Cal Rodgers, the Vin Fiz, and the Forty-Nine Days a Wrecked Wright Biplane Crawled Across America to Win a Prize It Never Collected

In 1911, Calbraith Perry Rodgers became the first person to fly an airplane across the United States, piloting a grape-soda-sponsored Wright biplane called the Vin Fiz from Brooklyn to the Pacific. The journey took 49 days, roughly 4,000 miles, and survived somewhere around 19 crashes and forced landings. He never collected the prize money that inspired the trip - he finished months past the deadline and did it anyway.

What Was the Hearst Prize That Started It All?

In 1910, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst offered $50,000 to the first aviator to fly across the United States, ocean to ocean, in either direction. The single hard rule: the entire crossing had to be completed within a 30-day window. Pilots could stop and repair as often as they needed, but the clock ran from wheels-up to wheels-down.

It was a staggering sum - a genuine fortune in 1910 - and most people assumed it was safe. At the time, no one had flown an airplane more than a few hundred miles in a stretch. The Wright brothers had been flying for less than seven years. An engine that ran a full hour without failing was considered remarkable, and Hearst was asking someone to nurse one of these fragile machines some 4,000 miles across deserts, mountains, and prairie.

Who Was Cal Rodgers?

Rodgers was an unlikely aviator. He came from a distinguished Navy family, but he was a big, hard-drinking, cigar-chewing sportsman who had lost most of his hearing to scarlet fever as a child. He raced motorcycles, sailed yachts, and gravitated toward speed and risk.

He had only learned to fly in 1911, the same year he attempted the crossing. His formal training amounted to just 90 minutes of instruction from the Wright brothers at their school in Dayton, Ohio. Then he bought a license and went barnstorming.

Crucially, Rodgers understood the challenge differently than the dreamers did. He recognized that flying coast to coast wasn’t really a flying problem - it was a logistics problem. A 1911 airplane would break, and break constantly. The real question was how fast you could repair it and get back into the air.

Why Was the Airplane Named After a Grape Soda?

To fund the attempt, Rodgers found a sponsor: Armour, the Chicago meatpacking company, which was promoting a new grape soda called Vin Fiz. Armour agreed to back the flight on the condition that the name be painted across the wings and tail, and they paid Rodgers $5 per mile east of the Mississippi and $4 per mile west of it. The first airplane to cross America was, in plain fact, a flying billboard for grape pop.

The aircraft was a Wright Model EX, a small single-engine pusher biplane with the propellers mounted behind the pilot, chain-driven off an engine of about 35 horsepower. Rodgers sat out in the open on the leading edge of the lower wing - no cockpit, no real seatbelt, no brakes, and essentially no instruments. He flew by the feel of the wind and the sound of the bracing wires.

How Did the Support Crew Keep the Vin Fiz Flying?

Behind the airplane, Armour ran a special three-car train: a Pullman car for Rodgers, his wife, and his mother; a diner; and a hangar car packed with spare parts - wings, propellers, struts, wire, fabric, engine components, and a full machine shop.

Aboard that train was Charlie Taylor, the mechanic who had built the engine for the original Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk - the man who made the world’s first airplane engine by hand. On this journey, the mechanic from Kitty Hawk served as the pit crew, patching the biplane back together after every wreck.

Navigation was equally improvised. With no radio and no usable charts, Rodgers followed the railroad tracks below him. The rails led to flat ground, water towers, and telegraph offices - everywhere the crossing needed. When he lost sight of the tracks, he was lost.

What Went Wrong Along the Way?

Nearly everything. Rodgers took off from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on September 17, 1911, and the trouble began almost immediately. After his first refueling stop near Middletown, New York, he clipped a tree on departure and drove the entire airplane into a chicken coop, wrecking it and cutting his head. The rebuild cost three days out of his 30 - and he was barely 100 miles from the start.

With that, the prize was almost certainly lost. Any sensible person would have quit. Rodgers kept going, saying he would reach the Pacific with or without the money, even if it took him twenty years.

The wrecks that followed read like a tall tale, except they’re documented:

He flew into a barbed-wire fence and struck trees more than once.
Engine failures forced him down in fields across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.
Over the Alleghenies, brutal winds tossed the little machine while he hung on in the open, exposed to the cold.
Souvenir hunters repeatedly walked off with pieces of the airplane after he landed in pastures.
An engine cylinder exploded in flight, driving a steel fragment into his arm; crews dug it out, patched him up, and he flew on.

Did Cal Rodgers Win the Hearst Prize?

No. By the time he crossed into Texas, the 30 days were long gone and the prize was mathematically impossible. But the flight had grown bigger than the money. Word raced ahead by telegraph, schools let out, shops closed, and whole towns climbed onto rooftops and water towers to watch the impossible machine crawl across the sky. In roughly a month, Rodgers had become the most famous flyer in America.

He pressed on through the lonely desert Southwest - New Mexico and Arizona - with no water below and no way to call for help. On November 5, 1911, 49 days after leaving Brooklyn, he descended into Pasadena, California, where a crowd of 20,000 people mobbed him and wrapped him in an American flag. He had flown across the United States.

How Did the Vin Fiz Finally Reach the Ocean?

Pasadena is inland, and Rodgers had promised coast to coast. Days later he took off to complete the final stretch to the Pacific - and crashed badly, spilling into a plowed field and suffering a broken ankle, broken ribs, and a concussion that put him in the hospital.

He refused to quit. On December 10, 1911, weeks later and still on crutches, he was lifted into the seat and flew the final leg, rolling the Vin Fiz onto the wet sand at Long Beach and taxiing until the wheels sat in the Pacific Ocean. Atlantic to Pacific - done.

By the finish, almost nothing of the original airplane remained - perhaps a couple of struts, part of the rudder, and maybe one wing spar. Everything else had been replaced along the way, some parts several times over. It was the riddle of grandfather’s axe, but it flew the whole distance, and the man out front on the wing was the same the entire way.

The final tally: 82 stops, roughly 19 crashes and forced landings, about 4,000 miles, and 49 days of flying spread across nearly three months - all for no prize money at all.

What Happened to Cal Rodgers?

The story does not end tidily. In April 1912, Rodgers was flying the same California coastline at Long Beach when a flock of birds rose in front of him. A gull is said to have jammed the controls; the airplane nosed over into the shallow surf, and Rodgers was killed at age 33. He is recorded as likely the first bird-strike fatality in American aviation - a strange thing to be remembered for, given what he actually accomplished.

Today, a few original pieces of the Vin Fiz hang in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, where visitors can stand beneath them and consider the 49 days it took to cross a continent nobody thought could be crossed.

Key Takeaways

Cal Rodgers made the first coast-to-coast airplane flight across the U.S., taking off from Brooklyn on September 17, 1911, and reaching the Pacific at Long Beach on December 10, 1911.
The flight was sponsored by Armour’s Vin Fiz grape soda, whose name was painted on the Wright Model EX biplane in exchange for $5/mile east and $4/mile west of the Mississippi.
Rodgers never won the $50,000 Hearst prize, which required crossing the country in 30 days; he finished far past the deadline and flew on anyway.
The crossing survived roughly 19 crashes and forced landings over ~4,000 miles and 82 stops, kept airworthy by Kitty Hawk mechanic Charlie Taylor and a parts-laden support train.
Rodgers died in a bird strike in April 1912 at age 33, becoming likely the first such aviation fatality on record.