Great secrecy was required for Roosevelt’s journey to Casablanca, such great secrecy, in fact, that the pilot of the Dixie Clipper, the Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat that was to carry the president across the Atlantic Ocean, didn’t even know who his passenger was until he saw FDR on board the plane before takeoff. Roosevelt left Miami, Florida, on January 11, 1943, and spent thirty- three hours crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Although the journey went without incident, not everyone was pleased with the president’s decision
World War II. The first aircraft, a C- 87A (a Consolidated B-24D Liberator bomber configured as a transport plane), was made available to Roose- velt on June 2, 1943, and was named the Guess Where II (a play on the phrase “Guess where to?”). A key consideration in selecting what was essentially a bomber for the presi- dent’s plane was its ability to fly long distances without refueling. A plane with a long range, like the C-87A, would make it unnecessary for FDR to make frequent stopovers, and this, it was reasoned, would help eliminate some of the security issues connected with his traveling by air. The cabin of the Guess Where II was
The Dixie Clipper, a Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat, shown here during a landing, made history in 1943 as the first plane to transport a serving US president.
to fly to the conference, as a statement made soon after the event by Washing- ton Evening Star writer Christopher Wayne makes clear. “Aviation is demanding and unforgiving,” Wayne wrote. “It is still not clear that the obvious advantages of air travel carry greater weight than the peril incurred by risking the life of a president on a journey through the sky.” Risky or not, Roosevelt would continue to travel by air during World War II, making at least two other long-distance trips—to Tehran, Iran, in November 1943 and to Yalta, in the Soviet Union, in February 1945.
The First Presidential Plane Despite the fact that many Ameri-
cans continued to object to the idea of a sitting president traveling by air, air travel had obvious advantages and was becoming recognized as an efficient way to transport the nation’s leader. As a result, two aircraft were outfitted especially for FDR during
30
as the first plane to transport a serving US president.
divided into four compartments, each modeled after the sleeper compart- ments of railroad cars of the day, and could comfortably accommodate nine passengers for overnight travel or twenty passengers for daytime travel. In addition, the Guess Where II had
two bathrooms and a full kitchen. Because of concerns on the part of the Secret Service and the US Army Air Corps regarding the C-87A’s safety record, however, President Roosevelt never actually flew on the Guess Where II. Instead, the plane was used to transport senior government and military officials, and in 1944, it took Eleanor Roosevelt on a lengthy tour of South American and Caribbean military bases. And, FDR continued to pave the way for future presidential air travel by making trips on various military and civilian aircraft. One presidential plane, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster, referred to as the Sacred Cow by the press, was config- ured specifically to accommodate FDR. Roosevelt’s use of a wheelchair required that special ramps be located at the airfields where his planes landed and took off. Because it was feared that these ramps would signal the president’s presence, especially at foreign airfields, an elevator was built into the Sacred Cow that could lift his wheelchair straight up into the belly of the plane. FDR flew in the Sacred Cow only one time before his death, when he took the aircraft from the Mediterranean island of Malta to Yalta in 1945. Nevertheless, the Sacred Cow continued to serve as the presidential plane until 1947, when President Truman’s own plane, a Douglas DC-6 Liftmaster, called the Independence, was commissioned. The Independence served as the president’s plane until Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, took office in 1953.
u President Truman’s Douglas DC-6 Liftmaster, called the Independence, was commissioned in 1947.
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PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
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