Presidential interest in flight began with the first President, George Washington. In 1793, President Washington was joined by the four men who succeeded him in office to witness the first balloon flight in the United States. Frenchman Jean-Pierre Francois Blanchard ascended to the height of 5812 feet above Philadelphia in 46 minutes. If any of the men entertained thoughts of breaking free of earth's gravity through flight, they did not act upon it that day.
Over the next one hundred years, air travel changed little. By the end of the nineteenth century, though, the rush was on to develop a flying machine. The Wright Brothers made history's first powered, sustained and controlled flight with a heavier-than-air flying machine on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their flight came during Theodore Roosevelt's first presidential administration. Seven years later, Roosevelt himself became the first president to fly in an airplane when he climbed aboard a Wright Type B at St. Louis. He flew as aviation pioneer Arch Hoxsey's passenger for just over three minutes at an average altitude of 50 feet above the field. But it was two years after his presidency had ended. It would be another thirty-four years before a sitting president would board a plane and take wing. The "birth" of Air Force One was still over fifty years away.
During the thirty-four years between presidential flights, aviation underwent a great deal of change, but the public's attitude towards their Chief Executive flying on a plane did not. Passenger flight was not considered very safe during the 1920s and 30s, and the life of the president could not be risked on such a frivolous adventure. Besides, it was unnecessary. The fastest, safest and most popular means of transportation for a politician traveling the country remained the train.
Theodore Roosevelt's flight was typical of his personality, his zest for living. Willing to break precedence, Roosevelt was also the first president to leave the United States while in office. He traveled by ship to Panama to examine the progress on the construction of the canal, but only left the country's continental limits that one time. Until the middle of the twentieth century, presidents were expected to stay on American soil, and most of that time was spent in or around the nation's capital. Woodrow Wilson experienced a great storm of criticism when he sailed to Europe to participate in the treaty negotiations that concluded the First World War. Not only was he traveling beyond the Western Hemisphere, the first for a president, but he would be gone from Washington for an extended period of time. Those who succeeded him adhered to the hard lesson Wilson had learned: stay at home or risk your presidency and popularity. Not until Franklin Roosevelt flew to a wartime conference in Casablanca in 1943 did another president leave the country for an extensive trip.
Aviation pioneers continued setting new marks. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to make a non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris, doing so in 33 hours. His flight touched off a flying craze in the United States. During Herbert Hoover's presidency, several high-ranking administration officials earned their pilot's licenses. They were dubbed "The Flying Cabinet" by the Washington press corps. In 1932, Amelia Earhart soloed over the Atlantic, becoming the first woman to do so. That same year, Franklin Roosevelt became the first presidential candidate to accept the nomination in person when he flew from Albany to Chicago to personally deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Even before his election, the presidency had been unwittingly ushered into the aviation era by a man who, ironically, could not walk under his own power.
Roosevelt continued breaking precedents as president. In 1940, with war clouds on the horizon, he was elected to a third term. Breaking precedent yet again, he became the first president to travel by air while in office, the first to fly abroad, the first to visit a battle theater since Abraham Lincoln, and the first to step foot on the continent of Africa. In January 1943, he flew to Casablanca, in North Africa, to attend a wartime meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Allied military leaders to plan the invasion of southern Europe. The trip was made in a veil of secrecy because of the war, and because the German Luftwaffe would have liked nothing more than to shoot down the President of the United States over the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Government officials and the Secret Service decided to fly the president there because German submarines patrolling the waters of the Atlantic made the risk of sailing there too great. But the conference was necessary, the president said, and risks had to be taken.
For this inaugural presidential flight, the Navy Department selected two Boeing 314s, then under wartime contract, to be equipped for the special mission and fly down to Miami to meet their passengers. The Flying Boats were provided by Pan American World Airways, but were flown by Navy pilots. Leaving Dinner Key, Florida, the location of Pan American's marine base in Miami, President Roosevelt flew on the Dixie Clipper down to Trinidad, covering the 1600 miles in ten hours. The president spent most of the flight poring over navigational charts and peering out the window, trying to spot familiar land formations. In the American Clipper, the companion plane, flew the rest of FDR's staff, his military and diplomatic officers, some additional Secret Service agents, and some of his staff who would be needed at the Casablanca conference. From Trinidad, the two planes flew southeast for eight hours to Brazil, where the passengers and crews rested for only three hours before making the most treacherous and tedious part of the trip across the Atlantic to Africa.
Naval Reserve Lt. Howard M. Cone, the Dixie Clipper's pilot, knew his flying days were over if anything happened to his special passenger on this next leg of the trip. In fact they almost ended even before they left Brazil. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter coming into port almost rammed a hole in the plane as it pulled alongside the Dixie Clipper. With that crisis averted, the two planes took off once again, climbing steadily above the South Atlantic as they made their way eastward on their 2,500-mile flight to British Gambia in West Africa. Once across, the passengers transferred to two land-based C-54s, owned by Trans World Airlines, but operated under wartime contract by the U.S. Army Air Corps. They flew the president and his staff to Casablanca, 1,500 miles to the north, where he spent the next eleven days in meetings. If the three-day trip had taken a toll on the president, it did not show. Within hours of landing at Casablanca, he and Churchill and the others entered into the first meeting, which lasted until 3 a.m. the next morning.
After the meetings, FDR flew to Liberia, America's oldest African ally, to meet with its president, and then returned to British Gambia to begin his return flight home. While on the final leg of the trip, the crew staged a special birthday dinner in honor of his sixty-first birthday, presenting him with gifts obtained in Trinidad. By the time he arrived back in Washington, the president had spent approximately ninety hours in the air, touched three continents, crossed the Equator four times, and spent more than six day's travel time to make it to his conference. Including the train trip between Miami and Washington as part of his trip mileage, he had covered over 17,000 miles. By comparison, the straight-line distance from Washington and Casablanca is 3,875 miles, and can be covered today with no stopovers in less than seven hours.
Besides the obvious importance of the trip--being the first Chief Executive to travel by air--the trip also made clear the necessity for two planes to be part of the travel contingent. A backup plane was deemed necessary to travel along at all times in case trouble plagued the primary one. Until this trip, the Navy had the responsibility and privilege of transporting the president on one of their ships. The successful flights aboard the C-54s across Africa helped assure them at least partial responsibility for transporting the president.
The trip gave a boost to the Army Air Corps' push to become a separate branch of the military as well. They quickly grasped the opportunity to ensure this a few weeks after Roosevelt's trip had concluded. The Air Corps decided to eliminate the need for the president to charter a commercial plane by making a custom-tailored plane available to the president anytime he wanted. The ability to fly gave the president unprecedented freedom, and the Air Corps successfully campaigned to be the military branch to provide him with that freedom.
The plane designated for such a special mission, the predecessor of today's Air Force One, was an adaptation of the famed B-24 Liberator bomber. It was dubbed Guess Where II by Roosevelt's pilot. Delivered on June 6, 1943, the olive-drab Consolidated Liberator Express resembled its sister B-24s, and bore no special markings indicating its special purpose. Though it used the same airframe as the B-24, Roosevelt's staff found it met the physical needs of the president. The cabin floor was low to the ground, allowing easy access for FDR's wheelchair. The interior was modified for extensive travel and long flights, able to seat twenty passengers or sleep nine. Four "Pullman" compartments, each with facing double seats and a removable table that could be converted into upper and lower berths, were along the right side of the fuselage. Across the aisle and opposite the center compartment was a large sofa that sat three. The sofa and an adjoining lavatory could be incorporated into the center suite by means of curtains, thus easily creating an executive cabin for the President. The tail section contained a Tappan aircraft galley with an electric range and oven, plus a large walk-in closet and linen storage area.
Ironically, President Roosevelt never used the plane. Instead, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and high government officials used it for their trips all over the world. She used it for her 13,000-mile goodwill tour of U.S. military bases in Central and South America, undertaken to demonstrate to those soldiers that though they may not be on the frontlines, they were not forgotten. This trip came after its inaugural mission that began in July 1943. Lasting two months, five senators circled the globe to observe and report upon the progress of the war in the various theaters. Their mission covered 36,798 air miles in all. During its service in 1943 and 1944, Guess Where II set many speed and nonstop distance records during its service with the White House, but was denied the privilege of carrying out the mission for which it was initially designated.
The four-engine C-87A instead flew as the president's backup plane for his two other flying trips, and went everywhere he went just in case. Approval of it as the primary mode of travel was denied initially by the Secret Service because of a suspicious technical flaw. The Secret Service had been gathering reports of unexplained tail buffeting and oscillation problems involving other C-87s. One incident reported said that a pilot had lost control of his C-87 over the Gulf of Mexico and had to parachute to safety while the plane droned on pilotless and eventually crashed in Mexico. Military and civilian experts eventually found that the problem was caused by human error. Co-pilots were inadvertently throwing an incorrect switch, one that accidentally opened the engine's cowl flaps and caused the buffeting.
Word came down from the White House just before departure that due to the technical problems, the entourage would instead use TWA's C-54 Skymasters. Once again Air Transport Command lost this highly coveted opportunity to a civilian airline. Even though the flaw was rectified just before FDR's departure to meet Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill at Tehran and Cairo in November 1943, alternate plans had already been made for his transportation overseas. The military had the plane flown over in case Roosevelt made a trip to a location that could not provide a high enough loading ramp for the C-54 he would use while there. Unfortunately for the Guess Where II and its crew, he stuck to his itinerary, and the plane was not used by the president.
Although Guess Where II had never experienced the buffeting problems, White House confidence in the C-87 was shaken. Plans for another aircraft were quietly drawn up that fall. Already proven as reliable and worthy of the President, the Air Corps notified Douglas Aircraft Company they wanted a C-54. Fuselage No. 78 was pulled from the main assembly line and moved to a secluded area of the Douglas plant, where work was undertaken to modify the C-54 to suit the current president's needs. Work began midway through Roosevelt's third term, before he had even decided to seek an unprecedented fourth term, let alone been elected to it. Nonetheless, the plane was tailored to satisfy his personal fancies and accommodate his physical handicap.
The Secret Service wanted an elevator installed just behind the main passenger cabin for security reasons and for convenience. On FDR's two previous flights, specially constructed ramps were needed to enable the President to board or depart the plane. The long, bulky ramps, which were impossible to conceal, could tip off any would-be assassin about FDR's presence or impending arrival. The elevator made the ramps unnecessary. Engineers did such a good job of concealing it that Air Corps generals often used to bet VIP visitors that they could not find it during flight.
The plane, soon dubbed the Sacred Cow by a reporter, easily accommodated FDR's specially designed collapsible wheelchair. The chair could be rolled into the elevator at ground level and hoisted to the corridor in the passenger section. From there, he could be wheeled about anywhere in the plane, including between the two pilots' seats so that he could talk with them during the flight. The presidential suite was a roomy 71/2 x 12 feet, and included an upholstered swivel chair, conference table, and telephone connected to the cockpit. A large, bullet-proof picture window was installed near the swivel chair for Roosevelt's viewing enjoyment, and retrofitted with a template to make it appear like a normal window when the plane was on the ground. Completed in June 1944, the 503rd Wing of the Air Transport Command at Washington's National Airport received delivery of Army Air Corps serial No. 42-107451 after its cross-country flight from the plant. To insure its anonymity, the plane had Army Air Corps markings so it resembled other C-54s.
President Roosevelt lost no time in putting the crew and the plane through its paces on behalf of others. On its inaugural mission soon after taking delivery, Major Henry Tift "Hank" Myers and his crew set the first of many records while flying Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and other military leaders from New York to Naples to check on the progress of the Allied campaign in Southern Europe. On the return trip, they made the first nonstop flight from London to Washington--3,800 miles--in just under eighteen hours. They soon set another record when bringing Madame Chiang Kia-Shek on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Washington when they became the first to cover more than 5,000 miles in one day.
It was not until February 1945 that FDR finally used the plane himself. Roosevelt would sail across the Atlantic. He arranged to meet the Myers and the Sacred Cow at the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea, where they would then fly the president to his top-secret meeting with Stalin and Churchill at the Crimean resort of Yalta. No one realized that it would be his only trip on the plane. Two months after the trip, Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia.
While staying in Yalta, Myers and his crew had some interesting encounters with the Soviet secret police. Bunking with his co-pilot and navigator in the same room in a resort hotel, they soon discovered a crudely hidden microphone planted there by the secret police. To amuse themselves and pass the time, the three men concocted wild stories to tantalize the police. General N. V. Yermachenkov, head of the Soviet naval air forces, became one of the Cow's most frequent visitors, inspecting the plane as often as he could, but never without NKVD (Secret Police) agents in tow. Myers showed the general around the plane, pointing out the latest gadgets such as a new and secret altimeter, or its long range navigational equipment, so new that only a handful of U.S. Air Corps officers knew of its existence. Time and again, the general insisted that he knew all about the secret equipment, reacting rather nonchalantly to its existence. It finally dawned on Myers why the general was acting this way. Yermachenkov could not let the agents know that he knew nothing about the equipment for it would reflect adversely on the Russian air force and endanger his job.
FDR's presidential legacy extended beyond the White House and the Capitol to the skies above. Besides becoming the first president to fly while in office, he gave the commercial airline business a little-recognized but much-valued psychological boost. He legitimized air travel for future presidents and citizens alike. People reasoned that if flying was safe enough for the president, then it must be safe enough for them. Consequently, the post-war period saw a boom in growth for commercial airlines in the United States, one that also fed off the boom in technological advances.
