In 1927 Charles Lindbergh soloed the Atlantic Ocean in a plane called The Spirit of St. Louis and became an American hero. That same year, Ernie Smith and Emory B. Bronte took off from Oakland, California, on July 14, in a single-engine Travelair aircraft named The City of Oakland and headed across the Pacific Ocean for Honolulu, 2,397 miles away. The next day, after running out of fuel, they crash-landed upside down in a kiawe thicket on Molokai, but emerged unhurt to become the first civilians to fly to Hawaii from the U.S. mainland. The 25-hour-2-minute flight landed Smith and Bronte a place in aviation history -- and a roadside marker on Molokai.