The crowd of 10,000 that had assembled at Bay Farm Island across the bay from San Francisco watched intently on July 14, 1927, as a Travel Air 5000 high-winged monoplane dubbed City of Oakland warmed up on the runway at Oakland Airport, preparing for a transpacific flight attempt. Most of these spectators were aware that the flight pilots and their sponsors had already faced major problems getting City of Oakland into the air. As a result, there was a mood of skepticism about the upcoming flight.

Built in Wichita, Kan., the Travel Air was about to take off on its second attempt to fly to Honolulu. Its experienced pilot was 34-year-old Ernest L. Smith. His navigator was 29-year-old Emory Bronte, a merchant marine captain.

Smith, born in Reno, Nev., had moved with his family to San Francisco in time to experience the great earthquake of 1906. Later the Smiths moved to Oakland, where ‘Ernie’ graduated from high school and spent two years at the University of California at Berkeley. He then went on to dental training, which was interrupted by the U.S. entry into World War I. After serving briefly in the medical corps, Smith transferred to the new U.S. Army Air Service and learned to fly at Rockwell Field in San Diego. He spent the rest of the war as an instructor at March Field in Riverside, then joined the Army’s aviation reserve while flying for the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest. In 1926 he worked for Pacific Air Transport as a pilot.

Bronte, a native of New York, had gone to sea at age 15 before entering the Navy in World War I. After the war he joined Isthmian Steamship Company, working his way up from third mate to master. In 1923 he relocated to San Francisco to work for McCormick Steamship Company, after which he became the Pacific Coast representative of the Inland Waterways Corporation. Along the way he had authored a book on navigation, but government service had also whetted his interest in the law, a field he planned to study after the 1927 flight was over. He had taken flying lessons and had soloed in a Curtiss JN-4 ‘Jenny’ but had no actual pilot’s license.

After an abortive takeoff attempt–during which the Travel Air actually ground-looped according to some reports–Smith and Bronte became airborne at 10:39 and headed into foggy skies. Soon after they took off, their radio receiver went on the blink. (National Archives)

As the departure date neared in July 1927, each man had private concerns about the 26-hour flight they were preparing to undertake. Smith was elated about the trip ahead, but he was also apprehensive about the ability of the plane to fly 2,100 miles nonstop, since this Travel Air model had never faced such a challenge. He was also concerned about the negative publicity City of Oakland’s crew had already received. In the past two weeks, his sponsors had allowed their internal disagreements to be reported in the press, giving rise to speculation that the entire enterprise was disorganized and in danger of failing before he even got the plane into the air.

Bronte, too, was excited at the opportunity to serve as navigator on a pioneering transoceanic flight, but he was also a bit uneasy about why his predecessor, merchant mariner Charles R. Carter, had bowed out after the initial flight attempt on June 28. On that date the plane had been forced to turn back only a few minutes into the air. Carter’s decision not to go along on a second flight had given Bronte his chance for fame, but it had also created doubts about his and Smith’s chances of making it to the islands.

On June 28, 1927, City of Oakland had taken off along with the Fokker Trimotor Bird of Paradise, flown by U.S. Army Air Corps pilots. The two planes had been engaged in an informal head-to-head race to Honolulu. Unlike some other high-profile flights of 1927, this one offered no prize money. The winner would simply have the honor of being the first to have flown to Hawaii from the West Coast. A subtle distinction had to be made about the goal in the record books, since a 1925 effort by the U.S. Navy to fly to Honolulu had ended with the plane, a Naval Aircraft Factory PN-9 flying boat, running out of gas before it reached Hawaii’s shores. The crew had sailed and drifted the last 450 miles to the island of Kauai over a nine-day period.

The civilian fliers in the June 1927 flight had been the sentimental favorites with the general public in the weeks leading up to the contest, but the Army crewmen had experienced far less trouble with their flight preparations than had Smith and Carter. Local political and aviation officials had campaigned actively to prevent City of Oakland from making the flight. In contrast to many of the specially built planes then being used in transoceanic attempts — such as Charles A. Lindbergh’s Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis — the Travel Air had been in commercial service for two months for Pacific Air Transport, flying between Los Angeles and San Francisco. One pundit declared that flying the Pacific in such a used plane would be suicidal. From the standpoint of safety, however, the distinction was immaterial; the first plane ever to cross the Atlantic nonstop, a Vickers Vimy bomber, had entered service at the end of World War I before it went on to make history in 1919.

City of Oakland had been purchased from the airline by a group of sponsors headed by Anthony Parente, a rags-to-riches businessman from the North Beach district of San Francisco. Contracts were drawn up between these backers and the fliers — who also owned a share of the plane — providing for the distribution of any money earned with the plane, an indication that they anticipated a successful future for the aircraft. The project team had sometimes been indiscreet, however, allowing reporters to get wind of their arrangements and disagreements about various features of the contracts.The Travel Air had been re-engined and extensively rebuilt in San Francisco. During that time, the commandant of Crissy Field, the Army’s air base at San Francisco’s Presidio, had denied the use of the field to the civilian plane, insisting that only military aircraft could utilize the facility. In spite of this setback, the Army personnel had remained generally cooperative and helpful toward all those associated with City of Oakland.

Other difficulties surfaced as the takeoff date approached. Several critics claimed it was unsportsmanlike of the group sponsoring the Travel Air to attempt a flight to Hawaii prior to August 12, 1927, which had been announced as the beginning of the eligibility period for the Dole race to Honolulu, an upcoming competition sponsored by well-known pineapple magnate James D. Dole. The Army fliers were spared this type of criticism because the Dole race was limited to civilian aircraft only.

With Lindbergh’s successful 1927 flight across the Atlantic only six weeks past and the Dole race only six weeks away, the crews of the two planes had finally been given the OK to take off on their race. Although the contest was a major story for San Francisco newspapers, the fliers had to share billing with another aviation event: the Atlantic crossing of Commander Richard E. Byrd, a national hero.

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