The Douglas World Cruisers and the Alaskan gauntlet on the first flight around the world

On April 6, 1924, four Douglas World Cruisers lifted off from Sand Point Airfield in Seattle, Washington, attempting what no one had ever done: fly around the entire world. 175 days and 27,550 miles later, two of the four aircraft returned to that same field, completing the first circumnavigation by air. But the mission was nearly lost before it ever left North America, in the brutal skies above Alaska.

Why Was the 1924 World Flight Attempted?

By 1923, the race to circle the globe by air had become an international contest. The British, French, and Portuguese had all tried or were planning attempts. The U.S. Army Air Service decided America would get there first, and they turned to a young aircraft company to build the machine that could do it.

Donald Douglas, just a few years into running the Douglas Aircraft Company out of Santa Monica, California, took his existing DT torpedo bomber and redesigned it from the ground up. The result was the Douglas World Cruiser, a biplane powered by a single Liberty L-12 engine producing 400 horsepower. Its defining feature was interchangeable landing gear — the crews could swap between wheeled undercarriages and pontoon floats depending on the terrain. That kind of modularity in 1924 was remarkable.

The Aircraft and Crews

Five World Cruisers were built. One served as a test prototype. The four mission aircraft were each named after an American city:

• Seattle — Major Frederick Martin (expedition commander) and Sgt. Alva Harvey
• Chicago — Lt. Lowell Smith and Lt. Leslie Arnold
• Boston — Lt. Leigh Wade and Lt. Henry Ogden
• New Orleans — Lt. Erik Nelson and Lt. John Harding

Each aircraft carried a pilot and a mechanic. They had no reliable radios, no weather instruments, and no navigation aids beyond paper charts, magnetic compasses, and visual reference. The planned route ran west through Alaska, across the Pacific via the Aleutian Islands and Japan, through Asia and Europe, over the Atlantic, and home — roughly 27,000 miles across 26 countries.

How Alaska Nearly Ended the Mission

The first major leg took the four cruisers north along British Columbia’s coast and into Alaska, where the expedition immediately collided with some of the worst flying conditions on Earth.

Alaska in April offered fog banks that materialized without warning, williwaw winds screaming down off mountains hard enough to flip boats, and temperatures hovering at freezing — meaning ice accumulation on wings, struts, and control cables. The crews flew low, sometimes just a few hundred feet above the water, because the mountains vanished into cloud and climbing meant flying blind.

Navigation meant following the coastline, a technique that sounds simple until you consider that the Alaskan coast is a maze of fjords, inlets, and peninsulas that look identical in poor visibility. The crews slept in fishing villages, canneries, or tents pitched on rocky beaches beside their aircraft. Mechanics spent hours in freezing temperatures changing spark plugs with numb fingers, draining water from fuel, and patching wind-torn fabric. The Liberty engines burned oil excessively and demanded constant maintenance.

Every water landing was a calculated risk. Setting a biplane down on open-ocean swells with no brakes meant judging wave height, wind direction, and current simultaneously — all in an aircraft that handled poorly in gusty conditions. Several landings nearly ended in disaster before the expedition even cleared Alaska.

The Loss of the Seattle

On April 30, 1924, the expedition suffered its first catastrophic setback. Major Martin, flying the Seattle through dense fog over the Alaska Peninsula, was searching for a mountain pass near Portage Bay when his aircraft struck a mountainside. The plane was destroyed. Both Martin and Harvey survived, but they spent ten days stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, eating wild game and sheltering against the wreckage before a rescue party reached them.

The expedition commander was out. Four aircraft became three, and the flight was barely a month old with the entire Pacific still ahead.

Pressing On: The Aleutians and Beyond

Lowell Smith assumed command from the Chicago, and the three remaining crews pushed west into the Aleutian Islands — where conditions were even worse. The chain stretches over 1,000 miles into the North Pacific, with fog dense enough to eliminate all visibility and winds of extraordinary force. The distances between islands meant an engine failure would put a crew into water cold enough to kill in minutes.

They made it, island by island, fuel cache by fuel cache, reaching Attu at the western end of the chain. From there they crossed to the Komandorski Islands in Russia, then on to Japan — one of the most dangerous overwater flights attempted to that point, in open-cockpit biplanes on floats with no meaningful survival equipment.

The journey continued through Japan, China, French Indochina, Burma, India, the Middle East, and Europe. Each region brought its own hazards: monsoon rains in Indochina turned landing areas into lakes, extreme heat in India caused engines to overheat on the ground. Over the North Atlantic, the Boston was forced down by engine failure. The crew was rescued by a passing ship, but the aircraft sank. Now two remained.

The Finish

The Chicago and New Orleans crossed the Atlantic, reaching Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador before flying south through Canada and back into the United States. On September 28, 1924, the two surviving Douglas World Cruisers landed at Sand Point Airfield in Seattle — exactly where they had started.

The final numbers: 27,550 miles. 363 hours of flight time. 57 stops. Two aircraft lost. Zero lives lost.

President Calvin Coolidge sent congratulations. The crews were promoted and decorated. But the mission was won not over the capitals of Europe or Asia. It was won in Alaska, in the freezing fog of late April, where exhausted men with numb hands nursed temperamental engines and set biplanes down on ocean swells by judgment alone.

Where to See the Douglas World Cruisers Today

The Chicago is on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The New Orleans is housed at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, California, near where Donald Douglas originally built it.

Key Takeaways

• The 1924 Douglas World Cruiser expedition completed the first-ever flight around the world in 175 days, covering 27,550 miles with no modern navigation or communication equipment.
• Alaska was the mission’s crucible — brutal weather, fog, icing, and treacherous water landings tested the crews before they even reached the Pacific.
• The interchangeable wheel-float landing gear was a critical engineering innovation that made the global route possible.
• Of four aircraft that departed, only two completed the journey, but all crew members survived.
• Primary source material on the flight can be found in Carroll Glines’ book Around the World in 175 Days and the Smithsonian’s archives on the World Flight.