[1] After attending an air show at Dominguez Field in January 1910, Musick, along with a couple of friends, built his first airplane in 1912; it reached an altitude of 9 feet (2.7 m) and promptly crashed.

[2] In June 1917 he joined the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps (later called the United States Army Air Service) in San Diego as a flight instructor for the duration of World War I, and was later transferred to airfields in Wichita Falls, Texas, and Miami, Florida.

Musick also flew for several airlines starting in 1920–21: Aeromarine Airways, where he studied navigation, and Mitten Air Transport, shuttling between Philadelphia and Washington DC.

[1] He made the company's inaugural mail flight to Havana, Cuba from Key West, Florida, on October 28 of that year.

[5] Musick's work on the trials with the Sikorsky S-42 led to him piloting the first two trans-Pacific survey routes for Pan American in 1935, laid out by Pan Am executives Juan Trippe, André Priester, and Charles Lindbergh and initially plotted by the chartered SS North Haven, which also carried prefabricated buildings, equipment, and supplies to establish air bases.

The aircraft flew the trans-Pacific route surveyed in the four earlier flights, with stops in Honolulu, Midway, Wake, and Guam.

[21][22] The S-42B Pan American Clipper II had arrived in Honolulu for that flight on March 18, 1937, with one of the four engines stopped due to an oil leak,[23] requiring several days to repair.

[24] Upon his arrival in Auckland on March 29, the famously terse Musick responded to the crowd of 30,000 who had turned out the greet the flight with the brief statement "We are glad to be here.

Unnamed Pan Am officials speculated at the time that the dump valves, located underneath the wing, may have vented vaporized fuel near the engines' exhaust ports, resulting in an explosion and loss of the flying boat.

All that remained at the scene of the crash were scorched fragments of wood and metal and some papers from the log book floating about the surface.