Halliburton tried to negotiate a deal so that he could get the use of an airplane from a manufacturer in return for publicity. Shell Oil Company agreed to let him sign for fuel abroad and cancel the debt when — or if — he returned. A private party offered him a grand big Stearman plane with a 500-hp motor. But he turned it down because, as he said, it burns 30 gallons of gas an hour and gas abroad costs 75 cents, and because the owner insisted his own pilot fly it. Halliburton’s wealthy cousin Erle owned a modern, twin-engine all-metal Lockheed Vega, but the writer told his parents that Stephens doesn’t want to go in anything but an open Stearman, thinks the Lockheed too big.

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Stephens found a silver Stearman C-3B, a fabric-covered, open dual-cockpit biplane, at Burbank airport in November. Its sole navigation device was a magnetic compass, and it was not equipped with a radio, but — as Halliburton reassured his parents — its 225-hp Curtiss J-5 engine was the same engine that [Charles] Lindbergh used to fly the Atlantic. Stephens had the plane reconditioned, and Halliburton had the fuselage repainted scarlet, with its name picked out in gold over a black stripe: The Flying Carpet.

They flew to New York in January 1931, crated the plane as deck cargo and sailed for England on the White Star Line’s Majestic. During their flight from England to the Continent, Halliburton noted that the Stearman’s aileron pushrods, which had always vibrated more than they should, began to oscillate dangerously The two men waited three frustrating weeks in Paris until a visiting Wright expert found that the riggers in Burbank had installed the pushrods upside down. The problem was corrected in minutes.

In French Morocco, Stephens flew Halliburton over much of the country so the writer could collect material for an article on the French Foreign Legion. The young pilot also found time to fly in Morocco’s first-ever airshow, held at Fez, competing with Michel Detroyat, the leading French aerobatic pilot. He later performed in Algeria’s first airshow along with Rene Fonck, top Allied ace of World War I.

Halliburton became obsessed with flying to Timbuktu. The historic but decaying slave-trading center lay 1,300 miles away across the desert from the Foreign Legion post at Colomb Bechar, on the northern edge of the Sahara, then 300 miles farther up the Niger River from the outpost of Gao. The Stearman could carry fuel for 540 miles at the most. The French army allowed them to refuel from dumps left at 400-mile intervals along a faint caravan track to Gao.

Moye’s eyes and mine were fixed desperately on [the track], Halliburton wrote of that flight. At 500 feet [the dump] looked like any one of a thousand rocks, but Moye saw it. The heat and sun were incredible. The horizon was a straight line. What with head winds and filling our gas tank by hand in the blistering sun, we could not make our destination and had to come down and sleep on the desert…. We slept on our parachutes and almost froze, whereas four hours before to breathe had burned the lungs. They spent three days at Gao cleaning sand out of the engine, then flew on to Timbuktu.

The pair flew back to Paris in June for an engine overhaul. There, Halliburton learned that the Russians had denied him permission to fly through Soviet Central Asia. Rather than give up, he and Stephens decided to fly through the Holy Land, Iraq and Persia (Iran) to India, thence to the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. Technical services would be available only in Cairo and Manila.

On occasion, Halliburton expressed a wish that The Flying Carpet could be used to rescue a damsel in distress. Stephens had flown to Bushire, on the Persian Gulf, and was waiting for Halliburton to come overland when a young woman in a leather flying outfit burst into his hotel dining room and addressed him in French and English. She was Elly Beinhorn — known as Germany’s Amelia Earhart — and she was attempting a Berlin-to-Sydney solo flight. Her distress was that the engine of her small Klemm K1.25 monoplane had quit 60 miles north of Bushire, forcing her to hitch a ride to town on a rickety truck. Stephens flew her to her plane the next day and traced the trouble to a sand-clogged fuel jet, much to the chagrin of the resolutely self-sufficient aviatrix.

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