A wealthy and rambunctious young adventurer named Calbraith Perry Rodgers was the pilot of the Vin Fiz Flyer. Daredevil Cal, as he was known, embarked on the coast-to-coast flight in an attempt to claim the $50,000 prize offered by publisher William Randolph Hearst to the first person to fly an airplane from one coast to the other.
Rodgers persuaded J. Ogden Armour, the famous meatpacker, to sponsor the attempt. In exchange for Armour's financial support, Rodgers named the plane after Armour's new grape-flavored soft drink, the Vin Fiz. He bought the plane from the Wright Brothers after taking about an hour-and-a-half of instruction from the inventors themselves, thus becoming the first private citizen to buy a plane from the Wright Brothers.
The Flyer had a wingspan of 32 feet, four cylinders and a water-cooled engine. What it didn't have was a throttle, basically giving the plane two gears: wide open and stop. Many of Rodgers' stops, especially in Texas, were of the sudden variety. The plane had no compass and Rodgers didn't take along any maps. Instead, he followed the path of a train below him to navigate from east to west.
By the time Rodgers finished his flight, only the rudder and a couple of struts remained from the original plane. Rodgers hired the Wright Brothers' bicycle mechanic, Charles Taylor, to repair the plane every time it crashed. Taylor ended up rebuilding it along the way, maybe more than once.
Long before he completed the flight, Rodgers knew he was going to miss the 30-day deadline for the prize but he persevered. The arrival of the Vin Fiz Flyer was a greatly anticipated event in the cities where it landed. Rodgers piloted it to Texas, at the behest of Fort Worth Star-Telegram publisher Amon Carter, who sponsored Rodgers' flight into Texas.
Rodgers followed the wrong railroad tracks soon after he got into Texas, leaving the Fort Worth crowd in suspense while he was cruising high above Montague County. A Katy railroad telegrapher somehow got word to him that he was headed in the wrong direction. He turned around and found the cheering crowd in Fort Worth, and an even larger one at the State Fair of Dallas the next day.
The Dallas Morning News described the Vin Fiz Flyer's arrival in Dallas this way: "Amid tumultuous applause from an eager crowd of 75,000 persons, Cal P. Rodgers, sea-to-sea aviator, glided gracefully down the infield of the State Fair racetrack at 1:50 p.m. After hovering over the Fairgrounds for 15 minutes in the most thrilling exhibition of aerial navigation ever seen here, he headed his biplane south and started again on his long journey to the Pacific Ocean."
Somewhere along the way in Texas, a territorial eagle attacked the plane. He survived that challenge but crashed periodically as he flew on to Waco, Austin, San Antonio and other stops, most of them unscheduled and bumpy. Near Kyle, between Austin and San Antonio, a piston crystallized and a spare engine carried aboard the train had to be installed.
In Spofford, his propeller struck the ground when he was taking off and resulted in major damage and another long delay. Other stops in Texas, included Denison, Gainesville, San Marcos, LaCoste, Sabinal, Uvalde, Del Rio, Alpine, Marfa, and El Paso.
Forty-nine days after he started, Rodgers ceremoniously taxied the Vin Fiz Flyer into the Pacific Ocean, giving him the distinction of making the first coast-to-coast flight. The trip took a toll on the plane and on Rodgers, who was injured to varying degrees in several of his crashes, but was rarely without a cigar, even in flight.
Rodgers died -- how else -- in an airplane crash in California in 1912. Pieces of the famed Vin Fiz Flyer were gathered. A replica was recreated for the "Pioneers of Flight" gallery in the National Aviation and Space Museum, a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
