It is said that the first automobile race took place the moment the second car was built, but motorsport took a bit longer to appear in aviation. The first air race was flown in 1909, in France, more than five years after the Wright brothers’ first flight. There were four entrants. Two started the race and none finished. The rules had foreseen that. They specified that the winner would be the competitor who had traveled farthest.
Things hadn’t progressed much by August 1927, when the Dole Derby, a heavily promoted race between California and Hawaii, limped to an unfortunate start. Eleven racers entered the contest, six actually flew and two finished. Ten people—pilots, navigators and one unfortunate passenger—died before the race was over. Two entrants later died while searching for survivors.
Call it the Dole Disaster and blame it on the pineapple.
In 1899, 22-year-old James Dole moved to Honolulu with a Harvard degree in agriculture in his suitcase, and he began canning pineapple. In 1907, Dole set about advertising his exotic product throughout the U.S. mainland and soon had a hit on his hands. By 1922, Dole pineapples were so popular that young James bought the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai as a 20,000-acre pineapple plantation.
In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, and aviation suddenly became the hottest game in town. Airports and airlines sprang up everywhere; aviators set and broke records weekly. The months after Lindbergh’s flight were called the Summer of Eagles, and some people were seeking a Pacific Eagle. Hollywood theater mogul Sid Grauman offered $30,000 for the first flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Dallas stockbroker William Easterwood put up $25,000 for anyone who could make the first flight from Dallas to Hong Kong in less than 300 hours, with no more than three refueling stops. And immediately after James Dole announced plans for what would become the infamous California-to-Hawaii Dole Derby, the San Francisco Citizen’s Flight
