Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to fly in an airplane.
On October 11, 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt took to the skies above St. Louis, Missouri, aboard a Wright Company aircraft. This unprecedented event, which took place roughly 19 months after Roosevelt left office, made Roosevelt the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane. The decision to fly was off the cuff: Roosevelt was visiting Missouri to support state Republicans in their election campaign when he was invited to hop aboard the airplane by aviator Arch Hoxsey. He initially declined, but then changed his mind and climbed aboard. The plane took Roosevelt to “a height of less than one hundred feet,” according to a New-York Tribune article, and covered 3 miles over the span of 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Roosevelt was described by a reporter from the United Press as having “defied death” in front of 10,000 breathless onlookers, and emerged saying, “That was the bulliest experience I ever had.”
Teddy wasn’t the only Roosevelt to make aviation history. In 1932, his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt flew from New York to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to accept the party’s presidential nomination. FDR later became the first president to fly on a plane on January 13, 1943, when he flew to Morocco to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The journey was more than 15,000 miles total, as the plane made refueling stops in Trinidad, Brazil, and the Gambia on the way. The president would have normally taken a boat, but doing so was far too risky given the German submarine activity in the Atlantic Ocean at the time.
