Nearly a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight from New York to Paris,
a German Junkers W-33 aircraft crewed by Baron Gunther von Hunefeld, Hermann Koehl and James C. Fitzmaurice undertook the east to west crossing in April, 1928. Seen by many as a much more difficult trip than "Lucky Lindy" flew in the "Spirit of St.
Louis" because of prevailing
When I arrived at Murry Bay. I was
told that Ihe only way to reach Greenly Island this time yearr, some 700 miles away, was
to fly there. The only way to do that was to go to Transcontinental
Airways in St. Agnes, a few miles away and rent a plane. To my dismay, other newsmen were already at the landing field trying to get a plane. It seems that most planes were assigned to help rescue the Bremen flyers. and already loaded with supplies and aircraft parts. The mail plane could be chartered for the flight, the airport manager told me, but the cost of renting the old
Fairchild monoplane and pilot would be quite expensive, all things considered, for $12,500 (1928 dollars). I consulted with James Stanton of the Canadian and Associated Press Association, Leslie Roberts of the New York American Montreal office and a chap named
Fernstrom, who was the moving picture camera operator. We all agreed to split Ihe cost of the
plane with Fernstrom paying $5,000 for his seat because of the heavy camera cases and tripods. The rest of us paid $2,500 each. Our pilot, Romeo Vachon, told us while we were loading the plane that the weather was so bad that we must wait a day or two for it to clear - unless we wanted to cover first-hand, our own crash story.
It was Sunday morning, eleven o 'clock when we flew out of St. Agnes. The temperature was a
brisk zero degrees. As we were leaving, someone ran to the plane and handed me two quart
bottles of good old Canadian Rye whiskey to give to the Bremen flyers. I am not a drinking
man, but during the flight to Greenly Island I thought about opening both of those bottles."