Qualla: Lituanica

Lituanica: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The donors' names were painted onto the airplane. Along both flanks of the orange fuselage ran scrolls listing the sponsors — Lithuanian clubs and societies scattered across the United States, immigrant families who had passed the hat at picnics and air shows so that two of their own could try the Atlantic. When Steponas Darius and Stasys Girėnas lifted off from Floyd Bennett Field on the morning of 15 July 1933, they carried a whole community into the air with them, lettered on the skin of the plane. Thirty-seven hours later the aircraft came down in a forest near the German town of Soldin — now Pszczelnik, near Myślibórz in Poland — 636 kilometres short of Kaunas.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Lituanica: Thirty-Two Hundred Dollars

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sijtze Reurich, Public domain. They bought her on 18 June 1932 from the Pal-Waukee Company for $3,200: a Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker, serial number 137, registered NC-688E. Only forty of the type were ever built — a single-engine, six-seat high-wing monoplane with a welded chromoly tube fuselage under fabric, sp...

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Image: Sijtze Reurich | Public domain

Lituanica: Thirty-Seven Hours, Eleven Minutes

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bank of Lithuania, Public domain. They rolled at 6:24 in the morning, Eastern time. The planned route ran New York, Newfoundland, the Atlantic, Ireland, London, Amsterdam, Swinemünde (now Świnoujście, Poland), Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and finally Kaunas airport — 7,186 kilometres in all. Weather over...

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Image: Bank of Lithuania | Public domain

Lituanica: Kuhdamm, 0:36

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit myself (User:Piotrus), CC BY-SA 3.0. They went down at thirty-six minutes past midnight on 17 July, in woods by the village of Kuhdamm outside Soldin. Both men died. In Kaunas a crowd was already gathering at the airfield to meet them. Before leaving New York the two had written that either a successful flight or a ...

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Image: myself (User:Piotrus) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lituanica: What the Commission Could Determine

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Terminator216, CC BY-SA 4.0. A Lithuanian board of investigation went over everything. It found the pilots properly qualified and the aircraft properly outfitted, and noted that the most difficult portion of the flight had been executed with great precision. The engine had been running at impact — the propel...

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Image: Terminator216 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lituanica: How a Country Keeps Two Men

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vytis1, Public domain. Chicago's Lithuanian community, which had helped pay for the plane, raised an Art Deco monument to the pair in Marquette Park in 1935; it is still standing. That same year Feliksas Vaitkus flew Lituanica II in their memory. In 1943 the sculptor Bronius Pundzius carved their faces...

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Image: Vytis1 | Public domain

Lituanica: The Forest at Pszczelnik

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jan Jerszyński, CC BY-SA 2.5. The place where they actually came down is the quietest of all of it. A monument stands in the woods at Pszczelnik, a few kilometres from Myślibórz, in a corner of Poland that was German when the Lituanica fell out of the sky and had never heard of either man. A local school name...

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Image: Jan Jerszyński | CC BY-SA 2.5