The 1924 Army Air Service World Flight, the Douglas World Cruisers, and the First Crew to Fly Around the Earth

On September 28, 1924, two open-cockpit biplanes landed on Puget Sound at Sand Point, Seattle, completing the first aerial circumnavigation of the Earth. Eight men in four aircraft had left the same spot 175 days earlier on April 6, 1924, flying more than 26,000 miles across three continents in aircraft with no radio navigation, no weather radar, and no guarantee the engine would keep running.

The State of Aviation in 1924

The Wright brothers made their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. By 1924, the entire history of controlled, powered aviation was roughly twenty years old. The pilots of that era flew open cockpits with no windshield, navigating by compass, paper charts, a clock, and visual terrain recognition.

General Billy Mitchell of the United States Army Air Service saw an opportunity in that primitive moment. Mitchell had spent years arguing that airpower would transform warfare and commerce alike. He would eventually be court-martialed for being correct too early and too loudly - but in 1923, he still held enough influence to push through the most ambitious aviation project the country had ever attempted: fly American aircraft around the world.

The Douglas World Cruiser: Engineering a Circumnavigation

No aircraft capable of circumnavigation existed in 1923. The Army turned to Donald Douglas, a 31-year-old engineer running a small company in Santa Monica, California, with a reputation for building aircraft that held together under stress.

Douglas designed the World Cruiser: a single-engine, two-seat open-cockpit biplane powered by the Liberty 12-cylinder engine producing 400 horsepower. The Liberty had been the workhorse engine of World War I - capable, but not always reliable about when it chose to stop running. The Army chose it anyway. They had thousands in storage, and a circumnavigation required a logistics chain that could deliver a replacement engine to a harbor in Alaska or a dock in Japan. Reliability of supply mattered as much as reliability of the engine itself.

The World Cruiser’s defining innovation was convertibility. The same airframe could accept wheeled landing gear or pontoons, swapped on the ground between legs. One aircraft. Two configurations. The whole world.

Douglas built five World Cruisers - four for the mission, one as a training prototype. The mission aircraft were named Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and New Orleans.

The Eight Men Who Flew Them

Each aircraft carried two people: a pilot and a mechanic. Not a co-pilot - a mechanic. Someone who could fix the aircraft when it broke down in a field in Alaska or a harbor in Burma.

Major Frederick Martin commanded the flight, flying the Seattle with Sergeant Alva Harvey. Lieutenant Lowell Smith flew the Chicago with Lieutenant Leslie Arnold - Smith was widely regarded as the finest pilot in the Air Service: cool, precise, and deeply competitive. Lieutenant Leigh Wade flew the Boston with Sergeant Henry Ogden. Lieutenant Erik Nelson flew the New Orleans with Lieutenant John Harding; Nelson was the mechanical mind of the group, with a working knowledge of the World Cruiser down to the rivets.

The Route: 57 Stops Across Three Continents

The planned route covered 57 scheduled stops across the United States, Alaska, Japan, China, Burma, India, the Middle East, Europe, the North Atlantic, and Canada. At every stop, an Army logistics chain had been prepositioned months in advance - fuel, oil, spare parts, and in some locations, complete replacement engines sitting on the dock. This supply operation ran through American embassies, foreign governments, and naval attachés spread across multiple continents.

The men in the cockpits were the visible part. An entire organization working ahead of them around the earth was not.

The International Race Nobody Talks About

The Americans were not the only team attempting a circumnavigation in 1924. British Squadron Leader Stuart MacLaren had already launched eastward from England in March aboard a Vickers Vulture - before the Americans departed Seattle. France, Portugal, and Argentina also fielded teams. Every aviation power of the era understood that the first nation to circle the globe would make a statement about national capability that no speech or treaty could match.

MacLaren reached the Kurile Islands north of Japan before his aircraft went down in a remote harbor. The British attempt ended while the Americans were still preparing to depart.

Alaska and the First Crisis

The Aleutian Islands were supposed to be the warm-up segment of the flight. They were not.

The Aleutians in April generate fog, icing, and storms without warning or mercy. The Liberty engines ran rough in the cold. Ice built up on the wire bracing between the wings. The cockpits were open to air that had not warmed since winter.

On April 30, Major Martin’s Seattle disappeared into fog while flying mountains south of Port Moller. In visibility that low, the truth of your position only reveals itself when it is too late. The Seattle flew into a mountainside at low speed. The aircraft was destroyed; Martin and Harvey survived, battered, and spent eight days walking out of the Alaska backcountry through snow and alder brush before a search party found them. They were done with the World Flight.

Three aircraft turned west toward the Pacific.

The Pacific crossing is the most underappreciated segment of the entire mission. Three open-cockpit biplanes with 400-horsepower engines needed to cross from the Aleutian Islands to Japan - thousands of miles of open ocean with no navigation aids, no reliable radio contact, and no meaningful search-and-rescue capability if a Liberty engine chose that moment to stop running.

The United States Navy positioned 21 ships along the route, one every few hundred miles, serving as both navigation checkpoints and rescue platforms. The plan was direct: fly from ship to ship across the Pacific, confirming position each time a gray hull appeared below, then press on to the next one. The Navy had built a navigation highway across the Pacific out of warships.

Pilots flew a compass heading and trusted the arithmetic. Miles covered divided by airspeed gives hours flown; hours flown from a known position on a known heading gives an estimated new position. Then you look for the next ship. Nobody went into the ocean. All three World Cruisers made Japan.

Asia, the Middle East, and Europe

Through China, Burma, and India, the climate shifted entirely. The open cockpits that had been instruments of cold torture in Alaska became heat traps. Leather helmets soaked through by midmorning. The Liberty engines ran hot, and pilots watched their temperature gauges the way a mountain pilot watches an altimeter - constantly, without blinking.

The aircraft crossed the Middle East, flew the Mediterranean coast, and landed in England in late July. By this point the story had become international news, with newspapers tracking the flight’s daily progress. In London, official receptions awaited crews who had become public figures.

The North Atlantic and the Loss of Boston

The final stretch ran from England to the Orkney Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the American coast. Each hop was a few hundred miles - manageable in distance, brutal in conditions, over open North Atlantic water in pontoon-equipped open-cockpit biplanes.

On August 3, Lieutenant Wade’s Boston went down. Wade put the aircraft on the water cleanly in rough seas between England and Iceland, but the pontoons were damaged and the flight was over for that airframe. The crew was rescued by a nearby vessel.

The Army designated the unused training prototype as Boston Two and sent Wade and Ogden to Pictou, Nova Scotia, to rejoin the flight for the homecoming leg. By the time they arrived, Lowell Smith in the Chicago and Erik Nelson in the New Orleans had already cleared the North Atlantic. Two aircraft were going to complete the circumnavigation.

The Return to Seattle

Chicago and New Orleans crossed Canada from east to west, with cities turning out at every stop. By September 1924, Smith’s and Nelson’s names were known across the country the way a later generation would know the names of astronauts.

On September 28, 1924, both aircraft came over Puget Sound and put down on the water at Sand Point, Seattle - 175 days after departure. Total flying time: 363 hours and 7 minutes. Total distance: more than 26,000 miles across 57 stops. General Mitchell was there, with the look of a man who had been right all along and was decent enough not to say so out loud.

Why the 1924 World Flight Still Matters for Aviation

The 1924 World Flight was not a stunt. It was a proof of concept for global aviation operations - demonstrating that a correctly organized enterprise with prepositioned logistics could take aircraft anywhere on earth and return them to their starting point.

The oceans were no longer barriers. The mountain ranges, jungles, deserts, and arctic seas that had isolated civilizations from each other across the entire span of human history were, as of September 1924, just legs to plan. Every transatlantic and transpacific commercial flight since then is a continuation of what those eight men established. The 1924 World Flight did not just prove circumnavigation was possible. It proved that aviation could be organized, supplied, and executed at a genuinely global scale.

Where to See the Aircraft Today

The Chicago is preserved at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The New Orleans is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Both retain their open cockpits. Standing next to one, you can see what the pilot had available: a compass, an altimeter, an airspeed indicator, and a clock. Then consider that they flew one of those aircraft across the Pacific Ocean.

Key Takeaways

On April 6, 1924, four Douglas World Cruisers carrying eight Army Air Service crewmen departed Sand Point, Seattle, on the first attempt to fly around the world.
Only two aircraft - the Chicago and New Orleans - completed the circumnavigation, returning September 28, 1924 after 175 days and more than 26,000 miles of flight.
The mission required an invisible logistics operation: 21 U.S. Navy ships positioned across the Pacific and prepositioned supply depots at all 57 planned stops worldwide.
British, French, Portuguese, and Argentine teams all attempted circumnavigations in 1924; none succeeded.
The Douglas World Cruiser’s convertible landing gear - swappable between wheels and pontoons - was the engineering key that made a single airframe viable across every terrain the route demanded.