One Summer: America, 1927

flight at Orly. Hinchliffe didn’t fare any better. He vanished at about the same time while trying to fly the Atlantic with a female companion.
     
    With the Atlantic conquered, attention turned to the Pacific – specifically, the 2,400 miles of challenging emptiness that lay between California and Hawaii. In the immediate aftermath of Lindbergh’s flight, James D. Dole, a Massachusetts native who had amassed a fortune growing and canning pineapples in Hawaii, announced a new challenge, to be called the Dole Pacific Race, with $35,000 in prize money. Dole’s event was to be a proper race, with competitors all taking off at the same time (or as nearly as possible) from the municipal airfield in Oakland, California. The race was scheduled for August, but was overtaken by events considerably before then. On 29 June, two Army flyers successfully flew in a Fokker from Oakland to Oahu in twenty-six hours. It was an extraordinary achievement – hitting Hawaii was a real feat of navigation – and the two pilots, Lt Lester J. Maitland and Lt Albert F. Hegenberger, deserve to be remembered, but unfortunately they weren’t even much noticed then because their success occurred at exactly the moment that Commander Byrd and his team were splashing down at Ver-sur-Mer. Two weeks after the Maitland– Hegenberger flight, two more pilots, Ernest Smith and Emory Bronte, also flew from Oakland to Hawaii – though only just. Virtually out of fuel, they crash-landed into a tree on Molokai, but somehow emerged unscathed. They had beaten Maitland and Hegenberger’s time by fourteen minutes. So by 16 August, when the Dole race got under way, the competitors had absolutely nothing to prove.
    Staging it as a race considerably heightened the dangers. It increased pressure on pilots to take off whether or not their aircraft were fully ready, and then to push those planes to their limits in order to beat others reasonably presumed to be doing likewise. A race – particularly a well-publicized race with a big prize – tended to attract flyers who were more eager than skilful. Hawaii was a tiny target in a vast ocean, and reaching it stretched even the most experienced pilots to the limits of their capabilities. The wholeenterprise was a recipe for catastrophe, and catastrophic it proved.
    Three competitors died in crashes before they even reached Oakland. Another plane crashed in the sea as it approached the Oakland airfield; the two occupants escaped without serious injury but their plane was lost. Another plane was not allowed to depart after it became clear that the pilot had no idea how much fuel he needed to reach Hawaii and didn’t have a fuel tank nearly big enough. It was obvious that several of the hopeful competitors were dangers to themselves.
    By the day of the race, the number of planes taking part had been reduced to eight, and four of those were scratched before takeoff or turned back soon after. Of the four planes that set off, two made it to Hawaii and two more were lost en route. One of those never seen again was a plane carrying a pretty 22-year-old schoolteacher from Flint, Michigan, named Mildred Doran, who was not a pilot but simply accompanying others to add glamour and interest for the press. When word got back that six people, including Miss Doran, were missing, a pilot named William Erwin took off from Oakland to look for them, but he disappeared, too. A great sea search – the greatest in history, it was claimed – was mounted, involving thirty-nine warships and nineteen civilian ships, but nothing was found. The Navy reported, a bit sourly, that it had burned 383,550 gallons of fuel looking for lost flyers. Altogether, ten people died in the Dole race. The whole thing was widely criticized. Byrd called it ‘hasty and ill-advised’, and many echoed his sentiments.
    Despite the disaster of the Dole race, people were suddenly announcing daring and risky flights all over the place. Paul Redfern, the son of the dean of Benedict’s College, a school for black students in Columbia, South Carolina, announced a plan to fly from Brunswick, Georgia, to Rio de Janeiro in a Stinson Detroiter aeroplane. Redfern was an unlikely hero. He had been crazy about planes all his life – so much so that he often wore an aviator’s goggled helmet even when on the ground and just going about his daily business – but his academic training was as a musician. Hisexperience as a pilot consisted of a couple of years of