Cal Rodgers, the Vin Fiz, and the Forty-Nine Day Crash Across America to Win a Prize He Never Collected

In 1911, a nearly deaf, cigar-chewing adventurer named Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first person to fly an airplane across the United States. He piloted a fragile Wright biplane called the Vin Fiz from Brooklyn, New York, to Long Beach, California, crashing roughly a dozen and a half times along the way and taking 49 days to complete a journey we now make in about five hours. He was chasing a $50,000 prize he had no mathematical chance of winning by the time he was halfway there - and he finished anyway.

Who Was Cal Rodgers?

Cal Rodgers was not a typical aviator, even by the loose standards of 1911. He stood over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and had been nearly deaf since a childhood bout of scarlet fever. He came from distinguished American stock, related to naval heroes whose names ended up on warships, but he had drifted through life on a diet of motorcycles and fast boats without ever quite finding his calling.

That summer, he traveled to the Wright brothers’ flying school in Dayton, Ohio, and learned to fly. Barely. The record shows he received roughly 90 minutes of instruction - an hour and a half of stick time - before deciding he would attempt to fly across an entire continent. Today that amount of training wouldn’t get you soloing a Cessna 172.

The $50,000 Prize That Started It All

The whole adventure began with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. To ignite public interest in aviation, Hearst offered a $50,000 prize - a life-changing fortune at the time - to the first aviator to fly coast to coast across the United States in 30 days or less. There was a hard catch: the offer expired at the end of 1911.

At that point, nobody had flown across the country at all - not in 30 days, not in a hundred. The Wright brothers had made their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk less than eight years earlier. Most Americans had never seen an airplane in person. A single airplane crossing one state was front-page news; crossing the whole continent bordered on science fiction.

The Vin Fiz: A Flying Soda Advertisement

To fund the attempt, Rodgers found a sponsor - and it was a grape soft drink. The soda was called Vin Fiz, made by the Armour meatpacking company of Chicago, and Rodgers painted the name in large letters across his airplane, complete with a small grape-soda bottle. In a very real sense, the first transcontinental flight in American history was a beverage commercial with a man strapped to the front of it.

Armour paid Rodgers by the mile: $5 for every mile flown east of the Mississippi River, and $4 per mile west of it. The company also provided a dedicated support train.

His aircraft was a Wright EX, an open-frame pusher biplane with the propeller mounted behind the pilot. Rodgers sat out on the leading edge of the lower wing, feet on a small bar, with nothing between him and the ground - no cockpit, no windscreen, no meaningful restraint - cruising at roughly 50 to 55 miles per hour.

How Did He Navigate Across the Country?

There were no aviation charts, no radio, and none of the navigation tools modern pilots rely on. Rodgers used the only reliable landmark available: he followed the railroad tracks.

Pilots of the era called this technique “flying the iron compass.” You flew low, found the rails, and followed them west. Rodgers’s own support train ran along those same tracks below him, so much of the time he simply followed his own train across the country.

That train was a mobile repair depot. It carried a Pullman car for living quarters and a hangar car stocked with spare parts - extra propellers, wings, an entire spare engine, wire, wheels, fuel, and oil. Aboard was mechanic Charlie Taylor, the same man who had built the engine for the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, along with Rodgers’s wife, his mother, and a small crew.

The Brutal Reality of the Flight

Rodgers lifted off from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, on September 17, 1911, before a large crowd, and pointed the nose toward a Pacific Ocean more than 3,000 miles away.

The conditions were punishing. Perched on the front of the machine with no cockpit, Rodgers absorbed the full force of a 50-mile-per-hour wind for hours at a time. He wore a suit, a cap turned backward, and rubber goggles, later stuffing newspaper inside his coat to fight the cold. The engine hammered away directly behind his head. Through all of it, he kept a cigar clamped in his teeth - clamped on takeoff and still there on landing - which became his trademark.

And he crashed. Constantly. The first serious wreck came just days into the trip near Middletown, New York, when he clipped a tree on takeoff and came down in a chicken yard, destroying the airplane. That set the pattern for the entire journey.

He crashed in Pennsylvania, in the Alleghenies, and across the West - roughly a dozen and a half times, by most counts, and these were serious crashes, not rough landings. He cracked ribs, was cut and burned when the engine once let go, and at one point flew with a crutch lashed alongside him because of an injured leg. Every time, the support train caught up, Charlie Taylor and the crew installed new parts, and Rodgers climbed back aboard.

The “Grandfather’s Axe” Airplane

So many components were replaced so many times that, by the time the Vin Fiz reached the West Coast, almost nothing of the original aircraft remained. The Smithsonian notes that only a couple of original pieces survived the whole journey - perhaps a rudder, a single strut, and an oil drip pan. Everything else had been smashed and swapped out somewhere along the route.

It was the aviation version of grandfather’s old axe: the same airplane, in name, that had simply gone through several sets of wings, skids, and propellers.

He Lost the Prize but Kept Flying

Here is the part that defines the story. The 30-day deadline came and went while Rodgers was still fighting across the middle of the country, nowhere near the coast. The Hearst prize was mathematically out of reach. He knew it, his crew knew it, and the newspapers knew it.

Rodgers kept flying anyway. Asked about the money slipping away, he said, in essence, that he would reach the coast if he had to use up the entire railroad to do it. Crossing the country had become the point - not the prize.

He pressed on through the desert Southwest - Texas, New Mexico, Arizona - where a forced landing meant coming down in cactus and rock. He crashed again out west, lost more days to repairs, and finally reached Pasadena, California, on November 10, 1911 - 49 days after leaving Brooklyn. A crowd of thousands draped him in an American flag and carried him on their shoulders. He had flown roughly 4,000 miles, counting all the zigzagging, and become the first person ever to fly across the United States.

Reaching the Pacific - on Crutches

Pasadena isn’t the ocean, and Rodgers had promised to reach the Pacific. Days later he took off to cover the final miles to the water at Long Beach - and on that short hop, the engine quit and he crashed one more time, breaking his ankle and cracking more ribs.

When he finally taxied the Vin Fiz’s wheels into the surf of the Pacific at Long Beach on December 16, 1911, he did it on crutches, leg in a cast, ribs taped, cigar still in his teeth. He had touched one ocean and then the other, with the full width of America under his wing.

He never collected a dime of Hearst’s prize money. Between wrecked airplanes and endless parts, the sponsorship barely broke even. He had done it, as he said, simply because he said he would.

A Short Life and a Lasting Legacy

The story does not have a soft ending. Just a few months later, in the spring of 1912, Rodgers was flying an exhibition over the water at that same Long Beach when he flew into a flock of gulls. A bird jammed his controls, the airplane nosed over into the surf, and Cal Rodgers was killed. He was 33 years old - gone within sight of where he had made history.

But the Vin Fiz survives. That patched-together, crash-scarred, grape-soda billboard of a flying machine hangs today in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Stand beneath it and you are looking at the first airplane ever to cross America - fragile as a kite, and it made it.

Every pilot who has ever glanced down at a rail line or highway to find the next town, and every pilot who has pushed on past the point where quitting would have been the sensible choice, is flying in Cal Rodgers’s wake. He proved that a continent could be crossed by air - spending 49 days of broken bones and broken airplanes to demonstrate something we now do in about five hours.

Key Takeaways

Cal Rodgers made the first transcontinental airplane flight across the United States in 1911, flying from Brooklyn, New York, to Long Beach, California.
He flew a Wright EX biplane named the Vin Fiz after its sponsor, an Armour-made grape soda - making it the first great flying billboard.
The trip took 49 days, covered roughly 4,000 miles, and included about 18 serious crashes; so few original parts survived that the finished airplane was almost entirely rebuilt.
Rodgers missed Hearst’s $50,000 prize (a 30-day deadline he couldn’t meet) and finished the journey anyway, purely to complete what he’d started.
He was killed in a crash at Long Beach in 1912 at age 33; the surviving Vin Fiz now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.