A community group is making plans to celebrate the centennial of a 1924 Seattle event that some consider to be second only to the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kittyhawk in the history of aviation.
A community group is making plans to celebrate the centennial of a
At Sand Point – which had been home to an airfield since around 1920 – the World Cruisers were outfitted with wooden pontoons by employees of the young Boeing Company. These would make it easier to land on water in remote areas between here and Japan, as the flyers traveled north through Canada, west across Alaska Territory, and then out along the Aleutians before making the hop to Asia. In 1924, airstrips were few and far between – while lakes, rivers and harbors were in great supply.
Sparks considers the 1924 flight nothing short of a logistical masterpiece: flying more than 26,000 miles in a total of about 363 hours in the air in a period of 175 days. To keep the motors running and get the fuel and other supplies to be in the right place at the right time in what were often very remote parts of the world required not only American military might and equipment but also the largesse of what’s now ExxonMobil – who donated all the fuel.
“It was wild,” Elisa Law told KIRO Newsradio. “These flyers were descended upon by gaggles of women having pieces of their uniforms cut off with penknives – the seat of their pants, their buttons, locks of their hair. People were coinciding their marriages with the landing of the first world flight, they were naming their children after the flyers.
“There were eight flyers, four of which made it all the way around, officially,” Law continued. “And because there were so many people involved, my theory is that it gets harder to stick in your memory when it’s more than just one intrepid person.” One thing that makes marking the 1924 history somewhat challenging – even doing something as simple designing a map for a walking tour to tell the story of the World Cruisers – is how radically altered the landscape is at Magnuson Park and on the grounds of the adjoining National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility.
“It’s a corrugated metal roof and just a plain cinder block [structure] from what I can see,” Corbin said, pointing through the fence that lines the eastern edge of parking area in the northernmost section of Magnuson Park. “The only problem is, it looks like it’s oriented north-south, whereas the original hangar was east-west.”