The history of flight in Hawai'i is a tale of barnstormers, risk-takers and dreamers.
It highlights a time when the world seemed larger, and when remote destinations like Hawai'i still offered romantic notions of travel. One need only think of Pan American Airways and its 1930s fleet of Clippers, and a host of post-card images of Waikiki palm trees, hula maidens and flying boats overhead leap to mind.
The first airplane flight in Hawai'i was on Dec. 31, 1910, by J.C. "Bud" Mars. He was traveling with a group from the Glenn Curtiss Aircraft Co. in New York that had shipped two disassembled Curtiss P18 biplanes to the Islands.
Flight had been possible at that time for seven years, and his takeoff from the Moanalua Polo Fields was more stunt than anything else. Thousands of people paid $1 to watch Mars soar to 500 feet.
Six months later, the Islands recorded their first airplane crash when Clarence Walker plowed into a hala tree in Hilo but lived to tell the tale.
The next few years saw several other firsts.
In 1913, Tom Gunn flew the first passengers in Hawai'i: a tailor and a theater worker on a flight over Schofield Barracks.
In 1918, Army Maj. Harold Clark flew to Moloka'i and back — the first interisland flight. The first aviation death was that year, too: Cpl. Mark Grace.
Military and civilian airfields were built in the 1920s as aviation in Hawai'i grew. Wheeler Field was constructed in 1922 and John Rodgers Airport — known today as Honolulu International Airport — was dedicated in 1927.
The Islands were still out of reach, however, by airplanes from anywhere else.
That changed on June 29, 1927. Two Army aviators — Lt. Lester Maitland and Albert Hegenberger — completed the first flight from the U.S. Mainland in a Fokker Trimotor named Bird of Paradise. At the time, their 2,400-mile flight from Oakland, Calif., to Wheeler was the longest all-water flight anywhere.
A few months after the Army flight, James P. Dole, president of Hawaiian Pineapple Co., organized the first air race from the U.S. Mainland to Hawai'i. But his Dole Derby was a disaster that claimed 10 lives. Of the eight planes that left Oakland, only two made it to Hawai'i. A search plane vanished as well.
Art Goebel won the race, with only 4 gallons of fuel to spare.
But Hawai'i truly shrank a little on Nov. 11, 1929, the day decorated World War I pilot and Islander Stanley Kennedy saw his dream of interisland commercial air service take off.
Inter-Island Airways, which is known today as Hawaiian Airlines, flew two Sikorsky S-38 amphibious airplanes to Hilo. The flight, which replaced an overnight boat trip, took three hours and 15 minutes.
Landing strips were hard to come by because it was viewed as wasteful to use good sugar-producing land for airfields. But the Sikorskys could land on water. Passengers were ferried ashore in outrigger canoes.
Pan Am's luxury flying boats of the 1930s took the Islands to a new height.
Hawai'i was an essential stop on Pan Am's pioneering route from the U.S. Mainland to Asia, and the company built a terminal on Ford Island.
Although the company began mail service across the Pacific in November 1935, it would not take passengers across the largest ocean on the planet until October 1936.
Its Martin M-130 flying boats were modern airplanes with a range of 3,200 miles and an interior that resembled a hotel for 52 passengers. A Pan Am brochure at the time boasted of dinner served on fine china and spotless linen tablecloths, followed by an evening of bridge and a restful night of sleep in a cabin prepared by an in-flight steward.
The Clippers survived World War II, although in scaled-down fashion, but aviation changed after the war.
Crossing the Pacific to Hawai'i would become routine, faster and more accessible, especially with the advent of jet travel.
But it would never match the romance of the flying boats.
