Will Rogers became an advocate for the aviation industry after befriending Charles Lindbergh, the era’s most famous American aviator.
During his 1926 European trip, Rogers witnessed the European advances in commercial air service and compared them to the almost nonexistent facilities in the US.
Rogers’ newspaper columns emphasized the safety record, speed, and convenience of aviation, helping shape public opinion on the subject.
In 1935, the famed aviator Wiley Post, an Oklahoman, became interested in surveying a mail-and-passenger air route from the West Coast to Russia. He attached a Lockheed Explorer wing to a Lockheed Orion fuselage. Rogers visited Post at the airport in Burbank, California, while he was modifying the aircraft. He asked Post to fly him through Alaska in search of new material for newspaper column.
After making a test flight in July, Post and Rogers left Lake Washington in Renton, Washington in the Lockheed Orion-Explorer in August and then made several stops in Alaska. While Post piloted the aircraft, Rogers wrote his columns on typewriter. On August 15, they left Fairbanks for Point Barrow.
About 20 miles southwest of Point Barrow, having difficulty figuring due to bad weather, they landed in a lagoon to ask directions. On takeoff, the engine failed at low altitude, and the aircraft plunged into the lagoon, shearing off the right wing, and ended up inverted in the shallow water. Both men died instantly.
Rogers was buried August 21, 1935, in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California; it was temporary interment. He was re-interred at the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma in 1944.
Experts still disagree about its cause. Bobby H. Johnson and R. Stanley Mohler argued in 1971 that Post had ordered floats that did not reach Seattle in time for the planned trip. He used a set that was designed for a larger type of plane, making the already nose-heavy hybrid aircraft even more nose-heavy. But Bryan and Frances Sterling maintain in their 2001 book “Forgotten Eagle: Wiley Post: America’s Heroic Aviation Pioneer” that the floats were the correct type for the aircraft, suggesting another cause for the crash.
