Nothing to It

It was a cold, raw day with a dirty overcast sulking overhead. No more than a dozen Air Force men were on hand to watch the big B50 lift slowly up from the Carswell Air Force Base, head northeast across the flat Texas plain. At the controls of the Lucky Lady II, Captain James Gallagher went onto instruments and kept climbing to 5,000 feet without breaking into the clear. Spare members of the 14-man crew relaxed with paperbacked mysteries and westerns. Ahead, if all went well, stretched 23,000 miles of flight, the first nonstop trip around the world.

Over the Azores, above the Saudi Arabian base of Dhahran, over Clark Field in the Philippines, converted B-29 tankers waited aloft to meet the Lady, their bellies gurgling with aviation gas. Each time the Lady dropped a line, to be snagged by a flying tanker. After the tanker had climbed above the Lady, hose lines were connected and loads of high-octane gasoline were poured into her tanks. The Lady roared on over the Marianas. Crewmen dug into their supplies of boned chicken, canned fruit, cheese crackers and candy.

Go Anywhere. Between tiny Johnston Island and Hawaii, the Lady met her final tankers, and there was some trouble getting the fuel to flow. After that there was nothing to it. Some 800 miles off the California coast, U.S. dance music began coming in over the radio. In the ship's log, ist

Lieut. Arthur Neal, one of three pilots, scrawled a brief comment: "We are all pooped but we feel pretty wonderful."

At 9:22 the next morning the Lady flashed past the Carswell control tower in a long shallow dive, 16 minutes later taxied to a stop before the tower. From Saturday to Wednesday she had gone around the world. Time: 94 hrs. i min.

Red-eyed with fatigue, but cleanly shaven, Pilot Gallagher and his crew hopped out to face a squad of waiting newsmen, who had been flown from Washington, D.C. to Texas by the jubilant Air Force with the promise that they would find a story there. "Everything was normal," smiled Gallagher wearily. "It shows that you can go anywhere you want and any time you want. And there's no limit to the time you can stay aloft." The Air Force had started the proof of that point just 20 years ago when Generals-to-be Elwood ("Pete") Quesada, Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz and Ira Eaker kept the old Question Mark circling over Southern California for 6 1/4 days. But until Lucky Lady made her flight, refueling flights, as far as non-airmen were concerned, had never been much more than stunts.

The Missing. The flight did indeed prove that, by refueling, the range of bombers could be vastly extended. But, spectacular as it was, refueling had just been carried out of the experimental stage. (A B50 that tried the day before Lucky Lady II took off was forced down in the Azores; a tanker that refueled the globe-girdler herself was still missing in the Philippines.) As the Air Force had hoped, Congress took due note of its feat. In the fight between the services for appropriations, the Air Force was well out in the lead.

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