A. Harold Bromley; First to Try Transpacific Flight

A. Harold Bromley, an aviation pioneer who was the first person to attempt to fly across the Pacific Ocean, has died at his home in Palm Desert at 99.

Bromley joined the Canadian army at 15 and served three years in France during World War I. While in the service, he learned to fly and eventually became a lieutenant in Britain’s Royal Air Force.

Unable to find a job in aviation after the war, Bromley, who died Dec. 20, started a flying school in Tacoma, Wash. In 1928, he became a test pilot for what was then Lockheed Aircraft Co. in Burbank and taught such famous aviators as Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post.

The next year Bromley teamed up with John Buffelen, a lumber baron who was interested in promoting the first transpacific flight, from Tacoma to Tokyo.

Buffelen bought an orange Lockheed-Vega monoplane and named it the City of Tacoma. He and civic leaders hoped Bromley would fly into history much as Charles Lindbergh did with his Atlantic crossing.

During Bromley’s first attempt, 25,000 people turned out to see him take off after heading down a sloping elevated platform--built to make higher speed possible--onto the short runway at Tacoma’s makeshift airport.

But the plane never made it into the air. The fuel tanks were so full that they overflowed, splashing gas into the cockpit and temporarily blinding Bromley as he was about to take off. The plane plowed nose-first into the runway.

A few years later, Buffelen and Bromley tried another approach with an Emsco monoplane. They decided to fly from Tokyo to Tacoma to avoid the treacherous head winds of the Pacific.

Bromley and his navigator flew almost 25 hours, halfway to the Aleutians, but were forced to return to Japan because of dense fog--and nausea caused by gas fumes.

Bromley gave up on the transpacific effort and flew mail planes from El Paso to Mexico City. He also worked as a federal aviation inspector at the Oakland airport.

In the mid-1950s, he retired to the California desert, where he worked as a real estate broker and grew dates and grapes.