* Alva L. Harvey; Plane Crashed in Bid to Fly Around World

Alva L. Harvey, 92, a retired Air Force colonel whose plane, the Seattle, crashed during an attempt to complete the first around-the-world flight. Harvey, a sergeant in what then was the Army Air Service, was part of a two-man crew on one of four especially designed World Cruisers produced by Donald Douglas for the 1924 around-the-world flight that began on the West Coast. Two planes completed the trip after 177 days and 26,345 miles, in which they averaged 72 m.p.h. for the 363 hours they were in the air. However, Maj. Frank Martin, (referred to in some source books as Frederick Martin), the pilot of Harvey’s lead aircraft, was blinded by snow and crashed on a mountainside in Alaska early in the flight. Martin and Harvey walked for 10 days through the wilderness to safety. In September and October, 1941, Harvey, by then an Air Force major, circled the globe in a B-24 bomber on a goodwill mission to Moscow headed by W. Averill Harriman, establishing what was then an elapsed time record for the 24,700-mile trip. In Alexandria, Va., on Dec. 1 of congestive heart failure.