Customer Reviews

Around the World in 175 Days: The First Round-the-World Flight

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I just finished reading USAF Col. (ret.) Carroll Glines's excellent book about the U.S. Army Air Service's round-the-world flight in 1924 (the first circumnavigation of the Earth by airplane), and just couldn't put it down until I had finished it. It's strange the degree to which that accomplishment - certainly on par with, or greater than, Charles Lindbergh's 1927 transatlantic solo flight - has been virtually erased from our collective national consciousness; I've never even seen a documentary about it - much less a Hollywood movie. (The U.S. Postal Service even declined to issue a stamp commemorating the flight's 50th anniversary in 1974!) Anyway, four pilot-mechanic teams started out from Seattle in early April, 1924 in four specially-built Douglas DT-2 torpedo-bomber open-cockpit biplanes, modified to strengthen their fuselages and wings and carry more fuel. Two of them (the "Chicago" and "New Orleans") made it all the way around - it took 175 days. Their story, of braving the freezing Aleutians, Bering Sea, Iceland, and Greenland (again, in open-cockpit, fabric-covered biplanes - without radios or lights!), as well as the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia and the burning deserts of the Middle East, is quite an engrossing read. One of the aircraft is now in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum ; I think the other is in a museum in California. I highly recommend this book, without reservation. Here's a Wikipedia article about the 1924 flight: