by Dan Hampton
Easing his shoulders back against the seat Lindbergh feels the hollowness in his gut fade a bit. He has two celluloid windowpanes in a little rack behind the seat, and can slide them in place anytime, so why not right now? Why didn’t I put them in before? Why have I wasted their streamlining value for these five hours of flight? After all, streamlining was the main reason for enclosing the fuselage and a natural evolution of the Spirit’s design.
Don Hall, the plane’s creator, had designed “an enclosed cockpit that doesn’t have any projections from the fuselage and ought to increase the cruising speed two or three miles an hour. We might pick up an extra hundred miles of range that way.” To Hall the logical solution was simply enclosing the cockpit from that position, so the top of the fuselage became the top of the cockpit.
Quite a man, Don Hall. He had designed and built the Spirit of St. Louis in sixty days, often working more than eighty hours a week. Son of a Western Union telegraph operator, he’d grown up in working-class Brooklyn and graduated from the Pratt Institute. Hall began as a draftsman for the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation before moving to Santa Monica, California, to work for the Douglas Company.
Quiet and unassuming, he was a long-distance swimmer and a photographer, and like Lindbergh, he loved the outdoors. Hall designed a fine aircraft. Slim had watched the entire Ryan crew, under B. F. Mahoney and Bert Tindale, painstakingly construct the Spirit down to 1/32 of an inch tolerance in some areas. Lindbergh had remained in San Diego the entire time, contributing his expertise throughout the design and construction process.
In his 1927 engineering report on the Spirit of St. Louis, Don Hall wrote, “The presence of Charles Lindbergh, with his keen knowledge of flying, his understanding of engineering problems, his implicit faith in the proposed flight, and his constant application to it, was a most important factor in welding together the entire factory organization into one smoothly running team. This group was unusually conscientious, co-operative [sic], and hard working.”
Suddenly the plane bolted upward and Slim’s hand instantly tightened around the stick. Everything loose in the cockpit bounced: the chart, canteen, and his gloves. Sinking toward the saddle in the mountains he watched the wingtips flex, and out of habit Slim wrapped his left hand around the throttle, ready to power out of the turbulence. Then the summit abruptly fell away, and as the plane lurched back to level flight, eastern Nova Scotia opened up beneath him.
The wings were never designed for such a wrenching, he thinks, staring at the ground. It’s certainly bad country for a forced landing; there’s not a farmer’s field in sight and wicked gray boulders are everywhere, like warts across a green face. A lake would be best, but there aren’t any in this rough terrain so young trees would have to do. Their supple trunks and thick, green boughs would break much of the impact shock, but with four hundred gallons of fuel remaining, Slim figured he was too heavy to crash-land anyway. Spirit would likely catch fire and Lindbergh, like all pilots, dreaded fire most of all.
“It was a mistake not to put dump valves in the tanks,” he said aloud, frowning and shaking his head. Solitary conversation was a habit nurtured from childhood, from long periods with no friends or parents around. “Now, if you could dump three hundred gallons of fuel, you could probably stall-in there with nothing worse than a blown tire and a bent propeller.”
Dump valves were simple vents under the tanks that the pilot could manually open from the cockpit. Gravity then drained the fuel into the wind stream and, depending on the altitude, it would evaporate. But such a system added weight and cost, so Lindbergh had refused it.
“Yes,” Slim continued his internal debate, “but we considered all that at the factory while the plane was being built. Dump valves might have leaked. No one was certain how to make them, not to mention the additional weight. Suppose one of the valves accidentally opened halfway across the ocean?”
Fuel was life.
Lindbergh had run out of gas eight months ago and didn’t care to repeat the experience. In September 1926, while he was flying the mail from St. Louis to Chicago, the fog had rolled in, cutting visibility to nothing. He’d circled, vainly trying to see the beacons installed by the government for such an occurrence, but the weather was too thick. When his reserve tank ran dry, Slim unbuckled, dove out of the cockpit into the opaque mess, and pulled the ripcord three seconds later. He’d been parachuting since his barnstorming days so floating down through the foggy blackness didn’t bother him much, but the plane he’d just deserted did. Slim hadn’t cut the De Havilland’s switches because the engine had quit for lack of gasoline, but without a pilot’s weight the nose dropped and trapped fuel spilled forward into the carburetor. The Liberty engine continued running and the DH, as it was called, circled its floating pilot all the way to the ground.
Where fuel was concerned, having more than enough was a tremendous advantage, so he needed that, even if this meant risking fire during a forced landing. Not installing the valves had been the correct decision since it saved weight, and if he did go down he would have other problems. Staring from the window at the thickening sky he thought about that. Did anyone even know he was here? Surely he was visually spotted all the way up the eastern seaboard and hopefully someone in Plymouth or Provincetown saw the Spirit head out to sea.
Surely.
But what about here? He’d really only seen small clusters of houses just off the coast near St. Mary’s Bay, and the few structures between there and here very likely had no radio or telegraph. He didn’t even have a radio; radios were simply too heavy.
On either side of Spirit’s nose the horizon had vanished. A solid wall of cloud reached from the ocean upward, the shade of gray darkening as it rose higher. The wind was rising, too, and Slim’s earlier sense of well-being drained through his boots. It now took a 25-degree crab to hold course into the gathering wind so he decided to let the weather push him southeast. He could get a position fix before striking out for Newfoundland, as long as Cape Breton’s eastern coastline was visible.
But that didn’t look good, either, at the moment.
Shimmering curtains of rain were sweeping across the ground ahead, fragmenting the horizon while streaking the lakes with whitecaps. Wet, warm air was rising fast, cooling as it soared upward, and the saturated bits became rain while others were flung so high and fast they froze into ice. Both plummeted back down, cooling and unsettling the air as they fell. As Spirit bucked and yawed in the turbulence, Lindbergh throttled back a fraction to hold 1,625 revolutions, then watched the wings. Each workman at the Ryan factory had signed the front wing spar around the phrase “to ride along on the flight for good luck.” He certainly hoped his luck would hold.
For the first time this flight, Slim was truly alarmed, and for good reason. Don Hall had added ten feet to the standard Ryan M-2 design so Spirit could lift the 2,500 pounds of extra load, mostly fuel, needed for the 3,610-mile flight. The modified 46-foot span provided a 33 percent greater wing area, but it also meant the longer wings would bend more as they protruded farther from the fuselage. The airfoil, or cross section, of Hall’s wing, allowed additional room for fuel tanks and made the wing structurally much stronger. Called a “Clark Y” type after its designer, the airfoil was curved, or cambered, along the top surface, but the underside was flat.* Air racing over the top of such a surface would have to accelerate, and its pressure was less than air flowing along the flat bottom. This greater pressure pushing upwards made the wing fly. Strong, stable, capacious, and generating lift, it was the best of all worlds—unless unforeseen and immeasurable turbulence was encountered. Just like now.
Like a coyote shaking a rabbit, the storm tossed the little aircraft up, down, and sideways, all the while blowing it farther southeast off course. If only I had a parachute! Slim’s eyes were wide now as he fought for control and struggled to buckle the safety belt. With the rudder pedals smacking his soles, he tightened the throttle lock to hold it in place and grabbed the stick with both ha
nds. But a parachute weighed twenty pounds: three gallons of fuel, fifteen minutes of flying time. It was left behind. I can’t carry everything.
The squalls got worse. He could see through the first one, but others swayed across the sky like dark sheets. Water beats furiously against the Spirit and the propeller is just a whirling silver disk with vapor spinning off the edges. Droplets splash inside the cockpit, over his flight suit and charts, and the glass-faced instruments glisten. He’s again reminded of how fragile his existence is at the moment; just a few feet of steel tubing, wood, and grade A cotton fabric between him and nature. Giving up trying to hold a heading, Slim begins threading his way east through the storm, coming back on course when he can, but giving up when he must. Maybe it breaks up closer to the coast. Maybe by avoiding the worst parts, the wings won’t collapse. Maybe.
Don Hall built the spars utilizing a Warren truss, like a bridge span, for strength. The Warren looked like a series of alternating triangles held between a longitudinal frame and it was designed to spread the wing loading so no single section would bear the full force. The “I” spars were made of spruce, then reinforced and braced with a double line of piano wire, all contained within a SAE 1020 carbon steel frame. Hall had also moved the spars closer for increased strength, eleven inches on center instead of the usual fourteen—but was it enough? The spars were glued, and only the area from the wing’s leading edge back to the first spar was plywood. The rest of the structure was covered with Flightex grade A pima cotton, coated six times with aluminum cellulose acetate dope just like the fuselage.
Suddenly the Spirit shoots into clear, bright sunlight and Slim blinks. Rain gleams on farmhouse roofs and he can see dirt roads twisting through the trees beneath him. Then it’s dark gray again: shredded clouds and more rain. In and out of the squalls, he spots a few lakes, their surfaces blown to foam, a condition that takes at least fifty knots of wind. Towns are down there someplace, and their names betray the peninsula’s Scottish origins: New Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Sherbrooke.
Water bothered him because it was everywhere in the cockpit and Slim wondered how the engine’s magnetos would hold up under the constant drenching. The moisture might interrupt or even extinguish them altogether. Magnetos were vital; they kept the engine running by supplying continuous electrical pulses to the spark plugs. Independent of the aircraft electrical system, they utilized permanent magnets to generate electricity, hence the name, but if they malfunctioned then the engine would run rough or even quit. Spirit’s Whirlwind engine had a pair of them, both AG-9D types made by Scintilla in Sidney, New York, and Slim had figured that if they were good enough for Wright Aeronautical they’d work for him.*
I don’t dare check the magnetos now. He wiped the rain from his lips knowing full well he couldn’t spare a hand from the controls. But not a single cylinder had missed, so the mags seemed fine. Of all Spirit’s complex components the Wright Whirlwind engine worried him least; it was so good that both Chamberlin’s Columbia and Byrd’s America used it.
Officially designated the Model J-5C, it was a nine-cylinder radial engine rated for 220 horsepower though this one actually put out a bit more. He’d been in San Diego when it arrived from Paterson, New Jersey, its cosmoline-coated parts carefully packed in a big wooden crate.† The radial design aligned the cylinders in a star-shaped pattern with the crankshaft and propeller in the center. Such an arrangement had been around since the turn of the century but wasn’t widely used until after the Great War. Ryan’s Fred Rohr hand-hammered the metal cowling, then covered the blemishes with burnished, scalloped swirls that had become a company trademark.
With a better power-to-weight ratio and improved metallurgy, the radial became more practical and reliable than its predecessor. Besides simplicity, the great advantage to the radial was that it was air cooled and much lighter than water-cooled engines. Liquid-cooled engines had other issues; nearly one-fifth of their failures were attributed to coolant plumbing, and they were heavier, so less powerful than their air-cooled counterparts. Nungesser’s giant twelve-cylinder Lorraine-Dietrich was a prime example; true, it was capable of 450 horsepower, but its sizable cooling system contributed to the White Bird’s 11,000-pound gross weight, twice as heavy as Spirit.
Heavy, rain-fresh air filled the cockpit and Slim gazed outside as the wilderness flashed beneath his wings. Along with losing an engine or running out of gas, weather was a constant, deep source of anxiety for a pilot. Fuel can be monitored, and much of the uncertainty about engines can be overcome with sound maintenance and good equipment, but weather is different. It can be forecasted, but only to a point, and was still a black art. Nature was still nature. Its unpredictability made it dangerous and frequently lethal. He’d gotten only a slight taste of a small storm in the past hour, but it was eye-opening and frightening. To think of flying through that at night, over the water . . . Slim nudged the stick forward and Spirit dropped lower. He concentrated on flying here and now, not on the night, which was still four or five hours ahead.
At fifty feet above the hilltops he was low enough to see pine needles on the branches and watch them sway in the breeze. The wind had shifted around and was now blowing from the southwest, a good sign he was on the back side of the storm—at least this one. Cumulonimbus clouds towered to the north, rolling away from Nova Scotia, and Charles thought the storm front must stretch all the way to the Canadian mainland. Maybe a similar storm had gotten Nungesser and Coli. It would have to be something like that, or a catastrophic mechanical failure, to bring the Frenchmen down.
Maybe both.
Slim flicks his right wrist several times, peering out to the left as the Spirit’s wings rock. Ailerons, the small, hinged surfaces on the wing’s trailing edge, were used for lateral control. They were interconnected so as the stick moved left or right, one aileron would rise while the other fell. The “up” aileron decreased lift on its wing, so it would drop as the “down” aileron increased lift, simultaneously raising the opposite wing. When the stick was centered so were the ailerons, and the side-to-side roll movement of the aircraft was neutral. If the stick was pulled back, both ailerons moved up, air pressure decreased along the top of the wing, and lift was generated so the aircraft climbed. When the stick was pushed forward the reverse occurred.
When he reengineered Spirit’s wings, Don Hall had moved the ailerons thirty-eight inches closer to the fuselage. Worried about the added ten-foot span, he calculated that placing the ailerons nearer to the structural center would help keep the wingtips from bending under the combined strain of turbulence and control movements. The trade-off was a “heavier” stick; more pilot muscle was needed to physically move the ailerons. The aircraft was certainly less maneuverable than others Lindbergh had flown, but the Spirit wasn’t a fighter plane. Both Hall and Lindbergh had correctly reasoned that agility was much less important than safety.
Craning his neck sideways in what has become a familiar position, Slim stares ahead through the silver propeller disk, his fatigue and muscle aches replaced with sudden dread. A floating white band stretches across his field of vision exactly along the Nova Scotia coastline. From the Atlantic off his right wing, north to St. George’s Bay, an opaque belt hovers just off the ground, obscuring everything behind it.
Fog.
Low lying and insidious, it can form in moments when the dew point, or saturation level, and air temperature are within 4 degrees Fahrenheit of each other. It’s a pilot’s nightmare. With no warning, fog effectively cloaks everything beneath it, and Lindbergh knows well the lonely feeling of circling above the white blanket waiting to land, running out of hope and fuel. But Spirit is just passing over Nova Scotia, so landing isn’t an issue unless something goes wrong.
Slim pushes the throttle up, adding another fifty revolutions, then gently pulls back on the stick and begins to climb. If the fog will hold off a few hours more, he silently pleads, if I can only check my course over Newfoundland, it won’t matter what happens after that. I
’ll ask for nothing more until I reach the other side of the ocean. But Lindbergh knows he’s already pushed his luck. First was the overloaded takeoff from a wet field in Long Island; then the East Coast cleared so he could set himself up across the Gulf of Maine; finally, his navigation got him to St. Mary’s Bay pretty much on course.
Maybe, he hoped, the fog would be limited to the narrow straits between the peninsula and Cape Breton Island. Squinting at the Mercator chart, he sees it’s called the Strait of Canso, barely sixteen miles from end to end. Yes! The fog is localized right there. Slim relaxes the pull, levels off at 300 feet, and can clearly see a large lake off the nose that, according to his map, must be Bras d’Or. Rising up beyond it toward the north are the bleak Cape Breton highlands. A wild and beautiful place. He’d read about it while preparing the route and now, after seeing it, isn’t surprised that some fifty thousand Scots immigrated here to this land of rainswept cliffs, rocky, bare hills, and very few people.
Of course, if the winds are bad across the Atlantic or his navigation is off he just might see Scotland, or the Norwegian fjords . . . or even Spain for that matter. All the more reason to stay alert and to stop daydreaming. For sixty minutes Slim focuses only on his instruments and flying. The Lukenheimer fuel manifold is feeding from the fuselage tank, and he’ll keep it there for the next two hours. Cape Breton is extraordinarily beautiful; like the Nova Scotia peninsula it is speckled with lakes and ponds sparkling brightly through heavy forests. The northern part of the island is mountainous, stacked like dark green loaves through the mist. Above the trees there is snow along the stark ridgelines.
Flying up Bras d’Or Lake, Lindbergh crossed over a U-shaped body of water and continued northeast for the coast. The salty air was fresh with unlimited visibility and he marveled that a few miles could make a remarkable difference. Somewhere off his left wing was the port of Sydney, and as he crested a line of low hills, Cape Breton’s western edge spread out off Spirit’s nose. Like a big thumbprint, the green waters of a bay pushed inland toward him and Slim could make out an island just offshore. Scatari Island, according to the chart, at the mouth of Mira Bay. Smoothing the Mercator with his left hand, Lindbergh hunches over and squints at the plotted course. If he remains south and simply parallels the planned route he’ll strike Newfoundland near Hermitage Bay. But that isn’t close enough, he decides, flexing his right hand against the stick and glancing up at his instruments.
