The first nonstop flight around the world was completed
On this day · 2 March 1949
On this day in 1949, a B-50 bomber and four mid-air refuelings carried a crew around the entire planet without ever touching down.
On March 2, 1949, a U.S. Air Force Boeing B-50A Superfortress named Lucky Lady II rolled to a stop at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, having flown all the way around the world without landing once. The journey covered about 23,452 miles in 94 hours and 1 minute, under the command of Captain James G. Gallagher.
Staying airborne that long meant refueling in flight, then a young and awkward art. The bomber was topped up four times by KB-29M tanker aircraft over the Azores, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Hawaii, using a fiddly looped-hose technique soon to be obsolete.
For the first around-the-world nonstop flight.
The feat, honored with the 1949 Mackay Trophy, was as much a Cold War message as an aviation milestone: it proved American bombers could, in theory, reach any target on Earth and return without setting foot on foreign soil.
Sources & references
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