Considering he spent much of his aviation career setting world altitude, endurance and distance records while performing a wide variety of dangerous tests, it’s surprising that the only three-time recipient of the Mackay Trophy (awarded by the U.S. Air Force for the most meritorious flight of the year) lived to be 91. Then again, John A. Macready was one hell of a pilot.
Before he flew untested equipment in uncharted scenarios, the San Diego native studied at Stanford University (earning a degree in economics), enlisted in the Army, earned his pilot’s wings and then graduated from the Air Service Engineering School at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, the same place he would go on to work as a test pilot.
It was there that he completed the first successful crop dusting flight in 1921, which almost seems like a footnote in what was a highly decorated career. That same year, he set an altitude record of 40,800 feet while flying a turbo-supercharged Packard Lepére LUSAC-11 biplane during the testing of a turbo supercharger.1
He and Lt. Oakley G. Kelley set an endurance record of 35 hours, 18 minutes and 30 seconds in October of 1922 (the duo is also credited with pioneering the process of inflight refueling from another aircraft). Then, in 1923, he became the first person to fly non-stop across the United States, taking off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, New York, and landing at Rockwell Field in San Diego, California. The 2,470-mile trip clocked in at just less than 27 hours, but more than half of that time was spent flying through storms and rain, in addition to the difficulty of night flying through unchartered skies.
In a harrowing account, he described just how difficult the flight had been. “We crossed the continent without landing, flew in darkness for 13 ½ hours, experienced very bad weather, and flew without sleep,” he noted. “With a limited amount of fuel, straying off course would cause us not to reach the west coast. There were no railroads established, nor air or mail routes to follow. When we emerged from the storms and darkness, we were right on course using only our compass and knew we had enough fuel to reach San Diego. We take great pride in that feat of navigation.”1
That remarkable achievement was certainly a lot more complicated than the first crop dusting test, an event he recalled in detail in a personal letter dated Jan. 28, 1969, to Richard Reade, owner of Mid-Continent Aircraft in Hayti, Missouri.
For Macready, it was just another day at the office, as evidenced by the tone in the letter.
Dear Mr. Reade:
Thank you for your letter. I will tell you about my connection with crop dusting. It is interesting to see how things develop.
From about 1919 to 1926, the development of aviation moved fast at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio. I was Chief of the Flying Section and a test pilot.
There had been some experimenting in regard to scattering military clouds (poisonous gas) from airplanes and the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked McCook Field to see if crops could be sprayed from airplanes with insecticides. The engineering job was turned over to a tough, intelligent little Frenchman named Dormoy. [see side story] He developed and supervised the construction of the spraying equipment that was built on the airplane. I think that it was a Vought airplane. Dormoy deserves the credit for operating the spraying equipment.
Three men from the Department of Agriculture came to my office in the Flying Section and said that they wanted the crop dusting trial conducted on a catalpa grove near Troy, Ohio, which, if I remember correctly, was about ten miles north of McCook Field. I was told generally what they wanted to accomplish.
With Dormoy in the back seat to operate the dusting equipment, I flew the airplane to an open pasture near the catalpa grove and landed, getting the wind direction and looking over the grove on the way there. General flying conditions to accomplish this job, the best height to fly above the trees, and the wind speed and direction were considered.
We were told to wait a certain length of time at the pasture to permit the Department of Agriculture men to get to the catalpa grove.
Dormoy and I discussed the proper direction to fly over the grove so that the wind would drift the dust where it was wanted and then took off and flew back and forth across the catalpa grove at about 8 or 10 feet above the trees. We could see from the airplane that the dust was spreading in the right place.
We flew back to the pasture, landed and waited and then Dormoy and I left the airplane and walked down the road toward the catalpa grove.
After we had walked a few minutes, we looked ahead down the road and saw three men running toward us. When we got to them, they were so breathless and excited that they could barely talk. It had been a perfect success. What had been a very big thing to them had been a short, easy flying job for us. We had thought of it as being a couple hours of comparatively simple flying.
In test flying, there are long, complicated, difficult tests that take months to complete and, in those days of aviation uncertainty, they were very dangerous tests. This was a simple, easy test that was perfectly accomplished and apparently satisfied the Department of Agriculture…
Yours truly,
COL. JOHN A. MACREADY,
USAF (Ret.)
Macready would go on to take part in another crop dusting test May 24-25, 1922, near Cleveland, Ohio, in a woodland area dense enough to prevent ground sprayers from having enough of an impact on the rising canker worm population. The hope was that a single aerial application would control the insects for a season. With Murphy’s law in full effect that day, changing winds and heavy rain complicated matters during the first run, though “the dust settled through the crowns of the trees and spread evenly over the upper canopy of the foliage.”2 After the rain, Macready applied another round of pesticides and the cumulative outcome was “almost perfect” control of the bugs.
Apart from the aforementioned, Macready was credited with other “firsts” as well, including being the first person to make a parachute jump from a plane at night, and, perhaps most astonishingly, he is considered the inventor of aviator glasses (just picture Tom Cruise’s Maverick character wearing them in Top Gun). They seem fashionable now, but in Macready’s day they served a practical purpose: to help deal with extreme sunlight and freezing temperatures at high altitudes and speeds. Essentially, they were designed to keep him alive performing tests that were designed to push him to his limits.
Those limits were often exceeded, which is why his first night parachute jump occurred. It was borne out of necessity. While making a flight from McCook Field to Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 1924, his engine died at 1,700 feet. He was close enough to Dayton to consider an emergency landing, but his emergency flares failed to ignite. He had no choice but to jump. He landed safely (though tangled in trees and in need of assistance to get down).
The early days of aviation were nothing if not adventurous. Perhaps his daughter, Sally Macready Wallace (who trained as a borate bomber pilot for aerial fire-fighting) said it best in her book, John Macready Aviation Pioneer: “During the 1920s, aviation was unsophisticated and dangerous. Pilots who took to the skies risked their lives to the whims of nature, the laws of physics, and the temperaments of untested machines.”3
Macready logged many hours doing just that, and lived to tell the tales, something he often enjoyed doing with other aviation pioneers.
“During my childhood, legendary aviators such as Orville Wright, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh frequently dropped by our house to visit my father,” wrote Macready Wallace. “Our home was filled with stories of heroic achievements, and my father’s mingled easily with the rest.”3
Before he passed away in 1979, he was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1968 and inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 1976. Other honors he received include a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Legion of Merit. Macready was posthumously enshrined in the National Agricultural Aviation Hall of Fame as part of its inaugural Hall of Fame class in 1982.
“Honor is its own reward,” he once said. “There is plenty of glory in connection with flights of this nature, and considerable satisfaction in doing one’s duty as a soldier and accomplishing a feat considered by many to be impossible.”1
Sources:
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. John A. Macready. Retrieved from https://airandspace.si.edu/support/wall-of-honor/john-macready
- Downs, Eldon W. and Lemmer, George F. (July 1965) Origins of Aerial Crop Dusting. Agricultural History, Vol. 39, No. 3. Published by Agricultural Historic Society.
- Wallace, Sally Macready. (1998) John Macready: Aviation Pioneer. At the Earth’s Ceiling. Manhattan, KS. Sunflower University Press.
