by Dan Hampton
Lindbergh had served in the Army Air Service and was an experienced contract airmail pilot. In fact, it had been while flying the mail eleven months earlier that aviation’s vast commercial potential became clear to the young pilot. In 1919, a kindred spirit, French-born American hotelier Raymond Orteig, proposed his eponymous prize for the first non-stop Paris-to-New York flight, hoped that in spurring pilots to win the prize money, aviation would be taken seriously and its technology advanced. Eight years later Charles Lindbergh had drawn the attention of the world to this latest attempt to prove the world-shrinking possibilities of aviation.
His maps were the best available, and he had planned the flight for a year, reviewing the route until he felt every detail was familiar. But he also understood the flight required an acceptance of the unknown. Something would happen. While others had crossed the Atlantic piecemeal or in airships, the pilot was aware that very few believed he, so young and unproven, possessed much of a chance. His backers in St. Louis had confidence, of course, as did his mother Evangeline in Detroit. Most importantly he, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, believed it. Not that anyone outside of his rather insular world had ever heard of him before he’d shown up here on Long Island.
It didn’t matter.
Inevitably known as “Slim,” the tall, lanky former mail pilot was committed now. To reduce stress on the undercarriage, his five fuel tanks had only been partially filled at neighboring Curtiss Field, and then the aircraft had been towed nearly a mile across open country to Roosevelt Field.* Fueling was finished at Roosevelt with bright red, five-gallon cans passed up to Ken Lane, Wright Aircraft’s chief engineer. With one foot on the nose and another on the wing, Lane had carefully filtered the gas through a 200-mesh wire screen. Losing the engine somewhere over the North Atlantic due to a clogged fuel line was a nasty thought. Almost as bad as having it quit during a heavyweight takeoff with an audience, in the rain. But that was the nature of flying: dangerous and unforgiving.
Lindbergh’s boots slipped a bit on the plain, metal rudder pedals, as he hadn’t thought to wipe them before squeezing into the narrow cockpit. With smooth foot movements he “walked the rudder,” keeping the plane aligned along the runway’s northern edge, but without a view forward it wasn’t easy. Slim had had the main fuselage tanks moved forward of the cockpit, which was safer in the event of an accident—Lindbergh had seen too many pilots crushed or burned in crashes because they’d been sandwiched between fuel tanks and an engine. But this meant he had to use a three-by-five-inch periscope to see straight ahead. There was no front window.
His eyes darted inside again to the tachometer. If anything was subtly wrong with the engine it would show here first, but the needle was steady at 1,825 revolutions. The plane skidded a bit, and as his heart skipped a beat Slim’s blue eyes flashed back to the runway’s edge . . . I must hold the plane straight . . . and not take my eyes from its edge for an instant!
He wasn’t moving fast enough to fly yet. Men were still running alongside the plane, their hands on the struts, pushing it through the muddy mess. His mechanic had actually greased the tires so they wouldn’t stick as much, but he couldn’t tell if it helped. The engine sounded muted, almost weak, compared to previous test flights and his trip here from the West Coast. Slim could feel the stick wobble in his hands, which wouldn’t happen if enough air was passing over the control surfaces. Faster . . . he had to get the plane moving quicker. It felt more like an overloaded truck than an airplane.
Built by Ryan Airlines in San Diego and named The Spirit of St. Louis, the plane was heavier than ever before; 450 gallons of California gasoline—compliments of Standard Oil—produced a gross weight of 5,250 pounds. This was an astounding number, more than two and a half tons, and though Lindbergh knew the J-5 Wright Whirlwind was theoretically capable of overcoming it, he’d never done it before. Lieutenant Commander Noel Davis and Lieutenant Stanton Wooster had tried a heavyweight takeoff three weeks earlier in Virginia. On April 26 their Keystone Pathfinder American Legion, a full ton overweight, stalled on takeoff and both died after smashing into a mud bank.
“TRANSOCEAN FLIERS DOGGED BY BAD LUCK; All Serious Contenders Here in Dash to Paris Have Met With Reverses, Some Fatal,” the New York Times had reported. “MANY TRAGEDIES RECENTLY . . . 13 Deaths Reported in This Month Alone.”
His face pale, Lindbergh stared from the little window searching for a tiny white handkerchief he’d tied on a stick set in the ground. It was there as a warning; half the runway was gone and only 3,000 feet remained. He’d extrapolated a 2,250-foot takeoff distance from his test data, but that had been on a dry runway with a seven-knot headwind. What had he been thinking? Did he, Charles Lindbergh, possess some magical quality that the others before him lacked? They were certainly older than his twenty-five years, and much more experienced. Why did he think he could succeed where they failed?
Nearly a mile long, Roosevelt Field was the only choice for such an attempt, but was it even long enough? Yards from where he’d started, just off the runway’s western edge was an ugly, black scorched area at the bottom of a ravine. A bent propeller blade was stuck upright in the middle of the burn, poignantly marking the crash of the last pilot who tried to reach Paris from New York. René Fonck, the great French flying ace, had rumbled down this very runway eight months ago in September, crashing an expensive aircraft and causing the horrible deaths of two crewmen.*
Lurching forward, the Spirit feels heavy and ungainly to the pilot. Lindbergh bounces in the wicker seat, like riding in a buckboard wagon, and details jump out: mist hovering off the ground, mud slapping against the aircraft, blue violets clustered in the grass. But he felt a difference. At 300 feet down the runway the plane is faster and the last men have let go of the struts. Should he have waited? A takeoff seemed hopeless, Lindbergh would later write, and the wrong decision would mean a crash. Should he have waited another day or swallowed his pride and had the heavy aircraft towed around to the other end of Roosevelt Field?
A thousand feet down the runway now and the stick is tighter. Slim feels air pressure pushing on the rudder through his boots. Spinning hard into the thick air, the propeller is trying to bite, to hold, and pull the Spirit into the sky. Is it enough? Will the wings take the heavy load before the thirty-four-inch, wire-spoked wheels snap?†
The handkerchief!
A brief white speck flutters in the gray air, then vanishes into the mist. Halfway now . . . 3,000 feet down and still not fast enough. He should’ve been airborne more than 500 feet back. Too much fuel? The extra twenty-five gallons added 153 pounds. Or is it the tailwind? Or the mushy runway? Too many variables . . . he knows that. He knows better. Lindbergh pulls the stick back an inch and the wheels rise off the ground.
But the Spirit immediately sinks back to the mud, hitting a puddle and splashing cold, dirty water along the cotton fabric fuselage. The wings wobble; his right hand and both feet play the stick and rudder to keep the plane straight. Lindbergh can feel the Spirit tremble, an animal crouched to spring, and then the right wing suddenly dips.
Pull up!
The wings level . . . now, ease back to the runway . . . softly . . . a little rudder and the plane settles . . . more splashes and he feels the wheels slip in the mud. The roar fills the cockpit now as the engine churns out power, and his gloved fingers hold the throttle forward. It’s like being inside a drum. The wheels lift off again and he senses the ground falling away a few feet. I could probably stay in the air. . . .
But he doesn’t.
Letting the Spirit sink, Lindbergh feels the wheels mush again, but this time it’s different and the earth can’t hold him down. The plane wants to fly. Sliding over the ground, controls taut, Slim feels all 223 horses throbbing through the stick. Staring through the silver spinning blades, Slim knows he’s much too close to cut the power and far too fast now to stop. Does he have the speed to clear the wall of trees and telephone wires a thousand feet ahead?
Up . . . up!
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sp; The propeller bites, wings lift, and the Spirit claws itself off the ground at 7:52 on that Friday morning. As the plane staggers slowly into the air, twenty feet high now, the trees are rushing up. So are the wires, shining in the rain like a spiderweb. Forty feet. The Whirlwind’s powerful growling thickens his hearing, and water droplets splatter across Lindbergh’s goggles—no choice now but to fly or die. From the corner of his eye, the pilot glimpses a small knot of men at the end of the runway. The president of Ryan Airlines, B. F. Mahoney, and others are gathered around a big Lancia sedan, waiting with fire extinguishers, just in case.*
Suddenly trees flash beneath the gleaming wet wheels. Manicured grass . . . pale faces looking up . . . the golf course! He’s over the links past the east end of the airfield. But through the spinning eight-foot, nine-inch propeller he sees another hill ahead. The stick trembles and he knows the plane is telling him not to turn. There’s not enough altitude to trade for airspeed, and not enough airspeed to maneuver. They’re on the ragged edge of a stall and his breathing quickens again. If he tries to avoid the hill the Spirit will likely stall and they’ll spin in, just like Wooster and Davis. Tapping the rudder Slim gently nudges the stick to the right. The aircraft answers ever so slightly, almost reluctantly, and they barely clear the hill.
I’m above the trees. . . .
“LINDBERGH LEAVES NEW YORK AT 7:52 A.M. With Cool Determination He Braves Death to Get Off in the Misty Dawn,” Russell Owen breathlessly reported to the Times’s readers. “Hundreds gasp as unconquorable youth [Lindbergh] by sheer wizardry lifts machine carrying 5,200 pound load, with failure a few yards off.”
Cautiously he climbs, watching the rolling hills of Long Island flatten out to the south and east. Then, realizing that he’s at least a hundred feet in the air now, Lindbergh begins to breathe normally. If the engine quits now there’s enough altitude and speed to make a controlled landing somewhere. His eyes flicker toward the tachometer on the black-painted wooden instrument panel and is relieved to see it still steady at 1,825 revolutions. Below it is the Boyce Motometer, which displays engine oil temperature, and it’s fine, too. On the lower edge of the panel, directly in the center, is a large, T-shaped inclinometer. Filled with liquid like a builder’s level, the gauge contains a horizontal crossbar that shows left and right turns while the vertical arm displays altitude changes. On either side of the T are the tachometer and airspeed indicator, respectively.
Lindbergh eases the oak throttle knob back slowly and the revolutions fall to 1,800. Airspeed still indicates over 100 miles per hour, so he inches the throttle back a bit more to hold 1,750, and it stabilizes. Finally, able to look left and right from the small windows, Slim is startled to see another airplane in loose formation with him: a Curtiss Oriole. He knows it’s full of reporters, and his eyes harden at the cameras sticking out of every window.
Even now they pester him. Charles Lindbergh isn’t prone to anger, but it surges through him now. Newspapers printed lies about him in California; reporters made up conversations with his mother; they even broke into his room and tried to photograph him in his pajamas. “Lucky Lindy,” they called him, as if luck had anything to do with it. Or the “Flying Fool.” He liked that even less. French newspapers like La Presse and Le Journal had run detailed stories describing Nungesser and Coli’s arrival in New York; utterly fraudulent, including the French ace’s fabricated first words to the American press. Why smother the flavor of life in a spice of fiction?
Nudging the stick left, he booted the rudder and the Spirit of St. Louis came smoothly around to the northeast, leaving the newshounds briefly behind. The newly installed Pioneer earth inductor compass seemed to be working perfectly, and he rolled out heading 065 degrees. Peering outside to compare landmarks against his fifty-cent Rand McNally railroad map, Lindbergh swept his eyes over Long Island, or what he could see of it.* At 150 feet altitude he faced a three-mile visibility and patches of low fog. He couldn’t make out Manhattan fifteen miles off his tail, or Oyster Bay, where he’d lunched with Theodore Roosevelt Jr. just days earlier.† Nor could he see Great Neck, or much of Long Island’s North Shore. It was the fabled Gold Coast, captured by the decade’s most celebrated writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Slim knew it firsthand, having visited Falaise, a vast Sands Point estate owned by his new acquaintance Harry Guggenheim. An accomplished naval aviator himself, Guggenheim was director of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics and had met Lindbergh at Curtiss Field the previous week.
At 8:07 A.M., fifteen minutes after the takeoff, Smithtown Bay appeared off his left wing. Craning his neck the other way, Slim could see Setauket under the right wing and a harbor full of boats. Port Jefferson. Beyond the shore lay Long Island Sound and then thirty-five miles farther the Connecticut coast. I’ve never flown across that much water before. I’m also a mile or two southeast off course, he thought, but decided not to correct the heading until reaching the New England shoreline.
Scanning the gauges he saw the oil pressure was good at 56 pounds, and the engine temperature was cool. Fuel pressure was steady, and with 1,750 revolutions set, the Spirit comfortably held 105 mph just a few hundred feet above Long Island. Below the instrument panel was the Lukenheimer distributor, a network of exposed vertical and horizontal fuel lines that allowed him to feed his 450 gallons of gas from any of five tanks. There was a 200-gallon main tank on the other side of the panel and a nose tank beyond that containing another 80 gallons. Farthest forward was a 25-gallon oil reservoir doubling as a firewall, a barrier between the engine and himself. Finally, three wing tanks held the last 145 official gallons, though his mechanics had somehow managed to stuff an extra 25 into the Spirit.
Using adjustable valves called petcocks, he could open or close any fuel line to trim, or balance, the aircraft throughout the flight. He planned on feeding from each tank for fifteen minutes to ensure they were all functioning, and then to alternate the feed every hour until he reached Paris. Twisting the petcock for the nose tank until it paralleled the fuel line, he waited a few moments then shut off the center wing tank by turning its petcock perpendicular to the pipe. Altogether, Lindbergh had taken off with 2,745 pounds of gas, enough for more than 4,000 miles of flight if the winds in his face weren’t too stiff. And if he didn’t get lost.
No use thinking about that now.
Suddenly the Spirit was tossed upward and Lindbergh’s stomach dropped. Then the plane plummeted back down. Wide-eyed, he peered outside and saw Spirit’s wingtips bending from the invisible turbulence. Gripping the stick, he fought with the rudder to keep the aircraft generally level, and then they were through the patch of turbulence. Air was usually unsettled where land and water met, but he hadn’t been thinking of it, and didn’t have much experience flying near water. As heavy as the Spirit was, such turbulence could easily rip the wings off. But it didn’t happen.
Flying out over the sound’s glassy waters, Slim relaxed a bit, and settled back in the wicker seat. The pesky plane full of reporters had turned back at the shore. He knew the type of pictures they’d wanted, death and disaster, a burning wreck in the trees at Roosevelt Field, or Lindbergh dead on the grass of some great estate. But he had left all that behind, and now the air, the clouds, the sky—these elements were his alone.
“One boy’s a boy,” his father used to say, promoting the virtues of individualism. “Two boys are half a boy. Three boys are no boy at all.” And he was correct.
When a pilot flies alone he can’t be undone by another’s errors—there is only himself to depend upon. One extra man in his flying clothes with all his equipment might weigh 170 pounds. Gasoline weighs 6.1 pounds per gallon, so he’d sacrifice nearly thirty gallons, more than 200 miles of flight, for an unnecessary body. Lindbergh also rejected a second or even third engine. In his mind that was twice the components that could malfunction, and if one engine failed could the other support all that deadweight anyway? He didn’t think so.
He
had confidence in Ryan Airlines and B. F. Mahoney. With his backers in St. Louis, Lindbergh had officially ordered the plane on February 25, 1927, and first took it into the air sixty-three days later over Dutch Flats, on the outskirts of San Diego. Thirty-two flights and nearly twenty-eight flying hours later, here he was over the East Coast attempting to cross an ocean and claim the Orteig Prize. They had commemorated the event by painting RYAN NYP, for “New York–Paris,” on the tail. Under the right wing was another new marking: N-X-211.*
In 1926, Congress had passed the Air Commerce Act, mandating that U.S. aircraft be registered with the Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch. Due to the federal push for compliance with safety regulations, pilots also now needed a license to fly. Luckily for Slim, his friend and reserve commander, Major Clarence Young, had been appointed as chief of the Air Regulations Division of the Aeronautics Branch and had expedited the procedure. According to License No. 69, Charles A. Lindbergh was rated as a “Transport Pilot” on April 21, 1927, and the Spirit of St. Louis was granted a special license six days later. He also made a personal request to Bill McCracken, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, to fly without the required aircraft lighting. “Well, you probably won’t encounter much night traffic up where you’re going,” McCracken had smiled. “I think we can give you a special dispensation, just this once.”
By the new rules he was legal to fly now and the plane was ready. Time, as he well knew, was short. Nungesser and Coli could depart from Paris at any time, and here in America Chamberlin and Byrd were poised to make the crossing. But Lindbergh’s bold—many would say reckless—act wasn’t really about winning the Orteig Prize. True, the winnings would pay off his investors with a bit left over for himself, but this wasn’t really about the money.
