19271776 Club
Maitland and Hegenberger land in Hawaii; the Pacific is crossed for the first time
Their modified Fokker tri-motor, the Bird of Paradise, touches down at Wheeler Field after 25 hours and 50 minutes over open ocean, where three and a half degrees of drift would have meant vanishing without a trace.
A month after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the Air Corps set its sights on the Pacific — a crossing twice as long, with no European coastline to aim for, only a scatter of islands in 2,500 miles of open ocean. On June 29, 1927, 1st Lt. Lester J. Maitland and 1st Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger touched down at Wheeler Field on Oahu after 25 hours and 50 minutes aloft in a modified Fokker tri-motor called the Bird of Paradise. Had they drifted three and a half degrees off course, the official Air Force history later noted, they would have missed Kauai entirely and vanished into the Pacific…
