Breitling Air Corps Sets Record Circumnavigating The Globe In A 77-Year-Old Douglas DC-3

Yesterday I went up in Breitling’s 1940 Douglas DC-3. To execute a photo-op flyby with the Hollywood sign in the background, we flew directly south from Van Nuys Airport to pass over the plane’s birthplace, Santa Monica Airport. This fall when the elegant DC-3 reaches home in Geneva for the Breitling Sion Airshow, it will be the oldest plane to ever circumnavigate the globe.

Starting in Switzerland this past March not far from Breitling’s shop, the 77-year-old twin-engine plane flew along the Balkan peninsula to Greece then on to Tel Aviv, Amman and the Emirates. Francisco Agullo, primary pilot, owner of the DC-3, and Breitling’s partner in the preservation of significant aircraft, next flew to Karachi, then India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, China and Japan before crossing to Alaska, landing on Shemya, a five sq. mi island in the Aleutian chain about 1200 miles south of Anchorage.

Agullo has earned his keep flying commercial passenger jets for Swissair and developing pilot training programs, but his real passion is elemental forms of flight, seeking just the sort of adventures the pioneers of aviation pursued nearly 100 years ago. He spent many years as a bush pilot in Canada, then flew in Africa for the United Nations. Agullo has completed nine round-the-world flights, including one in 2010 in an Ultralight, which isn’t much more than a hang-glider with a lawnmower engine and a chair.

Agullo and Breitling successfully partnered to preserve a four-engine Lockheed Super Constellation, but for the DC-3 Agullo and his band of aviation enthusiasts had far greater ambitions. To help defray costs of this round-the-world expedition of the skies, Agullo and Breitling agreed to stash a 500-piece limited edition of its brand-defining Navitimer chronograph deep in the plane’s belly, gaining retail value with every leg of the journey.

Like many of us in the car world who enjoy the computer-driven perfection of contemporary high-performance cars but yearn for intimate connection to the mechanical workings and physics of a vintage car no matter how much slower it might be, Agullo and his crew of pilots clearly revel in the DC-3. Look the plane over and you’ll see jointed arms and all manner of finely honed pieces under the alloy skin, all manipulated with levers and knobs in the tiny cockpit. Agullo has added sensible elements like GPS navigation and enough of the latest tech to fly in bad weather—the plane took off from Oakland yesterday morning in heavy fog without trouble. But this DC-3 remains the pure and simple plane that defined reliable air travel in the age of Indiana Jones, and that Supreme Allied Commander and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower credited as one of the four most important tools of victory in World War Two.

Agullo has accumulated enough stories for a book patterned after one of my favorites, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Wind, Sand and Stars,” which made me fall in love with the idea that life is a series of adventures large and small. Before our short flight, Agullo described the challenges of taking off and landing in 130F temperatures in the Sub-Continent, and being forced to fly over India at more than 13,000 feet, a few thousand feet beyond where humans can easily draw enough oxygen. He also provided a simple metric: one hour of flight requires 100 man-hours of maintenance and preparation.

To gain adequate range for the crossing from Asia to the Aleutians, a bladder-like fuel tank was strapped into the center of the passenger cabin, but on this open-ocean flight along the coast of Kamchatka the wings began icing, forcing Agullo to fly for many hours at altitudes of 1500 feet, and as low as 500 feet. Agullo’s quiet description of the flight echoes Exupéry’s tale of flying a mail plane from Chile to Argentina, Andean winds pressing Exupéry’s tiny craft downward and out to sea. The main differences are Agullo’s manifest skill as a pilot and modest demeanor, whereas Exupéry spooled poetic language and was by all accounts a merely adequate pilot whose great children’s book, “The Little Prince,” resulted from his experiences after crashing in the desert of French North Africa.

Passion for Breitlings and the company’s special place in the history of aviation produced drama along the way. Agullo and one other pilot have non-numbered pilot’s editions of the DC-3 circumnavigation Navitimer. In the Emirates, a Sheik who collects Breitling watches was willing to trade what was no doubt a $100,000+ hefty gold Breitling for the circumnavigation Navitimer on Agullo’s wrist. The limited edition is sold out, their owners no doubt anxious for the safe return of Agullo and his beautiful plane at the Sion Airshow.

Though we enjoyed a subtle whiff of fuel in the warm, stuffy cabin during flight and I chuckled at the sight out my window of a tiny trail of lubricant weeping over the engine’s alloy shrouding, reminding me of period-correct luxury and sports cars of the 1940s and ‘50s that I have owned, this "Band of Brothers" plane flew confidently. Our landing was smoother than any of recent memory in a modern commercial aircraft, thanks to Francisco Agullo’s subtle hand.