When ‘Cape Cod’ flew to Istanbul

LEE ROSCOE PHOTO

FAMILY PRIDE – Dorothy Polando and son David enjoy the reception for a new documentary about John Polando and Russell Boardman’s daring 1931 flight from New York to Istanbul. The medal around her neck was given to her husband by the Turks.

New documentary celebrates pioneering achievement

The documentary Cape Cod to Istanbul premiered on July 31 at the Cape Cod Cultural Center in South Yarmouth to commemorate the 80th anniversary of an historic flight taken in 1931. They flew on a mix of skill, good mechanics, know-how and daring. In a little over two days (49 hours), a specially designed airplane flew from New York City’s Floyd Bennett Field, 5,011.8 miles to Istanbul, Turkey. The pilots were John L. Polando and Russell N. Boardman, who named their plane the “Cape Cod” and painted it on their fuselage because it was the first area discovered in America.

Boardman was born to a farm family in Connecticut in 1898. According to the documentary made over four years by Turkish director Aydin Erel, Boardman was both virtuous and a daredevil, becoming a Hollywood stunt pilot, flying for such as Howard Hughes in the film Hell’s Angels. Polando, born in 1901 in Lynn, learned to fly in 1918 and joined the Army Air Corps in 1927.

They met at a “Wall of Death” motorcycle event in Revere, where Boardman was a cyclist, and became lifelong friends. Boardman thought Polando at 120 pounds and with excellent aviation mechanic skills would make a great co-pilot. Together they pursued the dream of breaking a world record.

A few transcontinental flights had occurred in those days. One at least had been flown in an aeroplane designed by Giuseppe Bellanca. Together with Bellanca Aviation, Polando and Boardman redesigned Boardman’s plane “The American Legion” after a fire had badly damaged it. No longer was it a dragonfly-like biplane typical of the times, instead it was a monoplane that sported a set of extra-long wings to carry an extra big load of fuel which it would burn at 10 gallons an hour, for a seventy mile span. During a test flight with 740 gallons aboard, the plane was too heavy. They jettisoned 500 gallons over Brooklyn, and flew back, sparks flying behind them.

Working with meteorologists and mapmakers, and with a new distance-measuring device, the stripped-down “ship” weighed one ton before loading it with fuel for a final weight of thee and a half tons. The NR 761W with the new name of “Cape Cod” was ready to go.

From New York over Long Island up to Newfoundland, through massive cloud cover they dropped a New York Times out to the Harbour Grace island lighthouse. They dropped the papers at various spots on the trip, as it was their major financier along with ten thousand postcards the pilots had sold for two dollars a piece as mementos.  Flying on to Ireland, then Paris and Munich, they circled around the Alps at night to avoid crashing into them. They came near failure when a fuel tank went dry, stalling out and starting up to continue in the day onwards to Istanbul. (They had decided to fly there rather than to Moscow because the distance would be enough to break the former record for the longest transcontinental flight.) They arrived having eaten a roast chicken and sleeping in brief shifts, pretty tired and hungry, and temporarily deaf.

The government of Turkey welcomed them with celebration, grand hotels, medals of diamonds, sapphires and emeralds, and gold, and vast proclamations. Ataturk, Gazi Mustafa Kemal, the Grand Pasha said they had “turned the Black Sea into a lake.” He commended the aviators as part of the “youth (who) are the creators of compassion.” (There is grim irony here to those who know history and are aware of Ataturk’s huge part in the Armenian genocide of 1918, a history of which it may be likely the pilots were aware.)

Back at home President Herbert Hoover gave them each the Distinguished Flying Cross. The two traveled to New York and Boston where parades were given in their honor, finally arriving at Cape Cod. Boardman settled eventually in Bass River and Polando in East Sandwich, and members of the family still live in both places. One of the pilots said on a newsreel that they loved Cape Cod: “It’s a wonderful place, cool in the summer and warm in the winter!”

In their honor the Barnstable Municipal Airport was named Boardman/Polando Field in 1981. When the new airport layout is complete, it will do more than show the extant plaque to commemorate the two.

At the Yarmouth event, t about a hundred folks, including Boardman and Polando friends, family, and airport commission members, spanned ages from the Greatest Generation, down to toddling great great grandchildren.  (The audience was so good looking and clean cut, it was like a brisk blue wind blowing out of the unpolluted skies.)

Dorothy Boardman (who kept the Patriot’s books for 15 years), is now 95. She told the audience she had seen a wonderful newsreel about two brave men in her hometown of Milwaukee.

“I told my father, who had been a World War I pilot, about how these wonderful men had made an astonishing record,” she recalled. “My father was impressed.”

Thirteen years and four months later, she was the head USO hostess at the Brown Palace in Denver when John Polando and a friend walked in as the bar was closing. She suggested the men go across the street to get something to eat. “I don’t think I can find it,” John said, enlisting her help (against regulations). He and his friend tossed a double-headed coin to see who would take her home. John (who had been previously married) “won.”  They were married on April Fool’s Day.  “The military had a sense of humor then,” Polando said. “They gave him two days off.”

They never discussed airship accidents, Polando said, and had a wonderful relationship, blessed with three children and numerous descendants. Boardman died two years after the historic flight. Polando lived until 1985. The plane itself came back to the states on the ship “Excalibur” and later was lost after being shipped to Mexico.

The film has a few difficulties. Some footage is hard to hear and needs subtitles. Subtitles that are on the footage need to be larger and clearer. Names are not flashed on the screen so it is difficult to tell which pilot is speaking, or who the political figures are. The loose ends of where the pilots ended up in their lives, what they did, how they lived after the flight were never told, leaving the story incomplete. But the feat itself, performed without the instruments we take for granted today, lives on in aviation history.

“They were all alone up there in those days,” an audience member said. They sure were.