80 years ago – first commercial flight around the world
80 years ago, a Boeing 314 Clipper completed the first commercial flight around the world. When the flying boat set off from San Francisco CA (USA) on 2 December 1941 for a scheduled flight to Auckland (New Zealand), there was no sign yet of the feat – in contrast to 1929’s the first circumnavigation of the world by the airship ‘Graf Zeppelin’, which was marketed with great publicity.
The Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat was 32 m long, sported a wingspan of 46 m and was 6 m high. It was used by Pan American World Airways for extremely luxurious journeys across the oceans.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 not only changed the course of history, it also changed the course of the flying boat. To prevent the Clipper from falling into enemy hands it was decided to fly on westwards. It first headed for Gladstone and Darwin (Australia) and then flew to Surabaya (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), Trincomalee (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), Karachi (British India, now Pakistan), Bahrain, Khartoum (Sudan), Léopoldville (Belgian Congo, now called Kinshasa and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Natal (Brazil) and Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago) before arriving in New York on 6 January 1942.
The Boeing 314 Clipper could carry 4.5 t of airmail and cargo; after the US entry into the war it was mainly military material. Before the pandemic, scheduled round-the-world air cargo flights were rare, but not entirely unknown. (ah)