Travellers' Checks | Van Lear Black, the man who proved the potential for long-haul passenger flights
When he landed in Hong Kong, on a stopover from London to Tokyo in 1930, he was said to be the world’s most widely travelled air passenger
Van Lear Black was said to be the world’s most widely travelled air passenger when he landed in Hong Kong on March 20, 1930. His custom-furnished, three-engine Fokker F.VII was reportedly the largest plane ever to have visited what was then called Kai Tack Aerodrome, and the local press were out in force to welcome him. After a brief chat, Black “dressed in a grey suit and wearing kid gloves” left his two pilots to do the talking and “proceeded to his rooms at the Peninsula Hotel”.
The arrival in Hong Kong of a private air passenger was quite something in 1930, for as The Hongkong Telegraph wistfully declared, “the privilege and excitement of a long pleasure trip in an aeroplane does not fall to the lot of everybody”.
Known as the “flying millionaire”, the retired American businessman and newspaper publisher had already been flown from Holland to Batavia (now Jakarta) and back in a single-engine Fokker F.VII, which he had chartered from the Dutch airline KLM. He then made a return trip from London to South Africa in a three-engine variant of the same aircraft – similar to that in which he had now arrived in Hong Kong. These were routes and distances that no commercial airline had yet flown and Black’s mission was in part, he was quoted as saying, to “show that it was possible to encircle the globe by air in safety”.
The Hong Kong stopover was part of a flight from London to Tokyo, via Europe, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and China, and he left for Shanghai on March 24, reaching Tokyo on April 7. Black, his pilots, his secretary and their dismantled aircraft then travelled to San Francisco by steamship, before flying to his home city, Baltimore.
Having helped prove the potential for long-haul commercial passenger flights, with more such ventures planned, the frequent flier fell from his private yacht off the New Jersey coast that August, aged 54. Four aeroplanes, several coastguard vessels and a 200-metre-long Zeppelin airship – the USS Los Angeles – were sent to search for him, but his body was never found.