It later served airlines in Panama and Nicaragua before returning to the United States postwar.
Fitted with twin floats and extra fuel tanks, it was sold to the Soviet Union and used for a 10,000 mile Santa Monica to Moscow flight.
A V-1AD was used in 1936 during an attempt at the first New York-London-New York double crossing, flown by Harry Richman and Henry T. "Dick" Merrill, in the famous "Ping Pong" flight, when to ensure buoyancy in case of ditching, empty spaces in the aircraft were filled with ping pong balls.
Fitted with twin floats and extra fuel tanks, it was sold to the Soviet Union and used for a 10,000 mile Santa Monica to Moscow flight.
A V-1AD was used in 1936 during an attempt at the first New York-London-New York double crossing, flown by Harry Richman and Henry T. "Dick" Merrill, in the famous "Ping Pong" flight, when to ensure buoyancy in case of ditching, empty spaces in the aircraft were filled with ping pong balls.
It was later used by Nationalist forces in Spain as a transport and high speed bomber.
When the U.S. Bureau of Air Commerce, the precursor to the FAA, placed restrictions on airliners that favored the safety margin of twin-engine designs, airline service for the rakish V-1s faded, and they became business aircraft and, curiously, bombers and transports ultimately used by both sides in the Spanish civil war.
By sometimes circuitous means to avoid government intervention, 16 secondhand V-1s went to Spain’s government for use as military aircraft in the civil war that started in 1936.
The clean performance of Jerry Vultee’s V-1 lent itself to some endurance flights.
Carrying U.S. civil registration NC13770, a V-1A flown by Jimmy Doolittle spanned the United States in 12 hours in January 1935.
In 1936, this same Vultee took on a load of 40,000 ping pong balls intended to give it buoyancy in the event of a water landing as the aircraft performed the first round-trip double Atlantic crossing with pilot Henry T. Merrill.
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