Plus Ultra Flight: 100 Years of the Historic Air Journey Linking Spain and Buenos Aires

A century ago, Argentina watched a fragile hydroplane arrive from Europe after conquering the South Atlantic, marking a pivotal milestone in global aviation history that showcased early transoceanic flight achievements and inspired future advancements.

From Ancient Ports to Modern Wings

On February 10, 1926, residents of Buenos Aires gathered along the Río de la Plata to witness something no one in the Southern Hemisphere had ever seen before: a hydroplane arriving from Europe after crossing the South Atlantic. The aircraft was the Plus Ultra, a German-built Dornier Wal adapted beyond its original limits, and its arrival marked the end of a 10,270-kilometer journey completed in 59 hours and 39 minutes.

The flight had begun on January 22, 1926, departing from Palos de la Frontera, in southwestern Spain—the same port from which Christopher Columbus had sailed in 1492. That symbolic choice mattered. Aviation was still young, fragile, and dangerous, and the decision to echo earlier Atlantic crossings was a deliberate act of historical continuity. This was not simply a technological stunt. It was a statement that the Atlantic, once bridged by caravels, could now be crossed by wings.

The route itself traced a long arc of calculated risk. After leaving Palos, the Plus Ultra stopped in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Porto Praia in Cape Verde, then crossed to Fernando de Noronha, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, before reaching Montevideo and finally Buenos Aires. Each stop reflected logistical necessity and political choreography, knitting together the Iberian world with Latin America through a feat of modern engineering.

At the controls was Ramón Franco, a Spanish military aviator whose name would soon be inseparable from the myth of early transoceanic flight. Alongside him flew Julio Ruiz de Alda as co-pilot, Juan Manuel Durán as radio operator, and Pablo Rada, a mechanic-soldier responsible for keeping the aircraft alive midair and afloat.

Engineering the Impossible

The flight’s success relied on daring improvisation, as the Dornier Wal’s range was limited, making human daring and ingenuity essential.

“Los aviones no estaban preparados. Aunque eran de serie, se les tuneaba para llegar más lejos,” explained Félix Majón, director of the Museum of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Cuatro Vientos in Madrid, which now houses a full-scale replica of the aircraft. The original Plus Ultra, preserved in Buenos Aires, remains a quiet monument to that ingenuity.

The first challenge was fuel. Additional tanks had to be installed, altering the aircraft’s balance and weight distribution. The second was navigation. Over the open ocean, there were no landmarks, no runways, and no margin for error. “No había GPS, ni indicaciones en el suelo y era todo igual, agua y más agua,” Majón noted, emphasizing the disorienting sameness of the sea below and the ever-present winds that could push the plane off course.

Pilots still relied on the sextant, a tool unchanged since Roman navigation two millennia earlier. “Orientarse era muy artificioso,” Majón added, underscoring how much depended on calculation, intuition, and luck.

But the Plus Ultra also carried something new. It became the first aircraft to incorporate a radiogoniometer, an experimental electrical system weighing 80 kilograms that could detect the direction of radio signals from coastal stations and ships, revolutionizing navigation by allowing pilots to rely on invisible radio waves instead of just stars and estimation.

A Stowaway and a Century of Meaning

Every remarkable feat carries its human irregularities, and the Plus Ultra was no exception. In what became one of aviation’s most curious footnotes, the flight briefly carried a stowaway. Journalist Emilio Herrero boarded the aircraft without permission during the so-called “zero stage,” from Melilla to Palos de la Frontera.

In the early hours of January 21, 1926, Herrero disguised himself as an aviator, slipped past security along the Mar Chica, paid a boatman a few coins, and climbed aboard the aircraft through its rear hatch. He hid among the canvas coverings near the propellers, wedged into a cargo hold.

The crew noticed something odd. The aircraft felt heavier than expected. When it finally landed in Palos, they discovered Herrero curled inside what they believed to be an empty crate. He later described himself as a “pasajero sin billete,” a passenger without a ticket, and became the world’s first recorded aerial stowaway.

The anecdote is often told lightly, but it reveals something more profound. Flights like the Plus Ultra did not belong only to pilots and politicians. They captured the imagination of journalists, dockworkers, immigrants, and spectators across Latin America and Europe. Aviation promised to shrink distance, to redraw mental maps, and to bind continents faster than ships ever could.

For Argentina, the Plus Ultra’s arrival symbolized more than a technical feat; it affirmed a shared history and cultural connection across the Atlantic.

One hundred years later, the world crosses oceans routinely, guided by satellites and algorithms. But the Plus Ultra endures because it reminds us of a moment when flight was still an act of faith, when navigation was half science and half courage, and when Argentina stood as the destination that completed the dream.

The aircraft’s name—Plus Ultra, “further beyond”—was borrowed from the motto of Charles I of Spain, meant to declare that the known world did not end at the Strait of Gibraltar. In 1926, that phrase took on new meaning over open water. It suggested that the Atlantic was no longer a boundary but a corridor, and that the future of connection would be written not only by engines, but by the willingness to risk them.

In that sense, the Plus Ultra did more than cross an ocean. It stitched together centuries of Atlantic history, from caravels to hydroplanes, and left Argentina holding the final seam.

The information and quotations in this story were first reported by EFE.

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