Halliburton and Stephens landed at Manila on April 26, the first Americans to fly a plane into the Philippines, where they were invited to lunch by Governor and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Halliburton regretted cutting the trip short but confided in a letter to his parents his relief 'that our flying was almost over, and our long journey ended without mishap. I feel like a man let out of jail.' They sailed May 9 on President McKinley for San Francisco. When they arrived on May 31, letters from Halliburton's banker informed him his account was $2,000 overdrawn. He later reckoned he had spent almost $50,000 on his flying adventure and was now broke.

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On June 4, 1932, The Flying Carpet took off from Alameda and four hours later spiraled down for a landing at Burbank Airport, where it had taken off 18 months earlier. Stephens figured they had flown 33,660 miles in 374 flying hours, making 178 landings on airfields, polo fields, pastures, rivers and creeks in 34 countries.

Richard Halliburton's publishers gave him five months to finish his book, and The Flying Carpet was published late that year. Moye Stephens found himself shut out of airline flying, but when war's approach boosted the demand for military aircraft, he became the corporate secretary and test pilot for Northrop Aircraft. In 1940, as Stephens flight-tested scout-bombers for the Norwegian and American military, Halliburton sailed from Hong Kong on his final adventure, in a replica of an ancient Chinese junk crewed by Cornell undergraduates and skippered by an Australian alcoholic. They negotiated the Japanese blockade but ran into a storm four days out. Their last radio message was '…storm, but no problem.' Searching U.S. Navy ships and aircraft found no trace of them.

In 1931 Halliburton and Stephens had been prevented from flying to Samarkand; nine years later, most of Asia, North Africa and the Middle East were war zones. The flight of The Flying Carpet had truly been a journey at the end of an era.

This article was written by Ron Gilliam and originally published in the May 2004 issue of Aviation History.

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