March 17, 1924, marked a St. Patrick’s Day to remember for the Scottish Douglas clan of Southern California.
While recovering from the illness that had barred him from attending the events surrounding the impending departure of the Douglas World Cruisers, Donald Douglas surely smiled at least a little bit. For his ambition to grow the Douglas Aircraft Company by means of incredible feats of aviation history were about to take flight.
Robert Arnold, grandson of Douglas and Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, recalled his mother Barbara’s memory of her own grandmother’s recollection of the occasion. “Granny [Arnold came] up for some of these events from San Diego, and during one of them, Hap put her in the back seat of [one of] the World Cruiser[s] and took her up for a spin. And Granny was about 4 foot 10 inches and always wore big hats, and always a charming and, for her time, a highly educated woman.”
The Douglas World Cruisers lined up at Clover Field on the departure day, March 17, 1924. [Courtesy of the Santa Monica Public Library]
“Doug” watched the send off in a checkered cap and horn-rimmed glasses, striving to look the part of the nonchalant man-of-the-world he strove to be.
On the morning of the grand departure, the airplanes stood ready to go, but fog blanketed Clover Field. After a two-hour delay, three of Cruisers lifted off. It was 9:30 a.m., according to “Sky Master.”
What about the fourth? Lt. Nelson’s airplane, Ship Number Four, the New Orleans, sat in San Diego, only just completed the day before. Nelson made his way up the coast solo to join his compatriots in Seattle.
Of all the best laid plans, the launch of an around-the-world flight still ranks as a prodigious undertaking—and that’s in the modern era, with reliable aircraft, satellite imagery, and global weather sourcing. Any number of calamities grave and minor could conspire to scuttle the start of the epic journey proposed by the U.S. Army Air Corps for its quartet of Douglas World Cruisers.
Still, hope springs eternal—and certainly it did in the Roaring Twenties. March 16, 1924, was selected as the target, and the city of Santa Monica hosted its World Flight Day on that pleasant Sunday. With a high of 65 degrees F and no precipitation, it would have made a perfect day to take off from Clover Field for points north but for one thing.
The entire Douglas family—at the time, Donald, Charlotte, Donald Jr (born in 1917), William (1918), and Barbara Jean (1922)—fell ill to whooping cough and missed the festivities. The family would catch up to the mighty DWCs as they were prepped to go in Washington state a couple of weeks later.
And who would fly these ships of wood and metal and fabric around the world? Each one would carry a pilot and a technician—one to fly and one to keep it flying—and the roster represented what the Air Corps considered to be its top ranking pilots, as well as ones capable of the mission ahead.
In Ship Number One: Major F.L. Martin, commander of the World Flight and Commandant of Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois; and Staff Sergeant A.L. Harvey, mechanic.
In Ship Number Two: Lt. Lowell Smith, a transcontinental ace and holder of the world’s endurance record at the time; and Technical Sergeant A,H. Turner, technician.
In Ship Number Three: Lt. Leigh Wade, former test pilot at McCook Field; and Staff Sergeant A.H. Ogden from the First Pursuit Group in Detroit.
In Ship Number Four: Lt. Erik Nelson, engineering officer for the World Flight; and Lt. John Harding Jr., maintenance officer.
Alternate crew members were there as well: pilots Lt. Leslie P. Arnold, and Lt. LeClair Schulze, a Pulitzer racer in 1922.
As the pilots assembled for the flight, they were supposed to bunk at the posh hotels in Santa Monica, but none would give the DWC crews special rates. I suppose pilots were cheap even back then… fortunately, the Christie Hotel in Hollywood stepped up to the plate.
From “Sky Master”: “Although an excellent hotel, the Christie wasn’t among the blue-blood establishments. The offer was accepted. When the flyers returned as heroes to Santa Monica after encircling the world, the managers of the luxury hotels begged the men to be their guests without any charge. The flyers thanked them, smiled, and returned to the Christie.”
If you pick your way along the paths that front the ocean between Malibu and the Santa Monica Pier, you’d best stay heads up from your phone, lest you get creamed by slender blondes and bronzed others ricocheting past on a run.
That’s not the Santa Monica that Donald Douglas knew—nearly a century has passed since he first walked down to the shoreline from his new house on San Vicente Boulevard in the early Thirties.
The Brown Derby chain opened in the 1920s nearby, with locations on Wilshire Boulevard and in Hollywood. Ballast bobs from the SS Catalina given away as souvenirs in 1923.
What would you have seen, though? I follow a couple of historical accounts on X/Twitter, including Pamela Grayson’s Lost Los Angeles, and the Santa Monica History Museum. Recently they’ve published a few photos from late 1923 into 1924… take a look at the pier that was—and the fire that nearly wiped out the Ocean Park Pier.
The Ocean Park Pier property was acquired just two weeks after the fire for $2 million in 1924 dollars.Aftermath from the February 1924 fire that wrecked the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica.The ruins of the roller coaster at the Ocean Park Pier in Santa Monica after the 1924 fire.During the 1924 fire, smoke covered the streets near the ocean in Santa Monica.
This is the scene within which the Douglas Aircraft Company finished assembly and test flying of its Douglas World Cruisers ahead of their planned launch from Clover Field (now KSMO) on March 16.
While testing on the aircraft took place throughout the spring of 1924, the U.S. Army Air Corps took official delivery of the last of the five units of the Douglas World Cruiser on March 11.
Testing on the prototype took place at McCook Field, in Dayton, Ohio, with trials on the floats in Hampton, Virginia, and again in San Diego, California. The DWC featured the 400-horsepower Liberty V-12 engine—a proven mount that the Air Corps already knew well from its use in a variety of airplane during the Great War—and it could cruise at 100 mph. According to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, 20,748 of the Liberty engines were built by auto manufacturers, including Ford, Packard, Buick, Lincoln, and Marmon for aviation use.
The Liberty A model V-12 engine, in the collection of the National Air & Space Museum. [Credit: Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum]
One of my most cherished books is an original edition of “Sky Master: The Story of Donald Douglas,” signed by Douglas himself. From those pages, I quote the specifications of the DWCs, from a DAC report.
“The fuselage is made in three detachable sections and is constructed of steel tubing. Wings are of the standard wood box beam and built-in rib construction. The wings may be folded back for convenience in storage. The water-type landing gear consists of twin pontoons of built-up wood construction, the top covering being of three-ply veneer, and the bottom planking being two plies of mahogany.
“The specifications of the World Cruiser are as follows: Weight, empty, as a seaplane, 5,500 pounds; disposable load, 2,615 pounds; gross weight, 8,000 pounds; as a landplane, weight, empty, 4,300 pounds; disposable load, 2,615 pounds; gross weight, 6,915. Gasoline capacity, 450 gallons [up from 155 gallons in the DT-2], or enough for eighteen hours of non-stop flight. Wing span, both upper and lower, 50 feet; height 13 feet seven inches; length, 35 feet six inches…”
The race to circle the globe has its roots in the first flight made by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk—though it took nearly 20 years for the technology of aviation to advance to the point where such a concept became feasible.
Donald Douglas, in fact, made his first stab at the design that would inform the successful round-the-world model back in 1915, in collaboration with Boston millionaire Porter Hartwell Adams. A couple of years later, Douglas would develop another variation, the Model S seaplane, for the Glenn Martin Company.
In 1920, under the first iteration of the company that would become DAC, the Davis-Douglas Aircraft Company, Douglas’ team of engineers built the Cloudster. The Army Air Corps took a shine to the land-based sportplane its initial prospectus to Douglas, now on his own, in 1923—but he already had a better answer: the DT series.
The Douglas DT-2 on land gear served as a torpedo bomber for the U.S. Navy, and it could also fly on floats. [Credit: Naval History and Heritage Command]
Having sold several to the Navy, Douglas felt the DT-2 was a mature product ready for a new expression. He submitted the design with a handful of proposals for round-the-world requirements. The brass back in D.C. loved the idea, and dropped other manufacturers from the competition, which had included the Fokker T-2.
When I traced the history of Donald Douglas in researching “Honest Vision: The Donald Douglas Story,” one intriguing event in his life took place during a trip he made with his family to England, Scotland, and around Europe in May 1935. The impetus for the trip? An invitation to deliver the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture in London.
To track down the details of that event, I contacted the librarian for the Royal Aeronautical Society in Farnborough, England. Brian Riddle paid careful attention to my request, and I was able to go a step further and visit their archives on a research trip to the UK in 2014. Excerpts from the lecture, and its publication in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in November 1935, warranted inclusion in the book–and with the permission of the Society, of course.
Mr. Riddle and I have stayed in touch on a couple of other research questions–and he also asked, after the book’s publication, if we would mind sending a copy for review. Not only is that review forthcoming in the new RAeS magazine, Aerospace, but “Honest Vision” has now joined the stacks within the library itself.
Honestly, I could not think of a more fitting place for this labor of love to reside. Thank you to the Royal Aeronautical Society, and to Mr. Riddle, for your enthusiasm to preserve the story of Donald Douglas.
The champion rarely needs further proof of success, in the hearts of public opinion. And when you’re trying to entice a reticent audience to take a risk, that proof may be the special catalyst you need.
For more than 100 years, innovators in aviation have recognized that the key to their economic viability usually lies in gaining public acceptance—and there are few more visible ways to achieve that than winning a race, or setting a new record.
When I recall the races to win various speed prizes back in the early days of commercial air transport, I see the parallels to today’s efforts to demonstrate the concepts going into electric aircraft. Case in point: Rolls-Royce building an all-electric aircraft with the intent to move the bar past 300 mph.1 The project, part of Accelerating the Electrification of Flight—or ACCEL—shows that even a world leader in the industry can’t just toil away in isolation. A prize, and the publicity that goes with it, will be needed to catalyze acceptance. With the barriers that we must still surmount in making electric-powered aircraft the standard, having the public behind it is critical.
In 1935, Douglas Aircraft Company met a similar challenge. With its DC-1 and DC-2 flying, it faced intense competition from European manufacturers—and a still-reticent public not yet sold on the idea of transcontinental flight. The U.S.-based National Aeronautical Association (NAA) wished to recapture a raft of speed records and prove the value of American aircraft manufacturing. So TWA, who had purchased the original DC-1, loaned it in pursuit of gaining back the advantage.
“The first record-breaking attempt launched from Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island, New York, at 7 a.m. on the morning of May 16, 1935. Loaded with extra weight (to meet international class criteria), the DC-1 took off with a run of 30 seconds and headed south at 10,000 feet. For an entire day, [TWA’s experimental test pilot Tommy] Tomlinson and co-pilot Bartles flew a triangular course between New York, Washington, D.C., and Norfolk, breaking a record roughly every three hours. When the clock ticked over 1:50 a.m. the next day, they had set a new record for the 5,000 km mark (nonstop) in 18 hours, 22 minutes, and 49 seconds, at an average speed of 169.03 mph.”2
The proposed electric aircraft from Rolls-Royce’s ACCEL intends to double that mark. Though attaining a pure speed won’t fully solve other critical elements of the problems faced (battery weight and life, among others), it will surely contribute to the public’s good perception of the concept. In hot pursuit of viable electric aircraft, success will breed future acceptance.
We’d traveled to Santa Monica on the day before, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the DC-3’s first flight. Because the weather on the actual day, December 17, 2010, threatened low clouds and rain, we planned to fly with a friend in Betsy’s Biscuit Bomber, a C-47 based in Paso Robles, on the afternoon of the 16th, from the Santa Monica Airport at 3:30 pm, to match the time that Carl Cover first took a Douglas Sleeper Transport to the skies in 1935.
But we had time to kill—a dangerous thing for a pilot crew—so I told my pals Dan and Matt that we’d drive down San Vicente Boulevard, so that we could see the house that Donald Douglas had designed and built, in 1927, for his family. Well, what we *could* see of it, hidden behind its long stucco walls.
We parked and walked along the sidewalk to the front gate, which had been braced with the Olde English style lamps that Doug favored. I peered through a crack…you couldn’t really see a thing from the road. “Should we see if anyone’s there?” said Dan. I hesitated. It never occured to me to ring the bell, to disturb whoever lived there. But it was early afternoon on a weekday—so in my mind, no one was likely to answer.
But someone did. And introducing himself as the house manager, the man asked what we wanted. Dan told him we were in town to celebrate the DC-3, that we knew the house as Doug’s own. And next thing we knew, the gate parted, opening onto a drive down which strolled Douglas, the kind estate manager, who offered to show us around.
I was stunned, not believing our luck. Jim Douglas, Doug’s son, had told me that he hadn’t seen inside the house since it was sold, following his parents’ divorce, in the mid 1950s.
We walked past the rose garden and around the back into the living room. The house was overjoyed with Christmas decorations, lending it a timeless, enchanted feeling. Douglas detailed the restoration work that the owner had completed—she was a native to the neighborhood, and most everything in the house was still original, as the only intermediate owner died without any money to remodel or fix things up.
He introduced us to the kitchen, the dining room, and the lounge, complete with its own pine-clad bar set into the wall. He showed us where the fallout shelter had been, and where Doug’s shop once stood—it was now an intimate movie theater, where once Doug had built models and tinkered with inventions with his children.
Finally, we stood in what had been Doug’s study, and I took in its somber, yet inviting warmth. I imagined his books lining the shelves—knowing that he kept special ones locked away in a hidden cupboard. I asked Douglas if he’d found it, and he smiled. Yes, and he showed us where it was—exactly where my eyes had been. It was the most logical place, but somehow, also, it made sense to me in a different way. I understood a little bit more that day about the man who led his company to create the DC-3.
He came home to his study each day during those years between 1932 and 1936, when the development of the Douglas Commercial line hit full stride, and came to a milestone with the entry into service of American’s first DST in 1936. Douglas had set out a leather-bound folder on the desk, with Doug’s initials (DWD) embossed in gilt on the front cover. Inside were a series of professional photos, shot dramatically in black and white—they were staged for an issue of Architectural Digest that neither Douglas nor I have been able to locate. These were used to help the owner restore the home to its period state.
But more so than that, they confirmed that where we stood resembled very closely the home in which Doug lived while the DC-3 came to life in the factory over in Santa Monica’s Clover Field municipal airport. I breathed in every bit of those rooms that I could, knowing that someday I would write more about this intriguing man’s life.
That was eight years ago, of course. So this year, I’m proud to wish a Happy 83rd Birthday to the DC-3, and raise a toast to 2018 during which that biography, “Honest Vision: The Donald Douglas Story,” came to life.
The Douglas C-47 Miss Virginia at Oshkosh 2018. Photo by Stephen Yeates.
