A Utah man was the first to fly across the country in a single day. Now a USU grad student plans to retrace the journey, exactly 100 years later

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — On June 23, 1924, Russell L. Maughan, of Logan, Utah, became the first person to fly from one coast of the country to the other in a single day.

The pioneering flight — from New York City to San Francisco, with several refueling stops in between — took more than 21 hours.

Now, a century later, 26-year-old Nathan Hoch, who currently lives in Logan, is planning to retrace Maughan’s flight path, paying tribute to one of his personal heroes.

“Not many people plan these wild, disjointed trips just for some historic sake,” he said, describing the plan as a “hare-brained idea” he thought up a few months ago.

Yet, he committed to the trip when he found a flight for the last leg of the journey that lands in San Francisco within minutes of when Maughan completed his historic flight.

“I found a commercial flight that lands at 9:50 p.m., which is exactly 100 years after he landed in San Francisco,” Hoch said.

Maughan’s flight was a dawn-to-dusk venture. Per the National Museum of the United States Air Force, he took off in a PW-8 plane at first light and “raced the sun” across the country.

Maughan stopped five times to refuel. The total journey took 21 hours and 48 and-a-half minutes.

For Hoch, his journey will not be in one day. He plans to leave on June 19 and complete it on June 23.

Hoch is retracing the flight path through a mix of commercial flights and interstate drives, as some locations in the middle of the country are “hard to get to with commercial aviation.”

The first flight will bring Hoch to Dayton, Ohio. The next lands him in Kansas City, Missouri. After that, it’s a drive to North Platte, Nebraska, followed by another drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

After that, he’ll roll into Denver and fly to Salt Lake City, where his wife will drive him to Utah’s West Desert, which was one of Maughan’s more remote refueling stops.

“There’s nothing there,” Hoch said. “They just picked it because it’s flat, featureless terrain. An easy place to land.”

The last leg of Hoch’s trip will take him from Salt Lake to San Francisco on June 23, where he’ll land within moments of the 100-year anniversary of his hero’s history-making accomplishment.

While Hoch has long been interested in aviation history, he only learned about Maughan a few years ago while doing his undergraduate studies at USU. On campus, there is a monument to Maughan, who is in the Utah Aviation Hall of Fame.

Along with making the first single-day cross-country flight across America, Maughan also served with distinction in WWI.

“He was a fighter pilot and shot down four enemy aircraft, so that’s one shy of being an ace,” Hoch said.

When he was a student at USU, Hoch showed his then-girlfriend the monument to Maughan. She wasn’t turned off by his enthusiasm for the Utah pilot, who died 66 years ago.

“She’s now my wife,” Hoch said, adding that she was a bit unsure about his trip at first. “So it’s going to be a Father’s Day gift for me.”