Over the Top

The record-busting season in aviation was on. Last week Army & Navy flyers were in a photo finish for the world's longdistance mark.

The Navy was off first. At Perth, West Australia, a twin-engined Lockheed Neptune patrol bomber, stripped of all but the most rudimentary radio, set out for the U.S. or beyond. Secretly the crew of the Truculent Turtle hoped to get to Bermuda, half way round the world.

But head winds ate up the 25 tons of gas too fast and the Turtle set down at Columbus, Ohio. The crew, freshly shaved and wearing well-creased greens, had had 20 hours' sleep during the 55-hour flight, showed less fatigue than the haggard groundlings who had sweated out their arrival. The record: 11,236 miles.

With true sportsmanship, the Navy helped the Army in its attack on the record. Ready for the take-off in Hawaii, the Boeing Superfortress Pacusan Dreamboat, 27,000 lbs. overweight, was expected to need every mile of runway it could get. The Navy connected its John Rodgers airfield outside Honolulu with the Army's Hickam Field, gave the Dreamboat 13,500 feet. It took about half that. Actually, the Army had little hope of bettering the Turtle's mark, trumpeted that its $3,000,000 flight over the Pole to Cairo would test performance in polar regions.

Carrying 38 1/2 tons of gasoline, the Dreamboat had no room for de-icing equipment, ran into a nightmare of icing conditions over the Arctic. But it made, the 9,500-mile run in 39 1/2 hours. Its crew had gathered evidence that the North Magnetic Pole was 200 miles north of the position shown on the charts. They had also proved that transpolar air war was possible: the Army's new B-36 bomber--or any comparable foreign plane--could make a similar flight carrying an atomic bomb.

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