The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  Is it possible that I’m entering a magnetic storm?

  He’s not sure, but it’s possible. If earth’s magnetic field is horizontal enough for the inductor to function, then might not it be disturbed by a storm at sea? After all, a ring of electrical current surrounds the planet, and since electricity is used to magnify metal, like his compass needle, why wouldn’t weather that generated electricity disrupt the magnetic field? Science has always interested him and he knows that a massive energy release like lightning accelerates atomic particles, so isn’t it reasonable that this would interfere with magnetic instruments?

  Maybe.

  As for visual navigation . . . Slim realizes he no longer needs the skylight to see stars. They are lower in the sky and visible from the windows since the weather ahead is breaking up somewhat. Frowning, he notices the clouds’ bright outlines, sharp against the heavy, dark sky. How is that possible? It’s much too early for dawn.

  The moon!

  I’d almost forgotten the moon. He stares out and up. Now, like a neglected ally, it’s coming to my aid. The clear night sky can seem two-dimensional—so deep, so infinite, as to erase any point of reference. But with moonlight touching the cloud formations there are shadows, and Slim can again see the world around him: massive gray arches brushed with silver curve between vast vertical colonnades. A temple in the air. Chasms yawn open beneath Spirit’s wheels, liquid darkness that shifts in all directions. Like pale brushstrokes on black glass, shades of gray streak the sky against a backdrop of cold stars.

  Being able to see around him, even the unreal, shapeshifting world of weather and sky, makes a tremendous difference. The threats are visible, the cloud formations less frightening. They assume personalities and seem to come to life: one a dragon, another a mountaintop, a springing tiger off to the side. They can be avoided now and maybe seem a bit less hostile that way. Who could blame them? Spirit is penetrating them, disturbing their existence, not the other way around. Perhaps this is a truce that will last till morning.

  Till morning.

  His eyelids drop and there’s nothing he can do to stop them. For a full five seconds Slim feels that warm bliss, that overwhelming relief that strikes just before sleep. No! I can’t let anything as trifling as sleep ruin the flight I spent so many months in planning. Against every fiber in his body Lindbergh wills his eyes open again. He knows he must do something, and cups a hand outside the window, directing a blast of cold air into his face. Sucking in a lungful, he draws it in, hoping to wake himself from the inside out.

  I’ve never understood the meaning of temptation or how powerful one’s desires can become. Slim violently shakes his head, then his whole body. But it makes sense now, and he’s ashamed of his inability to overcome the desire to sleep. Growing up as he had, Charles Lindbergh developed an iron determination and tangible ability to overcome adversity. Combined with his native stubbornness, perseverance, and innate contrariness Slim has always believed that nothing is impossible if he wants it bad enough.

  But this is different.

  ASIDE FROM FIGHTING off sleep, navigation is an urgent challenge: all that turning and backtracking with malfunctioning instruments. Yet there’s no way to compensate or even check his position until day comes again. I’ve got to do a better job of navigation, Lindbergh thinks angrily. This isn’t a school exam with nothing but a grade in the balance. The entire flight, the Orteig Prize, the millions following his progress, and his very life all depend on his position over the ocean. Hopefully this puzzle, Slim thinks as he spreads the chart on his lap, can keep him awake. Pressing the stick between his knees he shines the flashlight on the map and realizes he’s already flown off its edge. Pulling the next section out, he tries to hold it down with a forearm, but it doesn’t work and one end flutters about. The stick bumps back, Spirit’s nose rises, and the airspeed drops to 80 miles per hour. As it hits 70 miles per hour Slim feels the sluggishness, switches off the flashlight, and levels off quickly to avoid a stall.

  For the next hour he just flies, concentrating on his course and the instruments. According to the Mercator chart for the eastern half of the North Atlantic Ocean, his compass and magnetic courses are both 103 degrees. Minus out 10 degrees left for drift, so he holds 093 as a compass heading. There’s no way to know about the wind, but his gut feeling is that Spirit is south of course, so angling northward ought to put him close to the great circle plot: but for how long? The eight-day clock reads midnight in New York so what time is it here?* Five hours out of St. John’s at 90 miles per hour is 450 miles. Glancing at the Mercator, he eyeballs a position about 1,000 miles south of Greenland. That should put him two hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast and four hours behind Paris. If, that is, he’s in the right spot. If his calculations are correct.

  Well, why not?

  The moonlight is brilliant and he can see well enough to avoid the big cloud masses, and both compasses are enjoying a welcome steady period. It’s warmer in the cockpit, too, almost pleasant. Slim tugs off a mitten and sticks his left arm outside into the wind stream. No ice. It feels tropical compared to the earlier Canadian air. Returning to the map, Lindbergh figures if his distance calculations are nearly correct then he might have crossed into the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream. If that’s so, the freezing Labrador Current is behind him for good and so are the icebergs. Craning forward, he sees nothing but a cloud deck well below Spirit’s wheels. Warmer water is down there somewhere, and a man could live a long time in a rubber boat on the Gulf Stream . . . especially if it rained a little.

  Spirit wings on eastward through the night at 10,000 feet, a tiny man-made speck invisible in the vast space over the North Atlantic. But in the eighteenth hour a change occurs, something so subtle that Slim’s senses fail to detect it at first. There is depth to the sky, more than just shades of gray, or black, and silver. There is color: a faint streak of pink across the cloud bellies. Very, very high, tens of thousands of feet above him, but Slim can see a splash of lightness in the east.

  Dawn.

  Could it be dawn? Night surrendering to morning at last, and this long night finally ending? It is just 1 A.M. in New York so it would be 3 A.M. here locally, wherever “here” happens to be. Locally. Local for whom? Fish . . . and the Spirit of St. Louis. So it would be 6 A.M. in London, and according to his weather brief, sunrise there occurred two hours ago. Slim is suddenly excited. I’ve waited for morning the whole night through, and now it’s coming! We will see the same sun on Europe today. Not as guests, but as part of the same continent. I’ve burned the last bridge behind me, he thinks, straightening, stretching, gazing from both windows.

  All through the storm and the darkest period of the night, his instincts were anchored to the continent of North America. If the weather had been too bad, or something mechanical had gone wrong, Slim was always thinking of turning back to the west. In the back of his mind it was there: an anchor, a place of safety. Now my anchor is in Europe. He stares past the propeller hopefully. On a continent I’ve never seen. Lindbergh feels good. The dread of the first night, a great dark wall he had to fly toward and pierce for survival, had always loomed over the flight. Aside from the heavyweight takeoff on Long Island, it had preyed most upon his mind. Relief washes through him, a warm, relaxing flood spreading out from his chest, flowing through the aching muscles in his back, and melting down through each cramped leg.

  Tension and fear can keep a pilot alive and alert in life-or-death situations that would kill most people, and frequently kill pilots as well. Sheer willpower wires the senses, keeps the hands and feet moving and the mind active, but this lasts only so long. With dawn and the freedom from night’s crushing burden comes an unquenchable urge to sleep. Muscles go soft and the spine molds itself to the seat; fingers and toes tingle pleasantly as the body dreamily shuts down. With every bit of physical and mental strength he possesses, Charles Lindbergh fights back. Holding the stick between his knees, Slim pumps his arms as if running, pounding his boots on the f
loorboard. Shoulders ache again, knotty and painful, and his back stiffens. Then he rocks the Spirit back and forth, slipping sideways to blow fresh air through the open windows. He uses every trick at his disposal: rubbing his cheeks hard, shaking his head until his temples throb, and pulling the cotton wadding from his ears to hear the noise.

  But it’s the third morning since he’s last slept, and Slim has begun to lose control of his eyes. They close involuntarily, then stick together. His forehead lifts and his cheeks stretch as he pulls the lids apart a fraction of an inch at a time. Sleep . . . sleep . . . his whole body screams for it. To throw himself down, to lie flat and completely stretch every muscle. Would there be anything better than this? Yanking the leather helmet from his head, Lindbergh runs stiff fingers through his flat hair and scratches the scalp. Maybe some water would help. Pulling the canteen off the seat back he takes a big swallow, tasting the metal and smelling the canvas holder. It occurs to him that he’s had no food since yesterday.

  Possibly if I eat a sandwich.

  The paper bag is next to him, spotted with grease. Ham, or beef, or egg? But no, he’s not hungry, and eating may make him more sleepy, if that is possible. Should I have taken along a thermos of coffee? Would that keep me awake? No. At this point it wouldn’t help. Nothing internal will do it. If he’s to beat this then the stimuli must come from outside. Leaning far forward he peers at the ocean two miles below. If I could get down through the clouds and fly close to the waves, maybe that would help me stay awake. But the slight gray of dawn he can see up here hasn’t penetrated to the surface yet. Maybe it won’t, either. These clouds could go all the way to the waves, and it’s still much too dark to see water.

  Shoving the stick forward, he dives through a cloud, then pulls up sharply into clear air on the other side. Physically flying helps; doing something more than simply maintaining a course got the blood flowing again. This is good. It proves that outside influences have the greatest effect on his alertness, but he can’t do aerobatics all the way to Ireland. There are still more than eighteen hours left in the air, and at least twelve of them are over water. This is the key. Flying. Once again Slim is grateful that the Spirit isn’t an easy or comfortable plane to pilot. The slightest relaxation of pressure on either stick or rudder starts a climbing or diving turn. The very instability that makes it difficult to fly blind or hold an accurate course at night now guards him against excessive errors. He breathes deeply and glances at the clock. Two A.M. in New York.

  The routine of switching tanks and making notes is a good one: visible progress, and the marks on the instrument panel and in his log are slowly filling up. As long as he can stay awake Slim can fly the plane without conscious thought. Hands and feet become extensions of the charts, of the geography, and of where you want the aircraft to be. The problem is what to do with your mind while your body is working. So at the top of every hour Slim lays the log sheet on his chart and dutifully inscribes the numbers. The Spirit is holding 87 miles per hour at 9,000 feet. Oil temperature and pressure are fine, and so is the mixture. Reaching down to the Lukenheimer he opens the valve to the NOSE tank, waits a few seconds, then deliberately puts his fingers on the FUSELAGE valve before closing it. Shutting off the wrong fuel supply had happened before to others, and he has no intention of beginning this day with that sort of excitement.

  Setting the throttle to hold 1,625 revolutions, Slim again focuses on the clock. Something about that . . . of course! This is the eighteenth hour. He’s officially halfway to Paris. Eighteen hundred miles to go, which doesn’t seem so bad. The window’s rectangle neatly frames the sky, and he’s thrilled to see that the visibility is clearing with the sunrise. There are still clouds out here, though, and he can’t make out the horizon ahead, so Slim decides to remain at this altitude for a while. Businesslike, he straightens up, blinks his eyes, and shrugs his shoulders. Another milestone passed, so he should update the heading now, too. But a few degrees . . . how is that going to make much of a difference when Spirit’s nose is pitching back and forth like an angry horse? Another hour, he tells himself. I can work it all out then. Let the sunrise come first; with it, new life will spring. After all, how many sunrises does one see in a lifetime?

  SUNLIGHT!

  It suddenly surrounds the Spirit, washing the silver wings in bright light and flooding the cockpit. Slim blinks and stares out into a huge gap of deep blue air. He is overjoyed, as any pilot would be, at being able to see again, but his relief is tempered by what lies on the other side. Another towering heavy wall of clouds. Slim is humbled; man can put a plane together, even fly it blind through bad weather, but he still eventually needs to see. Even now the next line of thick, gray air doesn’t seem so bad because he can see it. Sight: the sense that ties all the others together, at least those related to flying. Lindbergh is certain that someday pilots will be less reliant upon sight; after all, he just flew all night without it. He savors the sight of valleys and peaks, the shifting, craggy summits and shadow-filled precipices. During the night one’s eyes are fixed on the heavens, yet at the first hint of dawn they’re drawn earthward to the barely perceptible pale world below. The sky before him is an immense canvas being painted as he watches. Clouds change from dark to light gray, then melt into bronze, gold, and red, spreading down the sky like stains.

  Dawn’s flag.

  Night has passed and this is morning, Slim realizes, the time to descend and again make contact with the ocean. But he’s reluctant; despite the dazzling whiteness up here at 8,000 feet there’s no telling what lies closer to the water. Suppose I start down through these clouds, blind, where should I stop? His altimeter measures the pressure difference between ambient air at his current altitude and a reference setting on the ground. This ground calibration setting—New York measured 29.90 inches of mercury—was dialed into the instrument before takeoff. Higher-pressure air has more mass than that of lower pressure so the number of inches displaced by the weight of earth’s atmosphere rises, and the altimeter needle moves accordingly.* Unfortunately, all he has is the Weather Bureau’s chart from May 18, nearly sixty hours old now, and the barometric pressure here could be anywhere from 29.80 to 30.00 inches. This could translate into an error of a hundred feet or more, and is too big a risk to take.

  Slim knows he should also update his course, but continues to hold the 096-degree heading he’s flown for the past several hours. There are already too many variables and it’s best not to introduce another now. Staring from the window, he decides that course correction can wait until the water is visible again, and he has some idea of the winds.

  Suddenly he leans forward, squinting down through the clouds. The ocean! He’s flown out into another gigantic sunlit valley in the clouds, only this one dips all the way down to the blue-gray waves. The surface is smeared with whitecaps and ripples, and if he can see ripples at eight thousand feet that means there’s a very heavy sea down there. A lot of wind.

  Excited, Slim pushes the stick forward and noses the Spirit over. A little light in the seat, he watches the airspeed needle rotate clockwise past 100 miles per hour . . . then 110. Reaching forward, Lindbergh wraps his left hand around the big wooden knob under the window, pulling it out and moving it forward a notch to reset the stabilizer. One hundred twenty miles per hour. Letting go of the knob, he reaches up and slides the mixture control all the way to RICH, then tugs the throttle back. The valley wall looms ahead so Slim boots the left rudder while bringing the stick left against his leg. Spiraling down is the only way to stay in clear air, and as long as the ocean is visible that’s exactly what he’ll do down to the wavetops. If this is only a hole, Slim figures, he can just spiral back upward.

  At 4,000 feet, he feels his ears pop with the pressure. The engine is roaring, noticeably loud after all those hours with no change. Sunlight washes through the throbbing cockpit, then a shadow, then sun again as Spirit rotates and the spiral deepens. Working his jaws to keep his ears clearing, Slim’s eyes dart back and forth betwee
n the ocean and cockpit gauges. The tachometer is steady and that’s good; the last thing he needs is to lose the engine at this altitude.

  Two thousand feet now . . . He’s dipped under the lowest layer of cloud and can see the ocean fairly writhing beneath its saltwater skin. Air rushes over the Spirit, rasping along the cotton-covered fuselage, and the rudder pedals tap against his boots. Stiff in his hand, the stick feels heavy against the faster air, and for the first time in hours Lindbergh is completely awake. A thousand feet . . . then five hundred. The air down here is thicker, humid, and tinged with brine. It’s like stepping through the door of a greenhouse full of plants, he muses, startled by the contrast.

  The waves!

  They’re enormous. Breakers rather than waves. Deep, white-flecked rollers rippling towards him. Leveling out fifty feet over the dangerous water, Slim pushes the throttle up to hold 95 miles per hour but keeps the mixture at RICH. Spirit is rocking and pitching and he might need to power his way out of here. Looking through both windows, Slim realizes the descent might be a bad idea. As far as he can see the ocean’s surface is beaten white from the wind. Foam spray whirls, climbs, and vanishes like pale blowing hair. Why, it must be blowing 50 or 60 miles per hour, he thinks. It would have to blow with great force to build up a sea like that. That sea would do fearful damage to a ship, even a liner, so what would it do to the Spirit’s puny steel tubes and cotton fabric?

  Back in the warmth and safety of San Diego it had seemed logical to tether his life raft to the plane in the event he ditched over water, but he hadn’t imagined waves like this. I feel naked above it, he thinks, looking down, wide eyed. The plane would sink in seconds, dragging him down, too. Best to ride it out, he knows now, and hope to float southeast into the sea-lanes.