Pilots regularly toppled and replaced milestones of altitude, speed and distance during the early years of aviation, particularly during the period between the two world wars. Their flights were widely publicized. Distance especially spoke to the public imagination, perhaps because it was the aspect of air travel that presented the most intuitively accessible contrasts with the pre-aviation world. Cash prizes—big ones—were offered and won for crossing the Atlantic or flying nonstop from New York to Paris or from London to Sydney, and newspapers lavished headlines on every attempt. Besides prize money, there was always the motive of acquiring at least temporary fame, and besides that, there was the lure of faraway places with strange-sounding names.
Early Hurdles
At first, the technical challenge of long-distance flying boiled down to the reliability of engines. As reliability improved, the central problem was to get airborne with huge loads of fuel. “Fuel fraction,” the share of an airplane’s takeoff weight that is usable fuel, is a fundamental determinant of range. When fuel fraction had grown to the limits of current technology, aerodynamic improvements—drag reduction and wings of higher aspect ratio—opened a new but narrow avenue to further progress.
