Spare engines crated and loaded onto ships before the aircraft that would need them had left Seattle. That's the part of it I'd have been paid to worry about: fuel, oil and replacement Liberty engines moved ahead by sea to ports along the route, so that four open-cockpit biplanes could arrive somewhere and find their next engine already waiting. Floats on for the water legs, wheels on for the land ones, swapped by hand. About 26,345 miles in 175 days, April to September 1924.

The names I'd want on the manifest first: Lieutenant Leslie Arnold, who flew in Chicago with Lowell Smith and spent a great deal of the trip elbow-deep in that engine, and Sergeant Alva Harvey, mechanic to Major Frederick Martin. Martin and Harvey put Seattle into a mountainside in Alaska in fog, with charts that were not much help, and then walked out to the coast. The Boston came down in the North Atlantic later and couldn't be saved. Two aircraft of four lost. Eight men flew, eight men lived.

So it was Chicago and New Orleans that came down at Sand Point, and the Washington papers gave it a small item in the lower corner of the front page, well under the disarmament protocol and the baseball. There's a photograph of two of them standing on Chicago's lower wing with the cowling open, one leaning into the engine, pontoons underneath. That's the posture I remember from every trip I ever packed for.