An old Ford pickup truck barreled down an empty highway full of sand, swerving to keep up with the single-engine, fixed-wing airplane puttering several feet overhead.
From the passenger seat of the truck, a man angled a bucket up toward another man who was dangling from the open door of the Cessna 172 aircraft with “LAS VEGAS: Hacienda Hotel” painted brightly on the fuselage.
On day 36, Timm dozed off for an hour during his shift. When he woke up, sweating, they were in a canyon, somewhere in Arizona, maybe California.
After the man yanked the bucket up to the plane by rope, he collapsed back into his crawl space and the plane crept a little higher, a little farther from the ground, circling Nevada, California, and Arizona, again and again and again, coming down only for supplies, twice a day.
By the end of their journey, in February 1959, the two men in the plane had accomplished a remarkable feat, and it nearly cost them their lives.
Fruitcake and mobsters
The whole adventure began with fruitcake. Apparently, Warren “Doc” Bayley, an eccentric travel columnist, liked fruitcake enough to buy his own fruitcake business.
The company did well, well enough that Bayley sold it for a sizeable profit. He used some of the money to buy land north of Fresno, California, where he built a hotel. He called it the Hacienda.
Bayley traveled a lot for his work. He had stayed in every kind and quality of lodging. For years, he had been imagining what the perfect hotel would be like. And he would build it. He knew it.
The hotel business suited him, and he quickly turned the Hacienda into a chain.
Soon, he was eyeing a much bigger, much riskier property in Las Vegas: a hotel on the then-unpopulated south side of the Vegas Strip called Lady Luck.
At that time, the Strip was an isolated, undesirable area, far from the rest of the casinos and hotels. Halfway through construction, the financing collapsed. Suddenly it was becoming too big a hassle. Everyone gave up on the hotel. They assumed that it was too far out of the way and too lavish to ever make its money back.
Undeterred, Bayley signed a 15-year lease at $55,000 a month. To succeed, he would have to make a big move. He would have to rebrand the Vegas experience.
At the time, Vegas needed it. Most casinos were still firmly in the grip of the Mafia, and the wiseguys were increasingly unable to hide the funny business, which often included murder.
Selling the Strip
Bayley’s Hacienda would be Mexican-themed, a family-friendly casino and hotel in direct reaction to the seedy, salacious excess of old Vegas.
Putt-putt golf course. Go-cart track. A massive swimming pool. All at reasonable prices. Retirees from all over America would flock to the Hacienda’s iconic sign: the horse and rider in neon. And he was right. But in those early days, it was all dust and empty rooms.
All he needed was a gimmick. He’d tried the usual avenues: coupons, advertisements, faux word of mouth. He even hired attractive women to hand out flyers to passing cars.
It was time for something more drastic. Like any good salesman, he appealed to our imaginations.
Come fly with me
Human beings have always wanted to fly. We’ve always looked to the sky for hope. It’s where we’ve always wanted to go.
In his lifetime, Leonardo da Vinci wrote over 35,000 words and drew more than 500 sketches about flying machines and the nature of air. He was obsessed with bird flight. He wrote: “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
Da Vinci could never have foreseen the industrial revolution, not the way it came about.
The first commercial liquid-fueled internal combustion engine was invented in 1872. Aviation began 31 years later, on December 17, 1903, with the Wright brothers, who after four years of research and design efforts, made history with a 120-foot, 12-second flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — the first powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.
We’ve gotten used to flight by now, so it’s easy to forget that it’s only been a little over 100 years. Easy to forget that every time a plane takes off or lands, it’s a miracle. It’s unbelievable that a 300-ton Boeing 747 can fly through the sky, safely, full of passengers and stale pretzels.
Still, miraculous as flight is, most of us find air travel tedious, mind-numbing, and claustrophobic. An hour on a plane is enough to irritate many people. Twelve hours is unimaginable. Any longer than that, the flight attendants better have an endless supply of tiny wine bottles, or else people will start snapping.
What kind of lunatic would test the limits of sanity by staying on a plane one minute longer than needed?
A lunatic’s bet
That lunatic was Robert Timm, one of the slot machine mechanics at the Hacienda.
Timm was a bear of a man. He’d been a bomber pilot during WWII, and he had a passion for flying. He convinced Bayley that an endurance flight was exactly what the Hacienda needed to make a name for itself.
Cleverly, Bayley designated it a fundraiser for cancer research. It was gambling, but for a good cause: People would guess how long the plane would stay in the air. The person who guessed the closest time would win $10,000.
It would take a year or so to build and customize the Hacienda Cessna 172. Now an aviation icon and the most-produced plane of all time, the Cessna 172 had only been available since 1955.
Timm and another mechanic installed a 95-gallon Sorenson belly tank on the plane. That way, they could refuel midair with the help of a Ford truck and an electric pump. They also rigged the plane so that they could change the engine’s oil mid-flight.
Roughly the size of a Toyota Camry, the cabin of a Cessna 172 can snugly seat four people (but not a toilet). They removed all the seats except for the pilot seat and converted the rest of the cabin into a tiny makeshift living area.
Timm had tried marathon flights three other times, but never stayed in the air longer than 15 days.
His second attempt came to a halt with a massive boom. As he wrote in his journal, “at 4 a.m. one morning the entire sky lit up.” He had been in the air during one of the 57 above-ground atomic bomb detonations set off during 1958 in the Nevada.
To complicate things further, there was a brand-new flight endurance record to contend with. To beat it, the men would need to remain in flight for over 50 days.
Medallion status
Timm and his co-pilot, John Wayne Cook, took off from McCarran Field in Las Vegas at 3:52 p.m. on December 4, 1958. To ensure that the men couldn’t land the plane surreptitiously, a chase car painted white stripes on the aircraft’s tires from below. These would scuff should they touch down before their official landing.
Most of the time, they refueled in Blythe (a desert town on the California-Arizona border) or swung out to Yuma, Palm Springs, or Los Angeles — where they made the occasional radio or TV flyby.
Confined to that cramped space, their everyday life resembled that of a prison inmate’s: lots of aimless reading and repetitive exercise and never-ending games — anything to pass the time as they buzzed around the sky. They had a little sink back there, and they “showered” by pouring bottled water over their heads.
They refueled twice a day, mid-flight, as a hose from the Ford tanker truck latched to the belly tank.
The two men piloted in four-hour shifts and did their best to sleep whenever they could, on a four-by-four cushion made of thick foam. It was hard to sleep, with all the rattling and mechanical groaning.
Asleep at the wheel
On January 9, day 36 of their flight, Timm dozed off for an hour during his shift. When he woke up, sweating, they were in a canyon, somewhere in Arizona, maybe California. Luckily, the autopilot had done its job.
Years later, he told a reporter: “I flew for two hours before I recognized any lights or the cities. I made a vow to myself that I would never tell John what had happened.”
Though he never said anything to Timm, Cook was aware of the near-disaster.
“… it was 2:55 a.m. and he [Timm] was fighting sleeplessness. On autopilot fell asleep 4000 FT over Blythe Airport found himself ½ way to Yuma Ariz 4000 ft. Very lucky. We must sleep more in the day time.”
All their food had to be mashed into thermos jugs, which were hoisted up with their daily supplies. Every other day, they got a quart of bath water, a large towel, and soap.
Darkness visible
A little over halfway through their journey, the plane’s generator went out. It had powered the plane’s interior lights and heating and was used to pump the fuel into the wing tanks. After that, they had to use a hand pump to move fuel up to the wings.
When it got really cold, they wrapped themselves in blankets, shivering. They had flashlights and had strung some Christmas lights through the cabin, but other than that they flew in the dark, a beautiful, endless darkness.
Cook wrote in his journal: “Hard to stay awake in dark place — can’t use radio — can’t use electric fuel pump. Pump all gasoline by hand, using minimum lights. … Don’t realize how necessary this power until all of a sudden — sitting in the dark — no lights in panel to fly by — flashlight burning out — can’t see to fix the trouble if you could fix at all.”
By the end of the marathon flight, they’d lost the tachometer, the autopilot, the cabin heater, the landing and taxi lights, the belly tank fuel gauge, the electrical fuel pump, and the winch.
Several times weather interrupted their refueling, and they had to scramble for a new opportunity, eyes shifting from clouds to fuel gauge, over and over.
They broke the record on Jan. 23, 1959, but kept going for another 15 days, until the spark plugs and engine combustion chambers became loaded with carbon, weakening the plane’s engine.
64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes. They’d flown over 150,000 miles through the air, roughly six trips around the planet.
The record stands to this day.
After the flight, Cook said: “Next time I feel in the mood to fly endurance, I’m going to lock myself in our garbage can with the vacuum cleaner running. That is until my psychiatrist opens up for business in the morning.”
Secretly, however, I’m sure he missed that feeling, the way he lived in the clouds, in the blue of the sky, high above everything, soaring like a bird.
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