By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Almost exactly a century ago, the engines of four modified Douglas DT-2 torpedo bombers roared to life in Crescent Bay as their crews wound up their brief stay in Sitka and continued northward on their quest to fly around the world.
The open cockpit biplanes, each with a two-man crew, were in a race with fliers from France, Argentina, Portugal, Britain and Italy to make the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe.
The four U.S. Army Air Service seaplanes landed in Sitka on April 10, 1924, stayed here three and a half days as the fliers rested and waited out rough weather before carrying on, to their next stop in Seward.
After 175 days of travel and about 25,000 air miles later, two of the four planes would complete the mission, landing at their starting point in Seattle on September 28.
Though initially delayed by the Douglas company’s slow delivery of the aircraft and then by bad flying weather, the fliers set out on April 6 from their Lake Washington air base, that’s now a part of Seattle’s Magnuson Park.
The story of the historic flight is preserved by the Seattle nonprofit Friends of Magnuson Park.
“It was like, ‘Can we do this?’ and it was also that aviation in general was in its infancy and American military aviation was highly atrophied after World War I, and there wasn’t a lot of public space and interest in aviation, not on the whole,” Friends of Magnuson Park executive director Elisa Law told the Sentinel. “And so it was an important publicity stunt for aviation as a science to prove to the public in this big way that we have the technology and the fliers to go all around the world. This is the future; this is going to connect us all.”
While military aviation had taken off in the First World War, by the 1920s no fliers had circumnavigated the globe. Technology at the time was a far cry from the city-leveling bomber fleets of the Second World War or the transoceanic jetliners of the modern era. The aircraft that passed through Sitka a century ago were burdened with problems of reliability and safety.
The four Douglas bombers landed in Sitka on the second leg of their flight, from Prince Rupert, B.C. The aircrews recalled their awe of the Sitka landscape in “First World Flight,” a 1924 book in which travel writer Lowell Thomas quoted Lt. Leigh Wade, one of the pilots: “Sitka is perhaps the most picturesquely situated of the towns that we saw on our flight around the globe. A fringe of small islands covered with evergreen trees lies across the mouth of the harbor, and on the other three sides it is surrounded by precipitous snow-capped peaks.”
Flying under 100 miles per hour, the 300-mile flight from Prince Rupert to Sitka took the team slightly over four hours. In the interim, one plane nearly wrecked near Kuiu Island, but upon arrival in Sitka the fliers were greeted with a formal celebration. There was herring spawn so thick on beaches the fliers first thought it was snow.
“As we grounded, an Indian band (the author is unclear as to the precise nature of the band) played martial airs,” one of the fliers said in Thomas’ book. “Officials of Sitka and representatives of the Governor of Alaska bade us welcome to the Far North and led us to a quaint little hotel. Imagine our surprise when we stepped into our rooms and found them full of huge bouquets of gladioli from the garden of an experimental station of the United States Department of Agriculture. More than ever, we seemed to have flown out of the fog into fairyland.”
The hotel was the Bayview, which stood on the site of today’s Bayview Building.
News of the fliers’ arrival in Sitka was widely reported in territorial newspapers, with stories in the Nome Nugget, the Alaska Daily Empire in Juneau, and the McGrath Kusko Times, among others.
Though the aircrews found the town charming, and appreciated the hospitality of the people, rough weather typical of the outer coast swooped in on their second day in Sitka.
“For the first twenty-four hours everything about the place fascinated us. We were entranced with the scenery,” Thomas wrote, again citing Lt. Wade’s recollection. “We visited the Alaskan village with its totem poles. We were overwhelmed with hospitality by the resident American ladies and their daughters… Next day came disillusion. We had hoped to hop off for Seward at dawn. But when we awoke, a gale was blowing in from the sea, and with every hour it increased in violence until by noon it was blowing a hurricane.”
The storm struck Crescent Bay so hard that on April 11, as the Alaska Daily Empire reported at the time, two of the aircraft dragged anchor and began to drift. A timely warning from a Sitka resident and immediate rescue efforts by a U.S. Forest Service boat, Thomas wrote, prevented disaster, and a possible early end to the expedition. After the weather delay the fliers were in the air on their way to Seward on Sunday, April 13, arriving later that day, McGrath’s Kusko Times and the Seward Daily Gateway reported.
On May 10 one of the four planes crash landed near Port Moller, and the two men aboard made it to the small cannery town on foot, the First World Flight Centennial organization’s website states. Months later, while attempting to island hop back to the states across the North Atlantic via Ireland, Iceland and Greenland, another plane went down, again without fatalities.
In his book, Lowell Thomas called the eight fliers “Magellans of the Air.” Unlike 16th century navigator Ferdinand Magellan who died along with most of his crew during his circumnavigation, all eight of the 1924 fliers survived their adventure. In the opening line of his text, Thomas also likened the aviators to Hellenic heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey.
At Seattle’s Museum of Flight and at Sand Point airfield, celebrations will be held this coming September to commemorate the successful completion of the First World Flight.
“Our organization just promotes and interprets the history,” Law said. “And so one of the biggest moments in Sand Point history, obviously, is the beginning and ending of the first ever flight around the world.”
Other towns such as Santa Monica, California, also have claimed to be the start point of the flight, she noted, because of their history as the places where the aircraft were built.
While the four Douglas bombers fascinated Sitkans in 1924, their stop here was only the beginning of Sitka’s aviation history, which included its use as a U.S. naval air base in World War II.
