Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Air Derby and the Thrilling First Flights That Opened the Pacific

By Jason Ryan

A thrilling account, Race to Hawaii chronicles the first flights to Hawaii in the 1920s, during the Golden Age of Aviation. These journeys were fraught with danger. To reach the tiny islands, fearless pilots flew unreliable and fragile aircraft outfitted with primitive air navigation equipment. The Dole Derby was an unprecedented 1927 air race in which eight planes set off at once across the Pacific, all eager to reach the islands first and claim a cash prize offered by "Pineapple King" James Dole. Military men, barnstormers, a schoolteacher, a Wall Street bond salesman, a Hollywood stunt flyer and veteran World War aces all encountered every type of hazard during their perilous flights. With so many pilots taking aim at the far-flung islands in so many different types of planes, everyone wondered who would reach Hawaii first, or at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780912777269

Jason Ryan

Jason Ryan lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His previous nonfiction books are Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs; Hell-Bent: One Man's Crusade to Crush the Hawaiian Mob; and Race to Hawaii: The 1927 Dole Air Derby and the Thrilling First Flights that Opened the Pacific.

Reviews for Race to Hawaii

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Dole Air derby of 1927 is an event that I've been aware of forever but it's also the case that it's been literally decades since I've really thought about it, so my interest perked up immediately when I saw that there was a new book on the topic. This account is rather different in that the author is coming at the topic not as an aviation enthusiast (which he was not at the start) but as a journalist, so he's more concerned with context and how the events were covered in real time. Be that as it may what I knew of the story was that the actual race was regarded as a bloody fiasco, and it was, but not necessarily for the reasons that concerned period commentators. They tended to be fixated on the demise of Mildred Doran, the flying mascot of the plane "Miss Doran," a young woman who wound up being the Christa McAuliffe of her time and how this enterprise seemed to represent the barnstorming phenomena taken to its logically stupid conclusion.While this is true to a degree the basic point is that while the best practice of aeronautical engineering had produced aircraft that were viable enough to make the flight from the United States to Hawaii (this is all taking place in the excitement of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic) the hard part was that navigation techniques had a long way to go before they were truly reliable. The aircraft on the cover was not one of the Dole Derby competitors, but the Army Air Service machine "Bird of Paradise" that was purposely sent out as an "x-plane" to test long-range navigation methods and technology. The cream of the Dole competitors did their best to learn from the previous Hawaii flights (which included a USN flight of flying boats and the first civilian crossing made by the "City of Oakland") but the margins were very narrow between success and failure. Much of the rationale for the the Dole Derby was to entice Lindbergh into making another record flight, but he wanted nothing to do with the whole enterprise!