Amelia Earhart broke a transcontinental speed record 90 years ago, in July 1933, by flying her signature red Lockheed Vega from Los Angeles to New Jersey in just 17 hours, seven and a half minutes. Earlier that year, Earhart had flown as an observer on a Northwest Airways winter flight across the U.S., testing the possibilities of a “Northern Transcontinental” route.
Because those early airplanes couldn’t reach high altitudes, they weaved through dangerous peaks and the erratic weather patterns that mountain ranges helped create. One co-pilot remembers the journey as “seat-of-the-pants flying across the Dakota and Montana plains and through, over and around the Western mountain ranges.”
Long-distance flight advanced rapidly between the 1930s and the early 1960s, shaving off the number of hours in the sky by half. But over the past 60 years, the duration of such flights has remained roughly the same. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of air travel has grown more elaborate, often leaving passengers squirming in their seats on the tarmac before or after flight.
Coast-to-coast air travel is in a rut – but there are still efforts to improve this mode of transit.
Just another ordinary miracle
Transcontinental air journeys are clearly different 90 years after Earhart’s record-breaking exploratory flights: Travelers now take such trips for granted, and often find them to be pure drudgery.
But for Ghelani, seated in first class, it wasn’t the terrain or frigid temperatures that were the most cumbersome part of his adventure. It was a cheap complimentary blanket, which “barely qualified as one – it was very thin, very scratchy.”
Amelia Earhart broke a transcontinental speed record 90 years ago, in July 1933, by flying her signature red Lockheed Vega from Los Angeles to New Jersey in just 17 hours, seven and a half minutes. Earlier that year, Earhart had flown as an observer on a Northwest Airways winter flight across the U.S., testing the possibilities of a “Northern Transcontinental” route.
Because those early airplanes couldn’t reach high altitudes, they weaved through dangerous peaks and the erratic weather patterns that mountain ranges helped create. One co-pilot remembers the journey as “seat-of-the-pants flying across the Dakota and Montana plains and through, over and around the Western mountain ranges.”
Benmou Suzuki's dilapidated 420-year-old temple, located deep in the forest near a tiny Japanese mountain village, hardly looks like prized real estate