Flying Forever - Improvisations in In-flight Refuelling

Probably, any very early attempts to refuel aircraft in flight were conducted quietly and were not sufficiently inspiring to be noticed by history.

A few were noteworthy insofar as they departed from the commonly pursued method of lowering a hose from a tanker aircraft to refuel another machine.

U.S. barnstormer Earl Daugherty, trying to draw the attention of paying passengers, introduced a new wing-walking stunt. This was first demonstrated by Wesley May in November 1921, over Long Beach, California. He climbed from the wing of one aircraft flown by Frank Hawkes to another flown by Daugherty with a can of fuel strapped to his back.

By the end of the Second World War, air-to-air refuelling in the modern sense was already being thoroughly explored. Nonetheless, in 1949, two aviators, Barris and Reidel, attempted to establish a record and managed to remain airborne for a total of 1,008 hours in an Aeronca Sedan in that year. They periodically dropped low and paced a Jeep to pick up supplies and fuel.

This method had developed during the early 1930s, following the flight of the USAAC's "Question Mark" in 1929, and it persisted for a while - in February 1959, John Cook and Robert Timm used it to keep a Cessna 172 aloft for over 1,500 hours.