On its 55th flight, the airship USS Macon crashed on February 12, 1935. After taking off from Point Sur, California, a gust of wind tore off the ship's upper fin, which deflated the gas cells and caused the ship to fall into the sea. Most of Macon's 83 crewmen were rescued from the warm waters, but two of them died in the accident. The U.S. Navy had suffered the loss of the airship Shenandoah in 1925 and Akron in 1933. Some considered airships too dangerous for the program to continue at that point, and work on them in the United States halted temporarily.
On February 7, 1928, Australian Bert Hinkler took off from London in a two-seat Avro 581E Avian biplane on the first leg of his solo flight from England to Australia. The unassuming Hinkler's grueling flight was little noted by the press until he reached India, then the world press got caught up in the drama of another "Lone Eagle" performance so soon after Charles A. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. As he plotted a course across Asia and the Timor Sea using a London Times atlas as his navigational chart, a newspaper editor dubbed him "Hustling Hinkler," a nickname later immortalized by the American Tin Pan Alley hit song, "Hustling Hinkler Up in the Sky." On February 22, after flying 128 hours in less than 16 days, Hinkler's 11,250-mile adventure ended in Darwin, Australia.