Question Mark

Endless circles and arcs, endless glissandos of flight. Over Southern California droned the Fokker cabin monoplane Question Mark. At the dawn of the new year five U. S. Army flyers had swooped into the air from Los Angeles. Their resolve was to shatter all existing records for endurance flights, to stay in the sky until men or engines succumbed. Experts had allowed their three Wright Whirlwind motors 400 flying hours before bearings splintered and cracked, poppet valves ceased to pop. The wind-bronzed flyers seemed staunch, infallible.

Back and forth they swept, between Los Angeles and San Diego. Every so often the Question Mark took on fuel. This required uncanny air jockeying. Only, 15 feet directly above the Question Mark flew a fuelling plane piloted by Capt. R. G. Hoyt or Lieut. Odas Moon. From this plane dangled a thin rubber hose. While the planes zoomed at 75 miles an hour Lieut. Harry Halverson aboard the Question Mark reached out, grabbed the hose, thrust it into the tanks. Once there was bungling. Gasoline was spilt. Major Carl Spatz, the commander, was burned. Lieut. Elwood Quesada was overcome by fumes. But later a swinging rope conveyed zinc oxide, balm for the Major. Lieut. Quesada, recovered, idled in his berth, read a magazine. Other ropes were swung, provided oranges, oatmeal, coffee. The larder of the Question Mark was stocked at the start with roast chicken.

Clouds, air pockets, winds, days, nights. Dismayed by enormous puffs of fog the flyers left the seacoast, roared over a 60-mile circuit above Imperial Valley. They broke the U. S. record for re-fuelled flight. They broke the international re-fuelled flight records.* Shortly afterward fell the world's record for sustained flight (heavier-than-air machines)./- There remained but two records to pass, that for sustained flight (lighter-than-air machines), and the distance record.**

Bridge was played, innumerable cigarets were smoked. One motor began spurting oil. Sergeant Roy Hooe pussyfooted along the slim runway leading to the spewing machine, did some windy tinkering. Capt. Ira Eaker, at the joy stick, wore a haggard grin. He headed back toward Los Angeles. The day was sunny, the fog had drifted away. The fourth day, the eighty-seventh hour passed. Had the five flown directly eastward the same distance from their starting point they would have been winging over Europe.

And so it flew, now a hovering buzzard, now a darking bee until the seventh day. On the seventh day it rested. The Question Mark ended its airy sentence. After 150 hours. 40 minutes, 16 seconds aloft, the plane came to earth. Out of the fuselage stumbled the crew, shouting greetings. For Lieutenant Quesada, a dish of ice cream; for Sergeant Hooe, a dress suit; for Major Spatz, a shave ; for them all and for the Question Mark there was the acclaim which they had won by keeping a seven days' vigil, so they might snatch from the clouds all existing records.

*U. S.: 37 hours, 15 min., 14 sec.; by Lieutenants Lowell Smith & J. P. Richter at San Diego, 1923.

International: 61 hr., 7 min.; by Adjutant Louis Crooy & Sergeant Victor Groenen, Belgians, 1928.

/-Sixty-five hr.. 31 min.; by Johann Risticz & Wilheim Zimmerman, Germans, 1928. The Question Mark, in one sense, could not break this record. The Germans never re-fuelled.

**Sustained flight (lighter-than-air machines); by the French dirigible Dixmudc. 118 hours, 41 minutes.

Non-stop distance record: 4,475 miles (Italy to Port Natal, Brazil): by Major Arturo Ferrarin and Commander Carlo Del Prete, Italians, 1928.