page_title: First aerial circumnavigation
section_title: Team circumnavigation
hierarchical_section_title: First aerial circumnavigation / Team circumnavigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Coolidge inspecting world flight plane at Bowling [i.e., Bolling] Field, [Washington, D.C.], 9/9/24
context_page_description: The first aerial circumnavigation of the world was completed in 1924 by four aviators from an eight-man team of the United States Army Air Service, the precursor of the United States Air Force. The 175-day journey covered over 26,345 miles. The team generally traveled east to west, around the northern-Pacific Rim, through to South Asia and Europe and back to the United States. Airmen Lowell H. Smith and Leslie P. Arnold, and Erik H. Nelson and John Harding Jr. made the trip in two single-engined open-cockpit Douglas World Cruisers configured as floatplanes for most of the journey. Four more flyers in two additional DWC began the journey but their aircraft crashed or were forced down. All airmen survived.
  In 1930, Australian Charles Kingsford Smith with a team of three others completed the first circumnavigation of the world by flight traversing both hemispheres, including the first trans-Pacific flight, from the US to Australia, in 1928. Kingsford Smith flew a Fokker F.VIIb/3m trimotor monoplane.
context_section_description: Four aircraft, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and New Orleans, left Clover Field, Santa Monica, California, on 17 March 1924, for Sand Point in Seattle, Washington, the official start of the journey. The individual aircraft were formally christened with waters from their namesake cities, prior to departure from Seattle where Boeing Company technicians configured the aircraft for the long over-water portion of the flight, by exchanging wheels for pontoon floats.
  On 6 April 1924, just 13 days after the British, under Stuart-MacLaren, set off from England in the opposite direction, they left Seattle for Alaska. Shortly after departing Prince Rupert Island on 15 April, the lead aircraft Seattle, flown by Martin with Harvey (the only fully qualified mechanic in the flight), blew a three-inch hole in its crankcase and was forced to land on Portage Bay. A replacement engine having been provided, the crew resumed their journey on 25 April, in an attempt to catch up with the other three aircraft awaiting in Dutch Harbor but which ended in failure on 30 April when the Seattle crashed in dense fog into a mountainside near Port Moller on the Alaska Peninsula.  It was destroyed in the crash.  The crew survived six harrowing days in the elements before finding shelter in an unoccupied cabin on Moller Bay and made the cannery four days later.
  The three remaining aircraft continued, with Chicago, flown by Smith and Arnold, assuming the lead.  Tracing the Aleutian Islands, the flight traveled across the North Pacific, landing in the Soviet Union notwithstanding the lack of entry permission.  The Aleuts of Atka applied the term "thunder-bird" from their mythology to the Cruisers. 
  On 25 May, whilst in Tokyo, the team received a cable reporting "MacLaren crashed at Akyab.  Plane completely wrecked.  Continuance of flight doubtful."  They responded by arranging delivery of a spare plane from Tokyo to Akyab (Sittwe) on the USS John Paul Jones, transshipped in Hong Kong onto the USS William B Preston, enabling the British to continue in their attempt to be first, as the Portuguese and Argentinians also pressed on.
  The aircraft continued relatively uneventfully via Korea and down the coast of China to French Indochina (now Vietnam).
  After leaving Haiphong in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Chicago's engine broke a connecting rod and it was forced to land in a lagoon near Huế. The aircraft was considered a novelty in this region of the world and missionary priests supplied the pilots with food and wine while locals climbed aboard its pontoons. The other flyers, who had continued on to Tourane (Da Nang), searched for the Chicago by boat and found the crew sitting on the wing in the early morning hours. Three paddle-powered sampans with local crews towed the aircraft for 10 hours, and 25 miles (40 km), to Huế, where the engine was replaced with a spare urgently shipped up from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City):  "[T]he fastest – and undoubtedly the first – engine change that had ever been made in Indochina." 
  The flight continued through Thailand and on to Burma where they came within earshot of MacLaren during a torrential downpour east of Akyab, MacLaren having just resumed his attempt in the aircraft delivered by the Americans and sheltering on the surface at the time.  Visual contact was not made and the Americans were unaware of their proximity to MacLaren.
  After carrying out the major operation of exchanging the Cruisers' floats for wheeled undercarriage at Calcutta, misfortune struck the Chicago crew on the evening of 29 June when Smith, in the dark after dinner, slipped and broke a rib.  He nevertheless insisted on continuing without delaying the mission.  All three aircraft were fitted with new engines in Karachi, the New Orleans having suffered a catastrophic engine failure just short of that city and limped in on intermittent power.
  They then proceeded into the Middle East and then Europe.
  The flight arrived in Paris on Bastille Day, 14 July. From Paris the aircraft flew to London and on to the north of England in order to prepare for the Atlantic Ocean cr
caption: U.S. President Calvin Coolidge inspected the planes when they landed in Washington DC toward the end of the tour in September 1924
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