Lt. John Macready was one of the Army’s best pilots in the years after World War I. As chief of the Engineering Division’s Flight Test Section at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio, in the 1920s, he led America’s first military test pilots. He set a world altitude record of 40,800 feet in 1922, made the first crop dusting flights, and participated in the first aerial survey of the United States in 1924. He is the only three-time recipient of the Mackay Trophy. In 1923 in the T-2, Macready and Lt. Oakley Kelly became the first to cross the United States nonstop from coast to coast by airplane, a trip that took almost 27 hours.
