Travellers' Checks | When 11 pilots set out to fly from Rome to Tokyo a century ago, only two made it
- It took the successful crews more than three months to reach their destination, where they received heroes welcomes
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One hundred years ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1920, 11 Italian aircraft – a selection of rickety-looking biplanes and one triplane – took off with their two-man crews from Rome, and headed towards Tokyo. Some of the first European fliers to attempt to reach East Asia by air, they were participating in the Raid Roma-Tokyo, an epic aerial endeavour dreamt up by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Of the 11 flight crews, only two made it all the way to Japan, arriving within an hour of each other in Tokyo, on May 31. The leisurely route flown by pilots Arturo Ferrarin and Guido Masiero, and their two flight engineers, crossed Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia. There was no airfield in Hong Kong in 1920, but in China they visited Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Qingdao, Beijing and Goubangzi, before flying down through Korea and across to Japan.
The other nine aircraft either broke down or crashed along the way, one of them fatally. Masiero had made part of the journey by train and ship, after crashing and replacing two planes, but both crews were given a hero’s welcome when they landed at Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park. A report in The Hongkong Daily Press described “the wave of cheering which swept the mass of people who had turned out to pay homage to these daring young men of sunny Italy”.
As the first person to fly all the way from Europe to Japan, Ferrarin has since been honoured in a number of ways. In 1970, Italy’s flag carrier, Alitalia, named its second Boeing 747 “Arturo Ferrarin” (the first was named after the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong). In 1992, he briefly appeared in the animated film Porco Rosso , Hayao Miyazaki’s homage to the aircraft and airmen of 1920s Italy. Based on his watercolour manga called Hikotei Jidai (“The Age of the Flying Boat”), it was originally intended as a short film to be shown in-flight on Japan Airlines, which provided funding, but eventually became a full-length feature.
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