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Truculent Turtle at Perth airport prior to its departure for nearby Pearce RAAF base. Grossly overloaded with fuel and relying upon rocket-assist for a successful takeoff, the specially modified Neptune claimed a long distance flight record that still exists to this day. (Anthony Prime)
Truculent Turtle
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How the Truculent Turtle Confirmed Perth’s Place in Aviation History
On Thursday August 17th 1989, the first Qantas Boeing 747-400 VH-OJA ‘City of Canberra’ landed at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport, after a record breaking 17,850km non-stop flight from London. The 20 hour 9 minute flight was the longest by a commercial jetliner, beating by 1,300km the record set by a South African Airways 747SP some years earlier.
Few readers would be aware that Australia was the takeoff point for an even longer non-stop record flight, flown more than 40 years before and that record still stands. In 1946, a US Navy Neptune patrol bomber named ‘Truculent Turtle’ flew 18,082km non-stop from Perth to Columbus,Ohio, in 55 hours and 17 minutes. At that time it was the longest flight, point to point, flown by a piston engined aircraft. It still is and after 40 years looks as if it may remain in the record books for all time!
The flight can be traced back to postwar Army/Navy rivalry. Immediately after World War Two, the US Army Air Force (as it was then known), had hundreds of surplus Boeing B-29 Superfortress long-range bombers at its disposal and was determined that it should undertake some spectacular long distance flights to keep up public interest in aviation and to ensure that Congress kept meeting its Budget requests. They set up a special force, code named ‘Operation Marathon’, with the aim of breaking all existing long distance flight records.
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