The banquet at the army tent camp at Laguna Salada, a dry lake used for aircraft testing, was over by 10 p.m., but the musical entertainment was just starting. So when General Abelardo Rodríguez abruptly ordered him to bed, Roberto Fierro Villalobos, the guest of honor, turned in reluctantly. Four hours later he was up and making a final walk-around of a high-wing monoplane with Baja California painted on its silver fabric-covered fuselage. Then, taking a last gulp of coffee and exchanging abrazos with fellow fliers and the general, also governor of Mexico’s territory of Baja California, he climbed into the open cockpit, checked the instruments and advanced the throttle. The 223-hp roar of a Wright J-5C Whirlwind shattered the nocturnal silence. Moving ponderously with its 1,750-pound load of gasoline, the plane–often referred to as BC-2–lumbered 750 meters across the salt flats, slowly gaining speed, then heaved itself aloft and disappeared into the starry black sky. General Rodríguez telegraphed Mexico City that Major P.A. (piloto aviador) Fierro had taken off from Mexicali at 2:05 a.m. PST, May 30, 1928, en route to Mexico City nonstop.

Subscribe Today

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

Fierro throttled the engine back to its 12-gallon-per-hour cruising power at altitude over the Colorado River delta. Then, over the Gulf of California, the engine began to cough. In the excitement of takeoff, Fierro had forgotten to switch from the reserve to the main fuel supply. He twisted the valves and desperately worked the emergency pump. When the engine was running smoothly once again, he mused, ‘The flight [was almost] over at the start, and as for me, most likely the sea would have swallowed me up.’

Using dead reckoning, Fierro followed the route Captain Emilio Carranza, his friendly rival, had blazed five days earlier. Carranza had flown from San Diego in México-Excelsior, a special Ryan B-1 Brougham like the one presented to Charles A. Lindbergh when he donated his Ryan NYP, Spirit of St. Louis, to the Smithsonian Institution. And in August, in a venture funded by Mexico City’s daily Excelsior through public subscription, Carranza would fly it nonstop to Washington, D.C., returning the courtesy of Lindbergh’s immensely popular Mexico City goodwill flight of December 1927. Since Carranza’s pioneering Mexico City-Ciudad Juárez nonstop flight in September, the Mexican and American press had been calling the modest 22-year-old great-nephew of Mexico’s first constitutional president ‘the Mexican Lindbergh.’

The sun rose in clear skies four hours into the flight, and Fierro spotted Guaymas off his port wing. Now he could easily follow the coast. Over Mazatlán three hours later, he turned a few degrees eastward and soon ran into thick cloud banks looming over the Sierra Madre Occidental. He put BC-2 into a steady climb and broke out into bright blue sky at 13,000 feet. He descended after dead reckoning past the solid cloud layer, and at 1:05 p.m. made out a familiar city in the distance, Guadalajara. ‘Once I glimpsed the ‘Pearl of the Occident,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ve made it!’ Guadalajara-to-Mexico City we know like the back of our hand.’

Crowds had been gathering all morning at Mexico City’s Balbuena Field, though Fierro’s arrival was announced for between 3 and 4 p.m. Around noon the wind picked up and dark clouds hid the horizon. Then came rain, and the spectators’ enclosure became a sea of umbrellas and car awnings. At 3:35 a telegraph operator 150 miles west reported that BC-2–which carried no radio–had just passed. Immediately an escort of seven Bristol F.2B fighters took off. At 3:55 Fierro was reported 100 miles out, and a procession of limousines arrived with civil and military aviation chiefs, the secretary of war and the president. President Plutarco Elías Calles addressed the crowd. As he finished, a cry of ‘Here he comes!’ went up. But only biplanes appeared–the escort returning, unable to find BC-2.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to