The 1924 Army World Flight, the Four Douglas World Cruisers, and the First Circumnavigation of the Globe by Air That America Somehow Forgot

On September 28, 1924, three open-cockpit biplanes landed on Lake Washington outside Seattle, completing the first flight around the world. The journey covered 27,553 miles, took 175 days, and logged 363 hours and 7 minutes of flight time across 28 countries and 72 stops. It happened three years before Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris, and most people have never heard of it.

Why the U.S. Army Decided to Fly Around the World

By 1924, the airplane was no longer a curiosity, but it was nowhere close to reliable. Long-distance aviation was still a matter of careful preparation, contingency planning, and genuine courage. The transatlantic crossing by Alcock and Brown had happened five years earlier. Circumnavigating the globe by air had never been done.

Multiple nations were preparing to be first. Britain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Argentina all had teams working toward the goal. The prestige was significant: whoever circled the globe first would establish a marker for national aviation capability that the entire world would recognize.

General Mason Patrick, chief of the Army Air Service - predecessor to the United States Air Force - made the call. The United States would be first, and they would do it in American-built aircraft.

The Douglas World Cruiser: Built for the Mission, Not for Glory

The Army contract went to a young company in Santa Monica, California, that had been building aircraft for only two years: the Douglas Aircraft Company. Donald Douglas and his chief engineer James Goodyear took the existing Douglas DT-2 torpedo bomber and rebuilt it from the ground up.

The result was the Douglas World Cruiser - a biplane with an open cockpit, powered by a 12-cylinder Liberty engine producing 400 horsepower, with a top speed of approximately 100 knots. It was not fast. It was not elegant. It was engineered for one thing: surviving whatever the planet threw at it.

The most important design feature was interchangeable landing gear. Floats could be swapped for wheeled gear, and wheeled gear for floats, in a matter of hours. That single feature meant the airplane could operate from a lake in Japan, a desert strip in Iraq, or a harbor in Greenland - whatever surface the next stop required.

Douglas built five aircraft. Four for the mission. One held in reserve.

The Eight Men and Four Aircraft

Each aircraft carried two men: a pilot and a mechanic. These were not passenger roles. The mechanics kept the engines alive, often working through the night at remote stops with improvised tools.

Aircraft 1 - Seattle

Pilot: Major Frederick Martin (commanding officer)
Mechanic: Sergeant Alva Harvey

Aircraft 2 - Chicago

Pilot: Lieutenant Lowell Smith
Mechanic: Lieutenant Leslie Arnold

Aircraft 3 - Boston

Pilot: Lieutenant Leigh Wade
Mechanic: Sergeant Henry Ogden

Aircraft 4 - New Orleans

Pilot: Lieutenant Erik Nelson
Mechanic: Lieutenant John Harding

The Route: Westbound Around the Globe

The planned route was westbound from Seattle - northwest through Alaska, out the Aleutian island chain, across to Japan, south through China and Southeast Asia, west through India, across the Middle East, north through Europe, then across the North Atlantic via Iceland and Greenland, and south along the eastern coast of North America back to Seattle.

Before a single engine turned over, the Army had spent months positioning the mission. Supply ships were stationed across the Pacific. Spare engines had been pre-shipped to key depots along the route, because everyone involved understood the Liberty engine would not survive the circumnavigation without being replaced - likely more than once. Entire powerplants would be swapped at stops, not repaired. The diplomatic work alone, securing landing rights across dozens of countries, took the better part of a year.

The logistical operation behind this flight involved hundreds of people working before April 6, 1924, when the four aircraft lifted off from Lake Washington.

Alaska: The First Crisis

Aleutian weather in April is not marginal VFR. It is fog that sits on the water for days, williwaws off the mountains with no warning, horizontal rain, and a coastline that demands full attention at all times. The advance parties had been there. They knew.

On April 30, Major Frederick Martin was flying low along the Alaskan coast near Port Moller, trying to stay beneath a ceiling that was closing down on him.

The Seattle flew into a mountainside in the fog.

Both Martin and Harvey survived and walked out of the wilderness after several days. By any standard, that was a miracle. But the aircraft was destroyed, the commanding officer was out of the mission, and the remaining three crews were less than 500 miles into a 27,000-mile journey.

They held at a fuel stop in the Aleutians and made the decision: they were going forward. Lieutenant Lowell Smith, in the Chicago, assumed command.

The Pacific: No Alternate, No Abort

The legs across the Aleutian chain and into Japan required flying across open water in late-spring Pacific weather - low ceilings, visibility measured in hundreds of yards, and wave tops close enough to count from the cockpit. There was no alternate airport. Forward was the only option that didn’t end in the water.

The arrival in Japan in early May was the first moment the crews understood how widely the world was watching. The Japanese government had sent ships to escort them into harbor. Crowds had gathered at the waterfront. These men had been grinding through Alaskan fog and North Pacific weather for weeks, and they pulled up to a dock in Tokyo to find a national reception.

Asia, India, the Middle East: Grinding Through the Map

China brought heat, dust, and mechanical problems that required improvised repairs at strips that barely qualified as airfields. The mechanics worked constantly, wrench by wrench, keeping the Liberty engines running.

The Indian subcontinent brought monsoon conditions - heavy rain and tropical heat, a combination poorly suited to open-cockpit biplanes and the men in them. Wade’s Boston required attention after nearly every leg through the subcontinent.

Iraq in summer will teach you things about heat that no simulator prepares you for. The airfields baked under temperatures that pushed the limits of what those engines could tolerate.

Europe: The Story Goes International

By the time the three aircraft reached France, this had become an international event. Paris gave them a reception the crews described as genuinely overwhelming. London was the same. Newspapers across Europe were covering every leg. Three open-cockpit biplanes had crossed Asia - people grasped what that meant when they looked at a globe.

The North Atlantic: Wade Goes Down

The final major obstacle was the North Atlantic crossing via Iceland and Greenland. Somewhere over the open ocean, Wade’s Boston developed an oil leak. The engine was going to fail. Wade put the aircraft down on the water, roughly 500 miles from land. He and Ogden climbed out onto the floats and waited.

A Navy destroyer pulled them out. Both men survived. The Boston was damaged in the recovery and eventually had to be abandoned.

Two aircraft remained in the formation.

Except the Army had kept the fifth World Cruiser - the reserve aircraft - at a depot in Pictou, Nova Scotia. They had named it Boston Two. Two days after being rescued from the North Atlantic, Leigh Wade and Henry Ogden climbed into Boston Two and rejoined the formation at Pictou.

Three aircraft would finish what four had started.

September 28, 1924: They Come Home

The final legs down the eastern seaboard were not a victory lap. The crews were still watching the weather, still monitoring oil pressure, still listening to the engine note. You don’t ease up on the last leg.

September 28, 1924. One hundred seventy-five days after departure. The Chicago, the New Orleans, and the Boston Two touched down on Lake Washington.

The summary: 363 hours and 7 minutes of flight time. 72 stops. 28 countries. Multiple engine replacements. One aircraft into an Alaskan mountain. One down in the North Atlantic. Three across the finish line.

For the first time in human history, aircraft had circled the globe.

Why This Flight Has Been Largely Forgotten

The reception was enormous. Ticker-tape parades in Seattle, New York, and Washington. The kind of national attention that moves through a country and then fades - which is exactly what happened, because three years later a mail pilot from Minnesota flew solo from Roosevelt Field to Le Bourget and reshaped how Americans thought about aviation achievement.

That’s not a criticism of Lindbergh. His flight was genuinely historic and the public response was earned. But it crowded out the memory of eight Army men who had already done something that had never been done before.

Where the Aircraft Are Today

Two of the original four Douglas World Cruisers survive.

The Chicago - Lowell Smith’s aircraft, the one that assumed the lead when the Seattle went down and never relinquished it - is in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It doesn’t look dramatic. It looks like exactly what it is: a tough, practical biplane built to do a job that no one had ever done before.

The New Orleans is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

The Douglas Aircraft Company After 1924

The Douglas Aircraft Company’s first real test of what it could build was this mission. It passed. The company went on to produce the DC-3, the DC-6, the C-47 Skytrain, the Skyraider, and some of the most consequential aircraft in American aviation history. None of that trajectory exists without the World Cruiser completing the job.

Key Takeaways

On April 6, 1924, four Douglas World Cruisers departed Seattle on the first attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air; three completed the journey on September 28, 1924
The flight covered 27,553 miles in 363 hours and 7 minutes over 175 days, crossing 28 countries at 72 stops
The Douglas World Cruiser’s interchangeable float/wheel landing gear was a deliberate engineering choice that made the mission possible
The Army’s logistical preparation - pre-positioned engines, supply ships, fuel depots across multiple continents - involved hundreds of people working for nearly a year before departure
The Chicago is at the National Air and Space Museum; the New Orleans is at the California Science Center - the only two survivors of the original four aircraft