Two Army biplanes touch down at Sand Point; the world has been circled for the first time by air

Five months earlier, four Army Air Service biplanes had left Seattle to attempt what no one had done: fly all the way around the earth. On September 28, 1924, two of them, New Orleans and Chicago, glided back onto the water at Sand Point Airfield, having covered 26,345 miles with no radios, navigating by dead reckoning alone. The other two aircraft, Seattle and Boston, had gone down along the route, but every one of the eight airmen survived. Crowds lined the shore at Sand Point to watch the two planes taxi in…