Reach for the Skies

by Richard Branson

  Jannus’s airline was short-lived, and it would be many years before civil aviation took hold in America. After all, the continent had working railroads: what did it need an airline for?

  Civil aviation began sooner in Europe, kick-started by the First World War. The conflict had virtually destroyed the railways of France and Belgium, and for a while, flying the 200 miles between London and Paris was easier—and certainly quicker—than picking one’s way overland from Paris to Brussels. In 1920, about 6,500 passengers flew between London and Paris. The airlines lost money on every ticket, but the British and French governments picked up the tab. Both had colonies to govern and saw air travel as a way of holding their empires together.

  Pierre Latécoère pioneered France’s empire of the air, establishing Lignes Aériennes Latécoère, often called simply “the Line.” Just six weeks after the end of the First World War, services began between the Line’s base in Toulouse and the Spanish city of Barcelona. Month by month, year by year, the line grew longer. By March 1919, the Line was flying to Rabat, Morocco. In September, it launched a regular service to Casablanca. In 1922 Latécoère began services within North Africa itself, flying from Casablanca to Oran. Three years later, he pushed down the western coast of Africa to reach Dakar, in what was then French West Africa.

  Henri Guillamet and Jean Mermoz pioneered countless international air routes.

  Larry’s Chair

  Larry Walters had always dreamed of flying, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough for him to join the United States Air Force. He did not stop dreaming.

  In 1982, while working as a truck driver in southern California, Larry visited his local Army-Navy surplus store and bought 42 weather balloons and several tanks of helium. On July 2, in his girlfriend’s backyard in San Pedro, he anchored his favorite deck chair to the bumper of his jeep, inflated his weather balloons with helium, tied them to the chair, and sat down, clutching an air gun, a pack of sandwiches and a six-pack of Miller Lite beer. His plan was to drift about at a height of about 30 feet for a few hours, use the gun to pop the balloons one by one, and float gently to the ground. But when his friends cut the cord, Larry’s lawn chair rocketed up at a rate of 1,000 feet per minute.

  Larry, whose eyeglasses had fallen off during his ascent, reached an altitude of about 16,000 feet and drifted into the primary approach corridor of Los Angeles International Airport, where he endured 14 hours of fright and freezing cold. A Pan Am pilot was the first to spot him. He told air-traffic control he had just passed a man in a lawn chair brandishing a gun.

  One by one, Larry shot his weather balloons, but the freezing cold made him clumsy and he dropped the gun. An offshore breeze picked up and carried him out to sea. Finally a rescue helicopter approached, dropped him a line, and tugged him back to earth. On his way down, Larry’s cables got caught in a power line, causing a 20-minute blackout in Long Beach. On the ground, Larry was arrested. Safety inspector Neal Savoy of the Federal Aviation Administration was not pleased: “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act,” he told reporters, “and as soon as we decide which part it is, a charge will be filed.”

  Larry was shaken, but not very repentant. When asked by a reporter why he had done it, he replied, “A man can’t just sit around.”

  Latécoère’s most famous pilot was Jean Mermoz, whose adventures became the basis for best-selling novels by his fellow pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. On one occasion Mermoz’s plane crashed in the Sahara and he was taken hostage by Tuareg tribesmen. He wasn’t the only one. The risk of being kidnapped was so great, Latécoère ordered his pilots to fly in pairs, employed friendly Arabs to ride on the flights as interpreters, and put the word out that he was prepared to pay ransom for the safe return of downed pilots.

  Once the Line conquered the Sahara, Latécoère turned his ambitions west—to the jungles of South America and the virtually impassable highlands of the Andes. “Here,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, “the crust of the earth is as dented as an old boiler. The high-pressure regions over the Pacific send the winds . . . into a corridor fifty miles wide, through which they rush to the Atlantic in a strangled and accelerated buffeting that scrapes the surface of everything in their path.”

  On one occasion Mermoz and his mechanic were forced down onto a plateau 12,000 feet up and with a sheer drop on every side. After two days of makeshift repairs, they rolled the machine off the plateau and over the edge. Luckily, the plane’s controls responded!

  If, in America, civil aviation remained a distant prospect, airmail was, thanks to the truly heroic efforts of the U.S. Postal Service, fast becoming an essential and familiar part of life.

  The modern U.S. Air Mail service had an inauspicious beginning (the young lieutenant charged with the first delivery was fresh out of flying school and had an atrocious sense of direction), but it steadily wove that vast country together. The planes used by airmail pilots, mainly de Havillands, were fondly christened “flaming coffins,” because if you landed heavily (easy to do—these planes had the glide angle of a brick), the fuel tank would blow up in your face.

  “Map-reading was not required,” one airmail pilot recalls. “There were no maps. When visibility was at a minimum, I was in trouble and could even be upside down.” He got through on his ability “to recognize every town, river, railroad, farm and, yes, outhouse along the route.” Thirty-two aviators died on U.S. Postal Service duty, piloting routes that airlines would one day follow.

  In 1925, Charles Lindbergh, the son of a U.S. congressman and a talented barnstormer, was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis to plan and fly a new airmail route between St. Louis and Chicago. Twice during the ten months that he flew the route, Lindbergh had to bail out of his mail plane owing to bad weather or equipment problems. After that sort of work experience, flying the Atlantic had to have held few terrors for him.

  The first prize announced for an air crossing of the Atlantic—a purse of £10,000—was put up by newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe. Appalled at the laggard state of the British aircraft industry, Northcliffe hoped the prize would inspire British aviators to close the distance between them and their American and French rivals. It was the kind of patriotic project the readership of his Daily Mail newspaper appreciated. But the first crossing was undertaken by Americans! Led by Lieutenant John Towers of the U.S. Navy in 1918, the mission involved four aircraft, multiple stops, and 41 U.S. destroyers.

  The Navy declined to accept the prize. Airplane technology was moving so quickly, it was obvious to all that, whatever the rules said, the prize should be reserved for a more purely aeronautical achievement. On June 14, 1919, RAF Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, an American citizen born and living in Britain, set off from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and after 16 hours and 1,890 miles of mechanical problems, disorientation, ice clouds, and wind, they landed, nose down but safe, in a Connemara bog. They had flown the Atlantic nonstop, and were worthy winners of a Daily Mail prize.

  A month before their historic flight, however, an even more prestigious prize was announced: New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 purse to the first Allied aviator to fly nonstop between New York City and Paris. The prize, driven by Orteig’s enthusiasm for Franco-American cooperation following the First World War, fostered nine separate attempts to cross the ocean. Altogether, $400,000 was spent in its pursuit. Six men lost their lives in three separate crashes. Another three were injured.

  By this time, aircraft technology had taken another big step forward, with the development of bigger, heavier trimotor aircraft. The Russian inventor Igor Sikorsky had designed and flown the world’s first multi-engined fixed-winged aircraft, the Russky Vityaz, in 1913, ten years before he emigrated to the United States. That plane, so big many claimed it was a hoax, had pointed the way forward for civil aviation. In the United States, and in competition with the Dutch designer Tony Fokker, Sikorsky developed a generation of three-engined workhorses, powered by a propeller a
t the front and one propeller under each wing. These, everyone assumed, were the kinds of planes that would one day conquer the Atlantic.

  Early riser: Igor Sikorsky’s trimotor airplane of 1913 could carry eight people.

  The Orteig Prize threw up a surprise, however. Rejecting the big three-engined machines preferred by his competitors, Lindbergh got into discussions with companies producing light, single-engine planes for the U.S. Air Mail. These were the sort of planes he knew like the back of his hand. These were a proven technology, and less likely to throw up unpleasant surprises when he was halfway across an ocean. The airframe he finally settled upon was loosely based on the 1926 Ryan M-2 mail plane. The fuselage was two feet longer than the production model; the wings were longer and stronger; the landing gear was strengthened. But there was really nothing radical about it.

  The Spirit of St. Louis wasn’t nice to fly. Putting fuel tanks in front of the cockpit meant that there could be no front windshield, and a periscope had to be installed so that Lindbergh could see straight ahead. The Spirit of St. Louis wasn’t very stable, either, although Lindbergh later wrote that this instability helped keep him awake during his 33½-hour flight.

  Charles Lindbergh with the mail plane that carried him across an ocean.

  On the evening of May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Air Field in Paris, after a flight of 3,614 miles. Lindbergh and his team had succeeded because they hadn’t bitten off more than they could chew. Their technology for the Atlantic crossing was about as off-the-shelf as it could be at that time. They extracted extraordinary performance from ordinary machines. They didn’t wildly overspend, and they didn’t empirebuild. They stayed small, so that everyone involved knew what everyone else was doing and thinking. The Orteig Prize had inspired more than an achievement: it had inspired a way of working. And this, in the end, is how prizes push technology forward.

  After his historic crossing, rather than return to service as a regular U.S. Air Mail pilot, Lindbergh used his fame to help promote the use of the service, giving speeches and carrying souvenir mail on flights across the United States and over routes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lindbergh flew 22,350 miles in the Spirit of St. Louis, encouraging the construction of local airports. His Latin American tour took him to 13 countries in two months.

  People said his flight changed the world. It certainly changed America. In 1927, applications for pilot’s licenses in the United States increased threefold, and the number of licensed aircraft quadrupled. In 1926, 5,782 passengers flew on U.S. airlines. In 1929, 173,405 took to the air.

  The story of the Orteig Prize shows that a well-timed, well-structured prize can change the mental landscape of an industry and a nation. Lindbergh, for his part, sowed a seed in people’s minds—a revolutionary idea: that anyone could fly. The dream came true for some.

  Wiley Post flew solo around the world in 1933—and received a hero’s welcome.

  British aviator Amy Johnson, who flew her de Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane from England to Australia in 1930, scrimped together the money for flying lessons from secretarial work in London. She received the Harmon Trophy as well as a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her trouble. In 1931, the American flier Wiley Post, who’d spent time in a reformatory for armed robbery and whose aviation career began as a parachutist for a flying circus, flew around the globe with navigator Harold Gatty. Two years later he circled the globe alone. On September 5, 1934, wearing an innovative pressure suit of his own design, Post reached an altitude of 40,000 feet above Chicago. And he kept on going, reaching altitudes of up to 50,000 feet on later flights.

  In 1904, seven-year-old Amelia Earhart persuaded her uncle to help her cobble together a homemade ramp, fashioned after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis. Amelia’s first flight ended dramatically. She emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled with a bruised lip and a torn dress: “It’s just like flying!” she cried.

  Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished while circumnavigating the globe.

  Amelia spent her childhood climbing trees, hunting rats with a rifle, and filling a scrapbook with newspaper clippings about successful women. In Long Beach, California, on December 28, 1920, she and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks, later a famous air racer, gave her a ride that would change her life. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,” she said, “I knew I had to fly.” By 1927 she had accumulated nearly 500 hours of solo flying and had set her first women’s record, reaching an altitude of 14,000 feet.

  One afternoon in April 1928, Earhart, now a Boston social worker, received a phone call: “How would you like to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic?” The caller, publisher and publicist George Putnam, was perfectly serious, and on June 17, Earhart, with pilot Wilmer Stultz and mechanic Louis Gordon, became the first woman to fly across the ocean. She shrugged off the achievement: “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes,” she said, adding, “Maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”

  Family investments, such as they were, had long since disappeared down a failed gypsum mine, and celebrity endorsements were essential if Earhart was to keep flying. Offered a position as associate editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, she handled her publicity well, campaigning for women in aviation. In 1929, she organized the first Women’s Air Derby (which featured Pancho Barnes) and was among the first fliers to promote commercial air travel. Together with Charles Lindbergh, she lobbied for Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), which later became TWA. She was also vice president of National Airways. By 1940, it had become Northeast Airlines.

  In August 1928, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the North American continent and back. On May 20, 1932, she soloed the Atlantic in 15 hours. The list of Earhart’s firsts would make a book. Following an unpublicized flight from Oakland to Miami, she publicly announced her most daring adventure yet: with ace navigator Fred Noonan (the man who had established Pan Am’s China Clipper routes across the Pacific), she was off to circumnavigate the globe. They departed Miami on June 1, 1937, hopped through South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and arrived in New Guinea on June 29, 1937. They were two thirds of the way through their journey. On July 2, they took off from Lae, in New Guinea, on the first leg of their Pacific crossing. The ocean swallowed them.

  Filmed at a cost of nearly $4 million, Hell’s Angels was, in 1930, the most expensive movie ever made. An epic tale of loyalty (it’s set in the First World War), courage (it’s about officers in the Royal Flying Corps), and sin (it stars Jean Harlow), Hell’s Angels features aerial stunts by actual First World War aces. None of them—this, anyway, is the story—was crazy enough to perform the film’s final aerial stunt, a piece of acrobatics they all said couldn’t be done. The film’s director, Howard Hughes, proved otherwise—or tried. He flew the scene, got the shot—and crashed the plane.

  The most beautiful racing plane ever built? Howard Hughes beside his H-1.

  His injuries, this time, were minor, and a dashing reputation was established—a reputation that would dominate U.S. aviation and U.S. politics well into the postwar era.

  Howard “Sonny” Hughes was born into privilege: his family owed their huge fortune to a patent on a drilling bit used by the oil industry. Hughes learned to fly when he was a teenager, and devoted his personal fortune and his life to aviation. He was more than a stunt flier, more than a tinkerer: he studied every aspect of the business. To understand the demands of commercial flying, in 1932 he adopted an assumed name and signed on for a while as a copilot with TWA. He learned aviation design by buying entire planes and setting to work on them with a spanner. This hands-on approach bore spectacular fruit in 1935, when Hughes collaborated with engineer Glenn Odekirk and designer Richard Palmer to realize the Hughes H-1 racer, arguably the most beautiful monoplane ever built. Because of its radically streamlined design (it had retractable landing gear, and its every rivet was countersunk fl
ush to the aluminum skin of the plane), it was also the fastest: Hughes used it to set a world speed record of 352 miles per hour in September 1935; two years later, Hughes and the H-1 (sporting longer wings) set a new transcontinental record and Hughes won the Harmon Trophy as outstanding airman of the year.

  But the strangest, and in many ways most impressive, part of Hughes’s design legacy has to be the “Spruce Goose.” The Hughes H-4 Hercules was a military transport plane, and the largest flying boat ever built. It was the brainchild of Henry J. Kaiser, a shipbuilder who directed the construction of hardy merchant-marine “Liberty ships” in the United States during the war. Though the program was turning out one cargo vessel every 45 days, German submarine attacks on the Atlantic trade were sinking the ships as fast as they were being built. The human and commercial losses were horrendous, so Kaiser conceived a plan to take merchant shipping out of the water altogether and into the air! Only a giant like Hughes could have swallowed such a gigantic undertaking. And it might have worked: boasting the longest wingspan and tallest height of any aircraft in history, the H-4 cargo transport was as big and unlikely as Hughes himself. It was built not of spruce but of laminated birch, because aluminum had become so scarce during the war. Events intervened to scotch its promise: it missed the conflicts it was supposed to serve by two years and flew only once, on November 2, 1947, before delays and cost overruns led to its cancellation.

  Howard Hughes was no less a legend than a businessman. Three years after he set a new transatlantic record in the H-1, Hughes set a very different kind of aviation milestone: one that would promote the cause of civil aviation in a civilian airplane. In 1939, Hughes flew around the world in a twin-engine Lockheed Super Electra airliner. He refueled only six times and covered 14,672 miles in just over 91 hours of flying time. As well as demonstrating the potential of civil aviation, Hughes led its commercial development. He bought himself a company, TWA, and worked with the aircraft maker Lockheed to create a revolutionary airliner, the Lockheed Constellation, exceptional at the time for both its speed and its endurance. Eisenhower picked it for his presidential plane. Orville Wright climbed aboard, too: 40 years after his historic first flight, it was the last airplane Orville ever flew in. Hughes lived to expand TWA, broke Pan Am’s U.S. monopoly on international air travel, and along the way persuaded Walt Disney to build the TWA Moonliner at his theme park Tomorrowland, depicting what travel would be like in 1986. Former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun helped design the rocket, which looked remarkably like a wartime V-2!