocean, and Rodgers had promised ocean to ocean. Days later he took off for the beach at Long Beach to put his skids at the water’s edge - and crashed one more time, breaking his ankle and injuring his spine. He had flown across a continent only to nearly kill himself in the final miles.

He refused to let it go. In December, still healing, he had himself propped up and flew the last stretch down to the water, rolling the Vin Fiz into the wet sand where the Pacific meets the beach. Start to finish, the trip spanned 84 days and about 4,000 miles - of which only a small handful of days were actually spent in the air. The rest was crashing, mending, and waiting on parts.

A Life Cut Short

Rodgers did not live to grow old telling the story. In April 1912, flying near that same Long Beach over the water where he had finished his great flight, something went wrong - by some accounts a flock of gulls, one of which jammed his controls. The aircraft went into the surf, and Cal Rodgers was killed at age 33. He had been a pilot for less than a year.

In that single year, he accomplished a feat the rest of the world still insisted was impossible.

Why Cal Rodgers Still Matters

Every pilot who has ever pushed up the throttle and wondered how far they could go is flying in Cal Rodgers’ wake. He was the first to look at the full span of the country - mountains, deserts, prairie, and rivers - and resolve to fly over all of it, then actually do it, in an aircraft most of us would be afraid to taxi.

The prize couldn’t hold him to the attempt, and losing the prize couldn’t stop him. That determination belonged to the man, not the machine - the machine was beautiful, historic junk.

And the airplane survived. Enough of that patched-up, rebuilt Vin Fiz endured to be preserved, and it hangs today in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington - a small cotton-and-spruce pusher biplane with a soda-pop name, resting among rockets and jets, a reminder that the first man to cross this country did it four and five dollars at a time, one crash at a time.

Key Takeaways

Cal Rodgers made the first transcontinental flight across the United States in 1911, flying the Vin Fiz, a Wright Model EX biplane sponsored by Armour’s grape soda.
He departed Brooklyn on September 18, 1911, reached Pasadena on November 5, and completed the ocean-to-ocean journey in December, spanning 84 days and roughly 4,000 miles.
Rodgers crashed or force-landed 15 to 40 times, and mechanic Charlie Taylor - builder of the original Wright Flyer engine - rebuilt the aircraft so often that only a few original parts survived the trip.
The $50,000 Hearst prize expired mid-flight, yet Rodgers pressed on to the Pacific out of sheer determination.
He died in a crash near Long Beach in April 1912 at age 33, less than a year into his flying career; the Vin Fiz is preserved in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.