Record Round-the-World Flight

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 August 1947, Page 5

Record Round-the-World Flight

(Rec. 12.10 p.m.) CHICAGO, August 10. Triumphant, but haggard from loss of sleep, 27-year-old Bill Odom landed at Chicago after having gone round the world faster than any man before. A huge crowd welcomed him at Chicago aerodrome, including his wife, his two children, his parents, and Mr Milton Reynolds, who sponsored the flight. Odom had been virtually without sleep since he left Chicago three days before, and fatigue nearly caused disaster between Anchorage (Alaska) and Edmonton (Canada) when he fell asleep for 100 minutes while in flight. • A “I was flying at 20,000 feet, and when I awoke I had dropped to 16,000 feet and was heading straight at a mountain peak. It made me sick in my stomach for a few minutes.” . Odom got no other sleep except catnaps, mostly while standing up during his short refuelling stops at Gander, Paris, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Tokio, Anchorage, and Fargo. He lived on sandwiches, scrambled eggs, and benzedrine pills. Former Records Odom’s time for the flight—<73hr

smin—eclipsed the former solo record of 1861 hours made by Wiley post in 1933, but Odom also broke the record of 78hr 55min for an aircraft with crew. That record had been set in April by Odom himself, Milton Reynolds and T. C. Sales in the same plane that Odom used for the solo flight. The plane, which is named the “Reynolds Bombshell,” is a converted twin-engined army attack bomber. Post flew a.single-engined secondhand aircraft and had inferior navigation facilities. However, his route took him over 15,596 miles, whereas Odom flew 19,889 miles in April and in the solo flight flew 19,645 miles at an average speed of about 269 miles an hour, including' ground time. " Odom’s average flight speed was 310.5 miles an hour. . - ■ - - Career in War

Odom, who is 6ft 2in, is aged 27. He neither drinks nor smokes. . During i the war he flew the North Atlantic as a co-pilot for American Export Lines, captained R.A.F. bombers for delivery hops from Canada to England, and made 102 flights over • the Burma “hump.” He'first wanted to be a flyer at the age of 13, when he met Wiley Post, who gave him an autographed bit of Post’s famous plane. Odom’s new ambition is to fly around the world the hard way—crossing both poles.:•