On April 25, 1919, four naval aviators, in a seaplane of the F-5 type, Serial No. 3589, made a new world’s record for an endurance flight when they flew, officially, 1,250 miles in twenty hours and ten minutes. The record was made during a continuous flight from 11.42 A. M. April 25 until 7.52 A. M. April 26. Throughout the entire afternoon and night, and often bucking a strong breeze over the Chesapeake Bay and the Virginia Capes, the F-5 described a great circle, extending northward to the mouth of the Potomac River and then eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping over the Capes and then inland to the naval station.
The four men in the machine ate three meals during the flight.
The machine left the naval base with 850 gallons of gasoline. When it landed there was scarcely two gallons in its tanks.
The F-5 is an improved type of flying-boat that the Navy Department intended using in patrol duty for war purposes. It has a wing spread of 105 feet. The machine was built by Curtiss, and is known as a “kite boat,” equipped with twin Liberty motors.
At Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, on September 18, 1918, Major R. W. Schroeder, of the United States Air Service, in an American-built aeroplane driven by an American-made Hispano-Suiza motor, climbed to a new world’s altitude record of 28,900 feet, only 102 feet short of the highest peak of the Himalaya Mountains. In December, 1918, Captain Lang and Lieutenant Willets claimed to have ascended to 30,500 feet in a Bristol aeroplane, but the record has not been homologed. On November 19, 1918, an aeroplane flew from Combes la Villa to Paris and return, a distance of eighty miles, carrying thirty-eight passengers. Two days before a Handley Page, with a wing spread of 127 feet and a fuselage measuring sixty-five feet, propelled by four motors and piloted by an American, carried nine women and thirty-one men to a height of 6,000 feet during an hour’s cruise over London, England. A year ago another type of this same machine, but with only a 100-foot wing spread and driven by only two 275 horse-power motors and carrying five men, flew across country from London to Constantinople, dropped bombs on the German cruiser Goeben anchored there, and then flew back to Saloniki, covering a total distance of more than 2,000 miles and remaining in the air a total of thirty-one hours. The flight was via Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles—in order to avoid the Alps—and from there to Pisa, Rome, Naples, and then across 250 miles of mountainous country, often at a height of 10,000 feet.
Near the close of the year a huge triplane Caproni, with its 150-foot wing spread, driven by three 700 horse-power Fiat motors, developing a total of 2,100 horse-power, has carried seventy-eight people in trial flights at the factory!
A Model F-5 flying-boat, with a wing spread of only 102 feet, driven by two Liberty motors, and lifting a 50-foot boat, has carried 12,900 pounds over many hundreds of miles looking for German submarines, and another flying-boat, with 123 feet of wing spread, carried fifteen officers and a pilot from Washington, District of Columbia, to Newport News, Virginia.
On November 27, 1918, a Curtiss N C 1 carried fifty people for a short flight at Rockaway Beach, New York. It was drawn by three Liberty motors. The flying weight of the machine was 22,000 pounds, and the machine had a wing spread of 126 feet, and the NC-3 and NC-4, which flew from Rockaway, New York, to Halifax, 520 miles for the first leg of the transatlantic, weighed 28,000 pounds, and were driven by four Liberty motors.
The War Department on December 23 also announced that a squadron of four army training-machines flew from San Diego, California, to Mineola, Long Island, a distance of 4,000 miles, in the actual flying time of fifty hours.
The infamous German bimotored pusher Gothas, measuring 78 feet, driven by six-cylinder Mercedes 260 horse-power engines, and carrying three men and five hundred pounds of explosives, flying by night from the aerodromes near Ghent, Belgium, a distance of nearly two hundred miles, have raided London more than a hundred times despite the opposition of fleets of British aeroplanes and seaplanes and thousands of antiaircraft guns.