Las Vegas, 1958-59: Bob Timm and John Cook flew a Cessna 172, sponsored by the Hacienda hotel and casino, across the deserts of Nevada, Arizona and Southern California. The casino’s publicity stunt set a new record, landing 64 days and 22 hours after takeoff.

Yuma, 1949: Sponsored by the Jaycees, pilots Bob Woodhouse and Woody Jongeward kept the City of Yuma, an Aeronca Sedan AC-15, aloft for 46 days and 20 hours. Mechanical problems finally grounded the plane, but the city celebrated its record win.

Early endurance flights: As the era of barnstorming faded, aviators seeking a challenge turned to endurance flights, attempting to keep a plane in flight — without landing — for a record time. Various records were set in the 1940s before a crew from Fullerton, Calif., set the bar at 42 days.

The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Apr 14, 2013 1:50 AM

Matt Pipkin listened to his friend, who had called from the airport in Las Vegas, babbling about a plane hanging from the ceiling over the baggage carousels.

Back in the 1950s, he said, a couple of pilots kept the plane in the air for two months without landing. They refueled from a tank on the back of a speeding truck on a deserted road near Blythe, Calif., just west of the Arizona border, snagging a hose as the plane flew a few feet off the ground.

“You’ve got to do that,” the buddy said over the din of slot machines in the terminal. “You could, you could do it!”

Pipkin, the son of an airline pilot, had always talked about learning to fly. He had started taking lessons in high school. But this stunt sounded like the dumbest idea he’d ever heard.

The friend called again a few minutes later. The plane, he said, was in the “Guinness World Records” for longest flying time, almost 65 days in the air. No one had ever broken the record.

“Sixty-five days!” the friend said. “You could do it for a cause.”

Pipkin had no real cause at the moment, a June day in 2009. He was 24. He had finished school in Indiana and returned home to Boise, Idaho. His first business venture had faltered. He was struggling to resolve a painful episode from his past.

As he hung up the phone a second time, all he could think was how much more miserable he would be trapped in a tiny airplane for two months.

Yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He studied the history of endurance flights, a history of daring and recklessness. A history of people, not unlike Pipkin, trying to find meaning in the things they did.

And a history that, before it reached the airport baggage-claim carousels in Las Vegas, took a long, looping path over the empty deserts of western Arizona to a community with a cause of its own.

Yuma, 1949

A city in trouble, a city with a plan

In January 1949, four Yuma businessmen drove north to Parker for a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce there. They were searching for ideas because Yuma was in trouble.

With the end of World War II, the Army had moved to close the city’s air base in spite of the open desert for training areas and the perpetually clear flying weather. The Yuma economy was sagging. The city’s business leaders needed a solution before it was too late.

During the tour of Parker, the chitchat took a new turn. Instead of attracting new business, the city should do what it could to hold on to what it had.

Ray Smucker, manager of Yuma’s only radio station, offered an unexpected suggestion. “You know,” others remember him saying, “there is a lot of publicity in an endurance flight.”

At the time, the record was 30 days. During the Parker trip, a team in Fullerton, Calif., had made news with plans to break that record.

The men kept talking. On the drive back to Yuma, the idea took shape. They could put together a team, map out a plan, break the record. Keeping the plane in the air for that long would prove just how good Yuma’s flying conditions really were.

Within days, the Yuma Jaycees took over the planning. The project soon had a flight crew: former Navy pilot Bob Woodhouse and another pilot, Woody Jongeward.

“They were so confident,” said Shirley Woodhouse Murdock, Bob’s sister and co-author of the book “The Longest Flight,” an account of the quest. “They knew they could do it.”

Next, they needed a plane, and the Jaycees found one they could borrow from AA Amusement Co. in Yuma.

The Aeronca Sedan AC-15 could seat four people. Three of the seats would be ripped out to make room for supplies, leaving one for the pilot. The off-duty man would sleep in a corner.

The little plane, tail number N1156H, would be renamed the “City of Yuma.”

George Murdock, Shirley’s husband, was the service manager at a Buick dealership and volunteered to be part of the support crew.

“We were all gung-ho about it,” said Murdock, now 86. “The whole city got caught up in it.”

The biggest hurdle for an endurance flight was fuel. Several of the earlier endurance records were set with plane-to-plane refueling, but the process was still dangerous. It required skilled pilots and a second aircraft that burned even more fuel.

So the plane would be refueled from the ground. The pilots would fly low over a runway at the closed air base, dropping to within a few feet of the ground. The support crew would drive a 1948 Buick Super convertible that had been owned by Murdock.

As the Buick roared down the runway at 70 mph or more, the pilots would maneuver above the car and the ground crew would hand up 2.5-gallon steel milk cans filled with fuel. One of the pilots would use a hand pump to transfer the fuel to the tanks.

Mechanics also rigged a way to change the engine’s oil without landing, running a line through the firewall into the cockpit.

Woodhouse and Jongeward took off for the first time on April 21, 1949. At the time, no one knew how long they would have to stay airborne. The previous record stood at 30 days, but the competing crew in California was still in the air. And that first Yuma flight was grounded by technical problems after barely three days.

Soon, the Fullerton crew landed. That plane, another Aeronca, had been in flight for 42 days — 1,008 hours total.

Yuma’s challenge was now clear. They would try to stay in the air for 1,010 hours. “Ten-Ten” became the flight’s motto and also the radio call signal for the refueling car.

A second attempt fell victim to mechanical problems.

“After the second try, everybody had decided it was about impossible,” Murdock said. “But Ray Smucker just kept pushing.”

On the evening of Aug. 24, 1949, a little after 7:15 p.m., the flight crew again fired up the plane’s 145-horsepower Continental engine and rolled down the runway. The City of Yuma took off once more, and the city of Yuma held its breath.

Above Yuma

Through it all, ‘they were never afraid’

During the first two attempts, the ground crew developed a routine. The pilot would drop to just a few feet above the ground and fall into a formation with the Buick. The other pilot, secured with a special safety belt, would lean out the door and grab milk cans or oil or meals or water for bathing. Trash and waste were bagged and lowered to the car. The ground crew could usually hand off four fuel cans during a single trip down the 5,000-foot runway. For each of the twice-daily refueling runs, the car and plane would complete a dozen runs.

“We’d floorboard the car to take off and sometimes we’d end up sliding into the desert when we hit the end of the run,” Murdock said. Midway through the flight, Murdock had to replace the Buick’s engine. Tires were switched out regularly.

Refuelings turned into community events. Schools would bus kids to the airfield to watch. In the evening, high-school students would line up on the runway with portable lights to help the pilots begin the runs. At night, people would wander outside and use flashlights to send Morse code messages to the pilots.

The wives of the two pilots, Betty Jongeward and Berta Woodhouse, sometimes rode in the refueling car and would stand up and share a kiss with their husbands, who were hanging out of the cockpit.

“They were both staying at Betty’s house,” Shirley Murdock said. “They always said they were never afraid. You’d think they’d be concerned about an accident, but they always said they weren’t.”

Excitement grew as the pilots closed in on the record. News outlets around the world relayed accounts and interviews with the pilots. At 7:15 p.m. on Oct. 5, the City of Yuma broke the Fullerton record. The town lit up amid an explosion of sirens, factory and train whistles and thousands of automobile horns.

The plane stayed in the air for five more days and might have remained aloft longer, but it started developing mechanical problems. Mechanics on the ground devised a midair fix, but it was complicated and the pilots decided not to risk it. At 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 10, the City of Yuma touched down to the cheers of about 10,000 people, more than the population of the city at the time. The record was theirs.

Las Vegas, 1956

For casino, pilots take a gamble

In October 1956, Warren “Doc” Bayley opened the Hacienda hotel and casino on the far southern end of the Las Vegas Strip, far from the Sands, the Dunes, the Flamingo and the other gambling halls. Bayley wanted tourists driving up from Southern California to see his hotel first and stay there.

“The Hacienda was way out of town. People would say, ‘You can go to the Hacienda or you could go to Las Vegas,’ ” said Mark Hall-Patton, administrator of the Clark County Museum system in Las Vegas. “So, Doc came up with the idea of handing out coupons to truckers in Barstow. He hired kids at first, then he hired pretty girls, which stopped a lot more truckers.”

Bob Timm worked as a slot-machine mechanic at the Hacienda. He was a pilot, a veteran of bombing runs during World War II, and he liked adventure. He had heard about the endurance record set nearly a decade earlier in Yuma and he decided he wanted to break it. So he pitched the idea to Bayley as a way to give the hotel an identity.

Bayley immediately recognized a good publicity stunt. To help draw attention, the flight would benefit the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Bayley put up $100,000 for a Cessna 172, a sturdy, reliable small aircraft. Timm would fly the plane, along with another pilot.

Like the Yuma crew, Timm and the mechanics would run formations with a ground vehicle on a remote stretch of highway near Blythe. Instead of milk cans, the crew devised a way to hook onto a hose and pump the fuel into a tank installed on the plane’s belly.

The Hacienda flight failed three times in 1958, a victim of refueling issues, a clogged fuel filter and engine knocking. Timm and Bayley persisted. On Dec. 4, Timm and co-pilot John Cook took off from McCarran Field, with slightly less fanfare than Bayley had hoped for.

“Once they got to the fourth try, it was difficult to get the PR,” Hall-Patton said. “It was when they got to 40 or 50 days that they started getting attention.”

Timm kept a diary through most of the flights. During the third attempt, as he noted the condition of the plane and the consumption of fuel, he mentioned a bright flash of light in the northern sky. After some investigation, he realized he’d seen an above-ground atomic-bomb detonation at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

California authorities agreed to close a stretch of highway for the refueling runs. At night, an old airbase near Blythe was used.

Steve Timm was 5 years old when his father took to the skies. “We had a two-way radio in the house,” he said in an interview from his home in Simi Valley, Calif. “We were able to talk to my dad on a regular basis. It was a really big deal.”

On Christmas, Steve and his brother, Greg, watched from their backyard in suburban Las Vegas as their dad dropped presents from the plane, a barnstorming Santa act that his boys never forgot.

The Hacienda cooked meals for the pilots using the best ingredients, then chopped the food up and stuffed it into Thermos bottles, which were lifted up during refueling. The two men shaved and brushed their teeth in a steel sink fitted into the back of the cockpit. A foam mattress offered a bed. Midway through the flight, the generator failed, leaving the men to get by with flashlights and a string of Christmas lights powered by a wind generator.

Then there is The Question, the one everyone asks. There is no bathroom in a Cessna 172 and no room to install one even temporarily. So the two men rigged a system with a folding camp toilet and plastic bags. Once used, the bags were disposed of over unpopulated areas.

“I once asked John’s widow if they handed down the waste during refueling runs,” Hall-Patton said. “She said, ‘No. That’s why it’s so green around Blythe.’ ”

Timm and Cook escaped close calls. One night, Cook woke up and found Timm dozing at the controls. The plane had been on autopilot, but it had still strayed off their intended path. They began taking shorter shifts in the pilot’s seat.

Years later, Steve Timm began to understand what his father went through.

“Staying in the air for 65 days in a little plane the size of a Toyota, not landing,” he said. “The noise, the danger, flying at night, all the various things that could have gone wrong that didn’t. My dad was in his early 30s and it almost killed him. … My dad and John Cook were very lucky to have survived that, let alone break the record.”

On Jan. 20, 1959, the Hacienda plane surpassed the record set more than nine years earlier in Yuma. Timm and Cook stayed aloft 18 more days, finally landing in Las Vegas on Feb. 7 after flying more than 150,000 miles in 64 days and 22 hours.

Boise, 2007

After a painful secret, rising above

A few months before he received the excited call from his friend in Las Vegas, Matt Pipkin had begun to see a counselor in Boise, Idaho. He had graduated with a degree from Purdue University in 2007, but his foray into real estate had skidded off track amid the recession. He lost all the money he had invested in the business, and he felt lost, depressed.

He also found himself wrestling again with memories from his childhood. When he was 6, he was molested by a family friend, a secret he kept from his parents for many years.

As he worked with the counselor, he decided he needed to do something to help other young people with similar histories of abuse. And he realized he had just been given a way to gin up some publicity and maybe raise some money.

First, he had to learn to fly, so he signed up for lessons. Then he formed a group called Commit 65, drawing on the 65 days needed to break the Hacienda endurance record. The group is now called Speak Your Silence, with a broader mission of working with abuse victims.

Pipkin wants to raise the money and get ready to fly by late summer of 2014.

“People think it’s nuts, but it’s so unique that it grabs their attention,” he said. “No one really knows about the record anymore, so it’s interesting again.”

Pipkin, now 29, and his dad, Chet, are working to find a suitable aircraft, likely a Cessna 172, still a popular workhorse. Instead of flying circular paths, they want to chart a cross- country path, hoping to draw attention as they pass over each location. That has required a seemingly never-ending series of meetings with federal aviation authorities.

They plan to engage people through social media and video feeds, things that didn’t exist for Woodhouse, Jongeward, Timm and Cook.

“I thought this was the worst idea ever at the start,” Pipkin said. “I thought it sounded miserable. I still do. But it’s going to be a great platform to share a message and break the ice. People ask if it’s possible. It’s a matter of endurance. It’s completely possible.”

Today

A landing and a memory

None of the four pilots from the Yuma and Hacienda endurance flights is still alive. Bob Woodhouse died in 2003, in Roll, just outside Yuma. Woody Jongeward died in 2011 in San Diego. Bob Timm died in 1978. John Cook died in 1995.

A few years after his father passed away, Steve Timm was visiting the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and it occurred to him that the Cessna 172 used to set the endurance record deserved to be displayed somewhere. He began a search for the craft and finally tracked it to Carrot River, Saskatchewan. He called the owner, a bush pilot.

“He said, ‘I was wondering when one of Bob Timm’s sons might call,’ ” Timm said.

Timm persuaded the owner to sell the plane, and over the next few years, he worked on moving it and finding money to restore it. A chance meeting with the aviation director of Clark County, Nev., led to a deal to hang it at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas as part of a new aviation museum. It is now visible above the baggage-claim area.

The City of Yuma was also sold not long after its historic flight. In 1991, Jim Gillaspie, a pilot and a mechanical engineer at the Yuma Proving Ground, embarked on a search for the plane. In 1996, he found it on a farm in Staples, Minn. The farmer agreed to sell it, and Gillaspie set out to bring it back to Arizona. Today, it hangs from the ceiling of Yuma City Hall, above a Buick Super restored to look like the refueling vehicle.

George Murdock stood next to the car on a recent morning, craning his neck to see the plane.

“I look back at it now,” he said. “We were all so young. After the war, we were all trying to accomplish something. And we did.”