Once they had reached Pratt, Kan., they deliberately left the railroad and followed a compass course. Macready planned to double-check his course when he crossed over the lights of a small town. This proved to be more difficult than anticipated. He later said, “The people of Kansas and Missouri apparently retire early and no lights appear after ten or eleven o’clock.” Adding to their problems, Macready said, “was a crosswind approaching the proportions of a gale, causing considerable drift.”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Aviation History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Macready continued on toward the Missouri River. At the Kansas­Missouri border, Kelly took over the controls, and after they passed St. Louis, they saw the sun rising ahead of them. Both pilots thought that practically all the troubles of the long trip were over.

About 400 miles into the flight, the pilots had discovered a cracked cylinder jacket. But the engine was not yet losing cooling water, so the problem was not considered serious and they continued on. As Kelly passed over Terre Haute, Ind., however, he sent a message to Macready in the cabin of the plane, telling him to plan for an emergency landing. The cracked cylinder jacket had worsened, affecting some of the other cylinder jackets, and they were rapidly losing coolant. Macready took over the controls and immediately found that “water was shooting from both sides of the engine in small streams.”

About 50 miles from Indianapolis, Ind., Macready noticed that the water temperature was rising and prepared to land. Meanwhile, in the cabin of the plane, Kelly was pouring coffee, broth and any other liquid he could find into the water tank. This lowered the water temperature enough to allow the stricken T-2 to continue on to the Indianapolis Speedway, where they intended to land.

The pilots landed in the center of the field–then immediately jumped from the plane “in order to avoid the danger of fire which seemed probable, as a dense cloud of white smoke was pouring from the engine,” as they later recalled.

The airplane did not catch fire. Had they continued on any farther, however, or if they had needed to fly around the field one more time, the plane probably would not have made it. The pilots were safe due to their incredible skill, sound judgment and quick thinking. They certainly knew their exact limits, as well as the plane’s.

“When Kelly and I stepped out of the T-2 in Indianapolis,” Macready later wrote in National Geographic magazine, “we did not do much talking about transcontinental non-stop flights. We were through. Any man who was foolish enough to want our job was welcome to it. Never, never again for us! Neither one said much, but we did a lot of thinking, and decided in our own minds that transcontinental non-stop flights were good things to keep away from. We were entirely willing for someone to take our place. We wanted to forget it.”

The pilots did not know just how lucky they were to have made it through the night until they read the newspaper the next day. The storms they had flown through the previous night included a tornado that had left 12 dead and 80 injured.

After a few days of rest in Dayton, Ohio, Kelly put a map of the United States up on the wall. Without much discussion or ceremony, he and Macready were soon planning another attempt at a nonstop, transcontinental flight.

The pilots re-evaluated their previous plans. If they flew from east to west, they reckoned, they could immediately throttle back after takeoff and stay at lower altitudes until they reached the western mountains. By this time, they would have burned enough fuel to allow an easy climb over the mountains. In discussions with the Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., the pilots learned that during the last two weeks in April, there was usually a shift in the continental weather pattern, producing two or three strong, east-to-west wind currents that they could utilize.

Once again the T-2 was prepared for a nonstop transcontinental flight, this time in the spring of 1923. While setting an official endurance record, Kelly and Macready missed two periods of favorable winds. Still optimists, they flew to New York and hoped for one more good wind.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to