During this flight, they set 16 new world records for distance, speed and duration. 27-28, Smith and Richter made an endurance flight which lasted 37 hours, 15 minutes, with 16 refueling contacts. Unfortunately, a gasoline valve in the receiver airplane became plugged, and Smith had to make a forced landing in some mud flats near North Island after almost a full day in the air. ![]() On Janother refueling flight was made in an attempt to break the world record set by Macready and Kelly in the T-2 in 1922. ![]() Virgil Hine and Frank Seifert passed gasoline through a hose to another DH-4B flying beneath it carrying Lts. The first successful aerial refueling took place on June 27, 1923, when a DH-4B carrying Lts. To eliminate the fuel limitation problem, the fliers at Rockwell Field, San Diego, developed a system for mid-air refueling between DH-4B airplanes. If they had not run low on fuel, they could have remained in the air until personal fatigue or mechanical difficulty forced them to land. John Macready and Oakley Kelly set a world endurance record of 35 hours, 18 minutes, 30 seconds in their Fokker T-2 airplane over San Diego, Calif. ![]() As aviation evolved from cloth covered biplanes hauling mail across the continent to metal mono-winged streamlined aircraft being used as war fighting machines, so did the method for keeping them aloft longer need to evolve.Īircraft-to-Aircraft In-flight Aerial Refueling can be traced back to November 1921 when a wing walker took a gas can and walked across the wing of a Lincoln Standard stepped over to Curtiss JN-4 and poured the gas into the "Jenny's" tank. Refueling aircraft in-flight got it's beginning when men standing on fast driving cars would hand cans of gas to aviators as their slow flying aircraft passed overhead.
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