Paris to Persia

A flying speck vanished away from the aerodrome at Le Bourget, outside Paris. They saw it pass near Strasbourg. Austrians and Hungarians glanced aloft shortly after. Dour Serbs eyed its flight over their dark mountains. Quarrelsome Bulgars and the night-watchmen of Constantinople heard its thin droning and all night it sped on over Anatolia, Kurdistan, down the Euphrates Valley to meet the dawn. At Basra in Irak, where the Euphrates, led by the Tigris, floods down to the Persian Gulf and men are said to have flown on magic carpets, the speck finally came to earth. Captain Ludovic Arrachart and his brother Paul then cabled their whereabouts to the French Air Ministry, claiming a world's record non-stop flight of 2,484 miles in 26 % hours. Their speck had been a 550-horsepower Renault-motored airplane, starring with 3% tons of petrol.*

*An airline non-stop flight was made in May, 1923, from Mineola, N. Y., to San Diego, Calif., 2,520 miles in 26 hrs., 50 min., by Lieuts. John A. Macready and Oakley Kelly.