Lowell Smith, the Douglas World Cruisers, and the One Hundred and Seventy-Five Days It Took to Fly Around the World When Nobody Had Ever Done It

On September 28, 1924, two U.S. Army Air Service biplanes touched down at Sand Point, Washington, completing the first aerial circumnavigation of the Earth. The mission had taken 175 days, covered 27,553 miles, and made 74 stops across more than two dozen countries. It was accomplished in open-cockpit aircraft with no autopilot, no instrument approaches, and engines derived from World War One.

Twenty Years After Kitty Hawk

The Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk had been just twenty years earlier. The entire history of powered aviation fit inside the lifespan of a college student. Aircraft were still largely fabric over wooden frames, braced with wire and rigging. The Liberty engines powering the World Cruisers were World War One powerplants. Against that backdrop, flying around the Earth was not merely ambitious - it was, by any reasonable measure of what had actually been accomplished, nearly incomprehensible.

The U.S. Army Air Service understood that and decided to attempt it anyway.

Planning took two years. Logistics officers charted supply routes across oceans they had never crossed. The Navy pre-positioned fuel ships at precise coordinates across the North Pacific, strung out like stepping stones on a chart. State Department officials negotiated landing rights in countries that had never seen an American military aircraft, in languages most of the negotiating officers did not speak. Every contingency the planners could imagine was built into the route, because they understood something would go wrong - they just didn’t know what.

The Douglas World Cruisers

The aircraft came from a young company operating out of a converted movie studio in Santa Monica, California. Donald Douglas had founded his operation two years earlier on ambition and very little money. The contract to build the World Cruisers was his chance to prove what he was manufacturing in that old soundstage was something the world needed.

Douglas built five World Cruisers, with a sixth as a static test airframe. At their core, they were fabric-covered, wire-braced biplanes. The Liberty 12 engine produced approximately 420 horsepower. Top speed was around 100 mph on a favorable day; cruise speed closer to 80 mph. The cockpits were open to the elements - not a design choice in 1924, simply how you flew.

The engineering detail that made the entire route viable was interchangeable landing gear. The World Cruisers could swap between floats and wheeled undercarriage depending on the terrain. Each float set weighed approximately 1,800 pounds, and swapping them required a full maintenance crew and the better part of a day. But that flexibility was the difference between a theoretical route and an actual one: you cannot float-land in the Middle East, and you cannot wheel-land in the middle of the North Pacific.

The Four Crews

Four aircraft made the starting line on April 6, 1924, departing Sand Point, Washington on floats in a cold northwest wind off Lake Washington.

• Seattle - Major Frederick Martin and Staff Sergeant Alva Harvey
• Chicago - Lieutenant Lowell Smith and Lieutenant Leslie Arnold
• Boston - Lieutenant Leigh Wade and Lieutenant Henry Ogden
• New Orleans - Lieutenant Erik Nelson and Lieutenant John Harding

Each aircraft was named for an American city. This was a flag mission, and everyone involved understood it that way.

Six Other Nations Were Racing

The Americans were not alone. Six other nations had teams either airborne or preparing to depart. Britain’s entry was Major Stuart MacLaren in a Vickers Vulture flying boat. France fielded Lieutenant Georges d’Oisy, who had already set distance records across Europe. Italy sent Antonio Locatelli in a Dornier Wal, a twin-engine flying boat that was, in several respects, better suited to ocean crossing than what the Americans were flying. Portugal and Argentina also had entries.

Every nation with aeronautical ambitions understood what being first to circumnavigate the globe by air would mean. The Americans had left first. The question was whether they could stay ahead.

Alaska: The First Catastrophe

The first disaster came before the expedition ever reached Japan.

Twenty-four days into the mission - April 30, 1924 - Major Martin and the Seattle were threading through mountain terrain near the Alaska Peninsula, trying to find a route south toward the Aleutian Chain. The fog was not the optimistic kind that burns off by midmorning. It was dense, gray, and permanent-feeling - the kind that hangs over that stretch of Alaska for days. Martin descended looking for a ceiling he could work below, and the Seattle flew into a mountainside.

Both men walked away from the wreckage.

Then the situation became worse. Martin and Harvey spent ten days in the Alaska wilderness before anyone located them. Not ten hours - ten full days in the Alaska bush in May, cold at night and wet underfoot. They scavenged from the wreck, navigated by the sun when the overcast broke, and by memory of their charts when it didn’t. A fishing vessel eventually spotted them on the coast. The Seattle was destroyed.

Command of the expedition passed to Lowell Smith in the Chicago.

Lowell Smith

The year before the World Flight, Smith had set the world aerial refueling endurance record over San Diego. He and Lieutenant John Richter stayed airborne for 37 hours and 15 minutes, taking on fuel from another aircraft in flight while the world below passed through a full day and night beneath them. That is a day and a half in an open-cockpit biplane over a California airfield - a record built not just on flying skill but on a quality of sustained attention and judgment under accumulated fatigue that very few people are ever tested on.

Smith was not a man who made speeches about himself. He wrote no memoir. He did not seek newspaper coverage. His reputation was built entirely on what happened in the cockpit. That is precisely the quality you want in command when a quarter of your aircraft are gone in Alaska and you still have twenty thousand miles ahead of you.

The Aleutian Chain

The Aleutian Island chain stretches approximately 1,200 miles across the North Pacific. Each island sits at a distance from the last that was right at the edge of what the World Cruisers could cover on a full tank. Each one is wrapped in its own weather system. Each one is surrounded by water cold enough to kill an unprotected person before rescue could arrive.

The crews flew formation when they could see each other, and solo when the clouds made formation flying more dangerous than flying alone. They navigated by compass and elapsed time, counting minutes to the next landfall and trusting that the island was exactly where the chart said it was. One mechanic on that leg later wrote that he listened to the engine constantly - not because there was anything he could do if it quit over the open ocean, but because listening felt better than not listening.

Japan, India, and the Road West

The reception in Japan was unlike anything the crews had anticipated. Crowds gathered at the harbors. Officials arrived in formal dress bearing gifts. Elaborate receptions ran well past what the Army’s schedule had allocated. The U.S.-Japan relationship in 1924 still carried warmth that the following two decades would erase entirely. Smith noted in his flight log that he had not expected anything like it. They stayed longer than planned because their hosts simply would not hear of them leaving on the original schedule.

The route then continued south and west through China, Indochina, and into India at the height of monsoon season. The heat and humidity in an open cockpit combine into something physical - a weight that presses down on you for hours at a stretch. Engine exhaust swirls back into the cockpit, adding heat and oil fumes to air already thick with moisture. The crews landed with their faces dark from exhaust residue and their hands cramped from fighting turbulence in rough air. They swapped floats for wheel landing gear in Calcutta and turned west.

Baghdad. Constantinople. The Balkans. Paris. London. Scotland. The European legs were shorter and better supported than anything since leaving the Pacific Northwest - actual runways, actual facilities, hotel beds. But by northern Europe, the crews were running on five months of accumulated fatigue that no amount of good food and decent sleep can repair. You eat, you rest a few hours, and you keep going.

The North Atlantic

Nobody had ever flown the North Atlantic east to west. The prevailing winds blow against westbound aircraft, cutting ground speed and expanding fuel consumption on every leg. The fog between Iceland and Greenland is among the worst in the world. The Denmark Strait will kill an unprotected person in minutes. These are the facts you are sitting with when you taxi out of Reykjavik.

Antonio Locatelli departed Iceland with the American formation, heading west toward Greenland. Somewhere in the fog southeast of Greenland, he lost the formation and his bearings, and put the Dornier Wal down in the open ocean. The USS Richmond eventually recovered Locatelli and his crew - alive, but finished with the circumnavigation. His flight log, later published in Italy, described the American crews with genuine admiration. No bitterness. When you put your aircraft down in the North Atlantic and someone comes looking, you are grateful regardless of which flag they fly.

Leigh Wade’s Boston had been nursing engine trouble across the North Atlantic for weeks. He set it down safely near the Faroe Islands, but the aircraft was beyond field repair. A replacement designated Boston II was waiting at a pre-positioned depot further along the route. The crew transferred their gear and pressed on. The original Boston never finished the circuit.

That left two aircraft: the Chicago and the New Orleans.

The Finish Line

Greenland to Labrador. South along the Atlantic coast. Nova Scotia. New York. Then southwest back to California.

The Chicago and New Orleans landed at Clover Field in Santa Monica on September 22, 1924. Donald Douglas was there, without having made any particular announcement about it. Two of the four aircraft he had built in that old movie studio were rolling onto the ramp in front of him.

Then north, back to where it began.

Sand Point, Washington. September 28, 1924. Five months and twenty-two days after they had taxied out on floats in the cold morning air.

175 days. 27,553 miles. 74 stops. More than two dozen countries.

The first aerial circumnavigation of the Earth.

What Happened to the Competition

MacLaren’s British team was still airborne when the Americans finished. He had been battling delays and weather since Asia and never recovered his schedule. He heard the news by cable somewhere in the North Atlantic - and kept flying. He did not complete the circumnavigation. The fact that he continued after the race was clearly lost says something worth saying about the character of the men who attempted these things.

Why This Matters for Pilots

Every modern system for long-range flight - the pre-positioned fuel depot, the international landing rights framework, the concept of alternates built into the plan before departure - traces a line back to problems first worked out in 1924. The Army Air Service was inventing long-range aviation logistics while simultaneously flying the mission. They planned contingencies for scenarios nobody had ever encountered, without GPS, digital weather data, or radio navigation in any meaningful form.

The complete navigation toolkit Lowell Smith carried over the North Pacific: a compass, a clock, a chart, and the horizon when he could see it. Dead reckoning when he couldn’t.

The Chicago is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The New Orleans is at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Both are free admission. Stand under either aircraft and look at the open cockpit, the wire rigging, and the Liberty engine. Then consider what was on the other side of that cockpit over the Aleutian Chain, in fog, with the next island a hundred miles away.

The centennial of the World Flight was marked in 2024. It passed quieter than it deserved to.

Key Takeaways

• The 1924 U.S. Army Air Service World Flight was the first aerial circumnavigation of the Earth, completed September 28, 1924, after departing Sand Point, Washington on April 6, 1924.
• Four Douglas World Cruisers departed; only two - the Chicago and the New Orleans - completed the full circuit after the Seattle was destroyed in Alaska and the original Boston was lost to engine failure over the North Atlantic.
• Lowell Smith, who held the world aerial refueling endurance record at 37 hours and 15 minutes, took command after the Seattle crashed 24 days into the mission.
• The mission totaled 27,553 miles across 74 stops, flown in open-cockpit biplanes with interchangeable float and wheel landing gear, navigating by compass, clock, and chart.
• The surviving aircraft are on permanent public display: the Chicago at the National Air and Space Museum (Washington, D.C.) and the New Orleans at the National Museum of the United States Air Force (Dayton, Ohio).