102 years ago today, on May 3, 1923 (March 18, 1923 in the lunar calendar), human beings flew across the continent for the first time without stopping. On May 3, 1923, Lt. Oakley Kelly and McCready of the United States Air Force completed the first non-stop transcontinental flight today. Their T-2 single-engine plane landed in San Diego, California at 12:26 p.m. Kelly and McCready flew nearly 2,800 miles, by far the longest flight without stopping, averaging more than 100 miles per hour. This is the second time the two pilots have tried to fly across the United States without stopping. They began the flight on May 2 by taking off from Hempstead, Long Island. Just a few minutes after the flight began, they ran into a big conundrum. Their aircraft voltage regulator went out, but McCready changed the instrument while Kelly took control of the flight, and they were able to continue flying again. The plane first flew down towards Dayton, Ohio, crossed over Chicago at 10:15 p.m., then turned south towards St. Louis. It flew over Atchison, Kansas at midnight and over Santa Rosa, New Mexico at 8:30 a.m. the next morning. It appeared over San Diego just after noon and was welcomed by all the flutes of factories across the city. Air Force Major Henry H. Arnold welcomed the two pilots at San Diego's Rockwell Field and exclaimed with delight, "The impossible has happened." This record is in stark contrast to the first west-to-east transcontinental flight in 1912, when Bob Fowler flew from Jacksonville to San Francisco in 151 days with pauses in between. A year ago, Calbraith P. Rogers made a 49-day trip from new york to Pasadena.