By the time The Flying Carpet reached Calcutta, Stephens had begun to wonder how long their good luck would hold. Halliburton’s main objective in India was to fly as high as possible up Mount Everest. Following an airshow by Stephens and Fräulein Beinhorn for the maharaja of Nepal, the maharaja gave Stephens and Halliburton permission to attempt it. With the Stearman’s tachometer redlined, Stephens recalled, I nursed it up to 18,000 feet by getting some lift from up-slope drafts. When Everest loomed out of the cloud mass, the plane was barely 500 feet above the jagged ridges, nose-high and barely airborne. I was wishing the thing along, just on the edge of a stall, when all of a sudden Halliburton stood up in the rear cockpit with a camera! With the air resistance of his body, we lost speed and started down. Stephens batted Halliburton down in his seat and dived to regain flying speed. Fortunately I had just turned away from the ridge, the pilot said, and The Carpet pulled out with only a few feet to spare.

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Another Halliburton stunt almost marooned them in Pontianak, Dutch Borneo, where a crowd of natives had come to view the takeoff. Pontoons had been shipped ahead from Fairchild Industries and fitted to the Stearman in Singapore. Standing on one pontoon, Halliburton started to pull up the anchor as the plane taxied slowly over it. Then, while addressing the crowd, he carelessly let the anchor line get into the idling propeller. In a flash, the prop wound up the rope. The anchor whizzed past Halliburton’s head and bent the propeller.

The only technical support available was a mechanic who straightened motorboat props bent from running into submerged logs; but he measured and marked off identical stations on the two blades. Then he went to work with a block of wood and a clamp and a thickness gauge, said Stephens, and straightened that thing out to where there was no vibration at all and it flew right from there on!

The two adventurers found they were the first Americans ever to fly into the Philippines when they landed in Manila in April 1932. While they were there, Halliburton learned that his New York bank account was $2,000 overdrawn. The pair had The Carpet crated, and they sailed May 9 for San Francisco on President McKinley, retrieving the Stearman’s dry-land undercarriage — shipped ahead from Singapore — during a stop in Hong Kong. To raise expense money, Halliburton managed to schedule paid broadcast appearances during their stopover in Honolulu and then in San Francisco after they landed on May 31.

Stephens spiraled The Flying Carpet into Burbank airport on June 4, 1932, where they had taken off 18 months, 33,660 miles, 374 flying hours, 34 countries and 178 landings before. They shook hands and parted company, Halliburton to write his book, Stephens to spend, as he put it, an unhappy three-year period of non-aviation employment — working as production manager in a glass business his family owned. He finally returned to the fold in 1935 as a partner in the West Coast distributor for Fairchild Aircraft, where he also flew occasional mapping jobs for Fairchild Aerial Survey.

Stephens met Inez, contessa Gadina de Turiani, through recreational flying, and they later married. The contessa was the first woman in Italy to hold a pilot’s license, earned in Los Angeles at age 20 when she was sent to live with American relatives. She returned to California — and flying — after attending medical school in Italy. A Lockheed Aircraft Company trip to New Zealand and Australia in 1937 served as the couplers honeymoon.

War orders from Europe boosted the American aircraft industry in 1939, giving Stephens’ old flying pupil Jack Northrop a chance to form his own company. Stephens joined him to organize and promote the new venture and later was elected to the board of directors. At the same time, he served as the firm’s chief test pilot, participating in development of the N-3PB seaplane built for Norway, the A-31 Vengeance dive bomber designed for, the U.S. Navy, and the P-61 Black Widow night fighter for the U.S. Army Air Corps.

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