by Dan Hampton
But the wind!
Fighting to stay level against the winds, Slim has both hands on the stick now and his feet are playing the rudder bars like pedals on a bike. Suddenly the sun vanishes and he risks a look back past the tail. He’s flown out of the valley now and is beneath a low ceiling; a wide, dark roof with hanging sheets of rain connecting sky to water. Fog, too. The horizon ahead vanishes, and he must decide to turn around and try to ascend again, or go on ahead at low altitude. If he turns back, there’s no guarantee the valley will still be there. It could close up and swallow him. But going on at fifty feet is too risky, and so he pushes the throttle up to climb back to a thousand feet and some safety. At least a wave can’t reach up this high to grab him, pulling the Spirit into the ferocious deep sea.
What is the depth here anyway? He’s well past the Flemish Cap, a relatively shallow plateau some 500 miles east of St. John’s, so that puts Spirit somewhere between the Newfoundland Basin and Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Slim knows that farther south near the equator the Atlantic plunges to more than 25,000 feet. But here the largest little black number on his chart reads 2,070 fathoms; at six feet per fathom that’s over 12,000 feet. Deep enough.
But he can’t dwell on that. Navigation. He must figure out a rough position. Alternating glances between the altimeter and the furious, boiling sea below he lets his mind work on the problem. Assuming the winds were coming from the northwest all night and he was holding a northeasterly heading, then a quartering tailwind has been pushing the Spirit since yesterday. Winds aloft are usually greater than those close to the surface—but had they been blowing with such velocity all through the night? If so, he certainly hadn’t corrected enough to prevent being blown far to the south. This could explain the warmth of the air.
He looks at the compass. I have a strong feeling that I’m too far south to strike Ireland unless I change my heading. But change it to what? Without knowing a starting position how many degrees to the north would it take to get Spirit back on course? Perhaps the best thing to do is hold the same course as a baseline, then sort it out when the fog lifts. Slumping back in the wicker seat he marvels at how easy it is to fly on instruments now. I’ve done almost as much on this single trip as on all my flights before put together, he realizes. His eyes move from the turn indicator to the tachometer, then back to the ball in the middle of the turn indicator. It begins to rock rhythmically back and forth so his eyes follow it.
Tick, tock . . . like a clock. It looks funny. Almost fuzzy. Maybe the gauge is wet. They should all be wiped off. Tick, tock . . . in a minute. In a minute. Now the whitecaps are clouds and clouds are whitecaps. That’s odd. So is the sky . . . it looks like the water now, gray-green and angry. Water?
Slim jerks awake and his heart thumps against his chest, frantically pumping blood as panic shoots through every muscle in his body. In a split second his mind registers the picture before him, and his hands and feet react instantly. Jamming the stick into his left thigh, he stomps the left rudder to pull the Spirit out of its death spiral. Too much . . . too much! He’s climbing now, nose up in the opposite direction. The airspeed falls off and the turn indictor is pegged left. Stall . . . he’s going to stall and spin in! Centering the stick and rudder, Slim shoves the nose back down to regain some flying speed. The mottled, fierce ocean fills his vision for a few agonizing seconds before he feels Spirit’s controls bite into the heavy, wet air. Stomach in his throat, Lindbergh smoothly pulls the stick back.
Level flight.
Staring at the gauges, Slim pants a bit as the pedals smack his boots, and one wing dips as he struggles to hold altitude. Adrenaline is marvelous; it has snapped him completely awake and coherent in a matter of seconds, muscles poised and skin tingling. He waits, listening and feeling the plane until everything is back to normal. I should climb to 1,500 feet, he thinks. But flying higher means he might miss any clear air down low. Still, if he flies lower, more than half-asleep, there’ll be too much chance of crashing into water.
Squirming in the seat, Lindbergh goes through the shoulder shrugs, neck stretches, and back twists that have become routine. Inhaling deeply, he smells the gasoline from the Lukenheimer trap, salt air, and his own stale sweat. His ears are dulled by the engine’s continuous roar. The cotton wadding helps, of course, but it also makes his head feel full. Does all that stuff jammed into his ears interfere with balance or the ability to fly blind? Apparently not, since he did it all night. He’s removed his mittens so the stick trembles against his hand, tickling the bare skin. With the throttle and mixture set Lindbergh can return to alternating hands so his wrists don’t cramp too badly. The seat is hard, and he can feel the wicker pattern through his flying suit. Unfortunately the air cushion is still flat, deflated from his descent, and there’s no way to blow it up again without the Spirit wandering all over the sky. Slim’s throat is dry and he decides to reward himself next hour with a cool drink.
Next hour.
Will he be in the clear by then or still trapped in the shifting gray fog?
“It’s clear up above,” he tells himself.
“But you’ve been there all night long.”
“It’s better than this fog.”
The sky is mesmerizing; it is daylight, but there’s nothing to see except mist. Like trying to see through a smoky glass window. With the increasing warmth and the engine’s steady vibration Slim’s mind begins to wander. Scenes from his Minnesota childhood appear as he stares from the window. Wahgoosh, his dog, and the beautiful family home on the Mississippi River burning to the ground. It’s as vivid as a motion picture: life on the farm, hunting for Easter eggs on the White House lawn, and watching his father from the gallery above the House floor.
Twelve degrees off course.
He blinks and the images fade as he corrects his heading. Slim tries to concentrate, but each time his mind wanders the Spirit strays. Once 7 degrees . . . then a full 20 degrees. Always left, to the north. Using his thumbs, he pries his eyelids open again and focuses on problems. Just how big is the storm that he could spend nine hours in it, at least 900 miles, with only very brief patches of clear sky? Of course, there’s never a guarantee with weather, and Doc Kimball only reported high pressure moving in along the route of flight. He never said it would be clear. Pulling out the Weather Bureau chart, Slim studies it between glances at the compass. The isobars, or lines of constant pressure, begin compressing where low and high pressure areas collide: exactly along his route from Newfoundland to Ireland.
Maybe this fog is the ragged edge of all that. Higher-pressure air beating down the lower-pressure air, and like casualties in a battle the mist is all that remains. By that logic he should deviate south toward the better weather, but then he might miss Ireland altogether. England too. Spirit could end up in the Bay of Biscay, adding another 300 flying miles before the French coast. Was there even fuel for that?
Fuel.
Slim gropes around for his pencil and forces himself to catch up on the calculations. He scratches one more hash mark into the upper right corner of the black plywood instrument panel. The performance figures he and Don Hall worked out gave a range of consumption between 7.2 and 14.4 gallons per hour, depending on weight, throttle, and mixture setting. Slim feels sharper now; the mental exercise is keeping him awake. Given all the corrections and altitude changes made during the night, consuming an average of 12 gallons an hour seems reasonable. That’s not factoring in wind, which very likely helped out for much of the flight, though there’s no way to tell for certain. Best to ignore it and be conservative.
He’s used the nose tank, which he is feeding from now, for a total of seven and a quarter hours, so at 12 gallons per hour that would be . . . 87 gallons. It had been designed to hold eighty but was slightly oversized. Even so, it should be nearly empty, and that is precisely what Slim intended to prevent a “nose heavy” aircraft. The main fuselage tank has eleven tally marks against it, meaning 132 of its 200 gallons are gone. This tank has additional capaci
ty too, maybe an extra five or ten gallons, but even by the official numbers there are still 68 gallons remaining.
Each of the three wing tanks held 48 gallons, though they were also slightly larger. He’s used 14 gallons from both outer tanks, and several from the center. Therefore the total fuel remaining in all five tanks is about 182 gallons; subtracting this from the 425 official capacity means he should’ve used 243 gallons by the end of the twenty-second hour. Subtract a few extra gallons for takeoff and climb-out and there still should be a minimum of 175 gallons left.
But if the boys at Roosevelt Field had actually squeezed another 25 gallons into the tanks then Slim has closer to 200 gallons remaining. Even at 12 gallons per hour this gives the Spirit at least another sixteen hours of flying time. Actual consumption is less, he knows, based on the continuously lightening fuel load, but there is no way to calculate exactly how much less. The winds would’ve helped a great deal, but being over conservative with gas is safer.*
So there is no shortage of fuel and mechanically the Spirit is performing perfectly. Of course navigation and the threat of bad weather are always risks, but the greatest danger remains himself. No sleep for twenty-three hours before takeoff had been a ridiculous risk, he knows now. He shouldn’t have gone into New York to see the Broadway show; he ought to have slept someplace quiet and secluded. The need and desire for rest is nearly overwhelming now, and his mind seems oddly detached.
He’s low . . . too low. Maybe five feet between the rolling gray waves and his wheels. Salt spray blows up over the Spirit, through the window, and he tastes it on his lips. It’s time to climb. Sleeping with eyes open at wavetop height in the fog is no place to be. Again lifting the mixture lever up to RICH, he opens the throttle, and pulls back on the stick. Leveling at 1,000 feet Slim resets the stabilizer and throttle.
He is not alone.
There are human shapes in front of him, beside him, and in the back! The fuselage is filled with them. These phantoms speak with human voices . . . friendly, vaporlike shapes that are familiar and somehow comforting. They lean forward over his shoulder, speaking above the engine’s roar, then press back into the crowd behind. They’re talking about navigation and the flight, muted and hollow as if from a tremendous distance or beyond some barrier. In fact, these emissaries from a spirit world are quite in keeping with the night and day. They’re neither intruders nor strangers.
Spirit breaks into the clear again and it is a much larger space. Tilting his head back, Slim sees blue sky through broken clouds above. A brief reprieve from blind flying is just what he needs to take a drink from his half-full canteen and stretch aching muscles. There’s another wall of fog ahead, so he pulls out the flattened air cushion, leans forward to grip the stick between his knees, then quickly blows it up and jams it back under him as the shifting, misty walls close in from all sides. He decides to stay low since there seems to be a better chance of open air down here. Rain patters on the skylight and floats past the windows in translucent sheets. That’s good, he thinks. Rain may be an indication of better weather ahead.
Who are the spirits?
They seem to come only with the mist. Are they here to keep him awake, to give encouragement and revive him? Perhaps they’re long-dead aviators, or instructors from his past who are permitted to come back to advise and reassure him: to inspire. Is it coincidence that they came now at this worst of times? Did they save him? Somehow Slim isn’t surprised and, startlingly, wonders if he’s already dead. Am I crossing the bridge which one sees only in last, departing moments? Am I already beyond the point from which I can bring my vision back to earth and men? Death no longer seems the final end it used to be, but rather the entrance to a new and free existence that includes all space, all time.
No.
Spirit’s pitching and slipping is too real. So is the feel of the stick and the rudder straining against his boot heels, and the smell of the sea. Suddenly the mist lightens, looking almost like snow, and in an instant the gray veil tears away leaving Slim blinking furiously in the sun. Warm light fills the cockpit; washing away the dials and numbers, flooding the sky and sea with beautiful brightness. Waves still roll, but they’re much smaller and the wind has slackened. Whitecaps seem fewer and less angry, almost friendly. The plane bobbles as Lindbergh’s eyes adjust, then it straightens out, level and steady at 200 feet over the ocean.
Excited, he noses over toward the waves and is heartened to see Spirit’s shadow leaping from green crest to green crest; the black shape shrinks and expands in the waves. He’s not alone, and this shadow is real! Would there even be a shadow if he’d passed on to the other world? No, this is life. Maybe the phantoms were sent to keep him awake, to save him and to give hope.
Hope, that greatest of things. Pilots cling to it when all else has faded, just as he’s done through this dark, deadly night. The clear patches he’d seen before were just teasers but this is daylight, and morning. Clouds are still everywhere, including a magnificent north–south arch that he now flies through. Spirit is surrounded by clouds but they’re widely spaced and he can see past them. With blue sky above and no ceiling, Slim pushes the throttle forward then eases back on the stick. Leveling at 500 feet he playfully banks left and right, threading around several gigantic columns, enjoying the freedom of flying with no bleary eyes fixed on instruments, no careful stick and rudder movements, and no fear.
A pilot likes nothing more than clear air, plenty of fuel, and knowing exactly where he is. Slim has two out of three, at least. More than ten hours has passed since he left St. John’s so land of some kind is only eight hours away. Eight hours! The figure seems inconsequential after twenty-three in the air. After Ireland, there are six more to Paris so, in fourteen hours, with any luck, the flight will be done. Slim sits straighter, feeling refreshed and alive as he gazes out at the ocean, a friend again.
Suddenly he stiffens, eyes wide with shock.
It can’t be.
It is.
Land!
But . . . but I’m in mid-Atlantic, nearly a thousand miles from land. His mind races. Are the compasses completely wrong? Am I hopelessly lost? Slim’s eyes dart over the gauges and his chart. Impossible. He knows it’s impossible. Leaning from the window, Lindbergh pulls down his goggles and peers at a haze-covered coastline about five miles away. It’s purple and rocky . . . with scattered clumps of trees. Sleep. He must be still asleep! Slim shakes his head until it hurts, shoves up the goggles and rubs his dry eyes, then blinks them clear.
It’s still there.
I know there’s no land out here in midocean . . . nothing between Greenland and Iceland to the north, and the Azores to the south. What if the compasses were malfunctioning? What if the storm scrambled them and he’d been flying north all night? Doubt is a deadly, formidable enemy to any pilot, and Lindbergh feels it, clawing at his stomach lining. Reason and calm thought can beat it back down so he forces himself to think. Say he’d covered 1,000 miles from Newfoundland during the night. Greenland was about that distance to the north. Could it be? Lindbergh gropes for the chart, but finds no answers.
It’s easy enough to check. Slim banks up left, bringing the Spirit around to the north, then abruptly changes his mind. Booting the right rudder, he nudges the stick right and comes back to his northeasterly course. It’s nonsense, pure nonsense to be lured off course by fog islands in the middle of an ocean flight. I’ll waste no time and gasoline on fanciful excursions which can only end in disillusionment and fatigue. But minutes later another island appears off the nose. As implausible as it seems, it looks like land, too: rolling hills and more trees with a beach. Skidding the plane slightly, he stares from the window, bewildered and curious. But even as he watches, colors fade to green and the hard outlines become fuzzy. The “beach” is nothing more than lighter mist against the darker wave troughs. Rocks and trees are merely shadows, and in an instant the mirage completely yields its illusion and only the sea remains.*
Slim knows he must take sto
ck of his situation. Eight hours till Ireland, he hopes, but what part of Ireland? It’s a 300-mile-long island and Scotland, well to the north, has a similar coastline. He could make landfall anywhere from Mizen Head in South Ireland to the Orkney Islands up past Scotland. Navigation can’t be neglected any longer. If I keep putting it off for fifteen minutes at a time, the entire day will pass.
He knows he must do it . . . but simply cannot. Nearly two days without sleep, plus the physical and mental stress of survival, are overcoming his last vestiges of strength. Even with a good wind Paris is more than ten hours away. How can I pass through such ordeals if I can’t wake my mind and stir my body? Europe is still far away, and if the weather gets bad again, can I even reach the Irish coast? Hopelessness gnaws at him again; the alternative is death and failure. The cockpit mists over and control of his muscles slips away. Despair wells up, and he tries to shake himself awake, but this time it’s not working. The waves below are gone! Where are the wings? Are they level or not? He doesn’t know. There’s no horizon up ahead.
I’m passing out.
God give me strength. . . .
PART THREE
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH
EIGHT
CROSSING THE BRIDGE
I’VE FINALLY BROKEN the spell of sleep.
Sun beams through the skylight, heating the cabin and reflecting off the gauges, but he doesn’t mind. Maybe this is a second wind, or perhaps the sight of death has drawn out the last reserves of strength. The clock reads 7:49 A.M. New York time, so he’s been airborne now for nearly twenty-four hours. Others have been up longer; France’s Maurice Drouhin and Jules Landry’s 1925 record of 45 hours stood until Chamberlin and Acosta remained aloft for more than 50 hours just last month.* But Lindbergh is solo and no one else has flown alone for so long.
