The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  It took Lindbergh an hour to fly up the Nova Scotian coast. It was one o’clock—lunchtime in New York City, and lunchtime aboard the Spirit of St. Louis too. He reached in his sandwich bag but then changed his mind. He wasn’t starved. Might need them for later, might make him sleepy. He flew on.

  Along the north coast of Nova Scotia he could see clouds forming in the east, and the air became bumpy. Accidentally he nudged his Mercator chart and the wind from the open window caught an edge. In a sudden panic he quickly snatched it back. A fine kettle of fish it would be to have his only cross-Atlantic guide sucked out the window.

  The big cumuli ahead were crowding out the sunlight now, a gathering storm. And to the north the sky was bulging enormously in a sinister gray. Below, he could see whitecaps and wind streaks on the water. Newfoundland, his last landmass, was up in the darkness ahead. The air was becoming violent, jerking Lindbergh around like a carnival ride. He tightened his safety harness and worried about the safety of the plane, in particular that a wing might fail. He’d burned some five hundred pounds worth of gas but the aircraft was still dangerously overloaded. The turbulence increased, “gathering my plane in its teeth,” he said, “like a dog picks up a rabbit.” He slowed airspeed and had an argument with himself over not bringing a parachute.

  A squall hit with blinding rain and even more turbulence, soaking Lindbergh and his charts in the cockpit. He gave up his course to avoid the worst storms, flying due east. At 1:52 p.m. he was six legs out, with thirty more to go. The storm abated. On the ground below was old snow; it was late May and he was in the northern climes. Then, on the horizon, he saw a thin, white band of fog along the coast.

  How far the fog bank extended was Lindbergh’s next great concern. Was it all the way to Newfoundland? He knew not. As luck would have it, the fog bank was merely a thin strip right along the coast, and as he crossed the strait to Cape Breton Island the sky opened up in brilliant sunshine. He checked his earth-inductor compass. The cockpit was so tight that the mechanic had had to install it above and behind Lindbergh’s head, and so he’d have to read the compass with a mirror.

  At midafternoon Lindbergh guided the Spirit past Cape Breton toward Newfoundland, two hundred miles northeast over the sea. The sunshine held; there was no turbulence; the engine vibrated evenly. He marveled at the thin fabric covering the plane inside and out. “I understand how the giant Gulliver was tied so firmly to the ground,” he wrote afterward. “As he was bound to earth, I am held in the air—by the strength of threads.” The sky at these latitudes seemed enormous, and he was a mere pinprick moving across it. Rarely had a hundred miles per hour seemed so slow.

  Over the open sea once more he checked the Mercator projection resting on his knees and reset his course. Suddenly he became conscious of being very tired, and he decided it must be the monotony of flying over nothing but endless water. He blinked his eyes hard, making sure each time to remember not to leave them closed. He was so far north the sun was already sinking. He fought the impulse to close his eyes but felt that sleep was gaining.

  In a moment of panic he jerked back on the stick and pulled the Spirit up two hundred feet above the waves, shaking his head and tensing his muscles in a deadly fight against sleep. He was surprised at how soon it had come but ought not to have been, for he’d been awake for almost thirty hours and in the plane for nearly eight. He was stuck in the cramped cockpit like a hand in a glove, without room even to bend or stretch. He decided to concentrate on navigation to exercise his mind. He was on the eighth leg—one quarter of the way to Paris! That at least was something, and right on schedule too.

  Lindbergh knew the wind was blowing him slightly off course—a good twenty knots from the west, a quartering tailwind. He knew it by the crude but efficient method of flying low and checking wind streaks on the surface of the water. He knew what a twenty-knot streak looked like; if there weren’t clouds, after moonrise he planned to check his drift that way as often as possible. Before he left he’d memorized the topography of Ireland, Scotland, England, and France, and it rolled around in his mind as he continued the losing battle against sleep. As the engine droned on, his eyes dropped to the compass needle and it read that he was ten degrees off course. He corrected, and then from below came a godsend, a huge white something brilliant and dazzling in the setting sun as far as he could see—an ice field. Something new to look at! He was awake once more.

  Entering his tenth hour aloft, Lindbergh began to feel the lightness in the plane, and quickness in the controls, now that he’d burned off eight hundred pounds of gasoline. He glided down for a closer look at the ice and began to ruminate on what would happen if he was forced to land on it—a fool’s errand—because nobody would ever find him and he’d starve to death after his sandwiches were eaten up, if a polar bear didn’t get him first.

  He flew over Newfoundland in semidarkness with mountain ridges and Conception Bay barely visible. In the bay were outlines of fishing boats. The town of St. John’s came into view. In the twilight Lindbergh dropped down low to let them have a good look at him. He could see workers at the docks and wharves stop and stare up. People came out of houses at the sound of his engine. Enough people saw him that he knew the telegrams would soon go out, wires humming via the cable to Nova Scotia, and the one to Land’s End, in England, reporting that Lindbergh was coming, that he was sighted at dusk passing over St. John’s, Newfoundland. He looked back at the long finger of land projecting into the dark Atlantic and wondered if he would ever see America again. And behind that, this longest day was now merely a faint pink glow in the western sky.

  His thoughts became gloomy and filled with doom: bobbing in his rubber raft in freezing empty seas, stranded in the wilderness, plunging headlong into the water, eaten by polar bears on the ice … He flew on.

  A gigantic iceberg appeared below, then another, and another, seemingly connected by wisps of fog that soon galvanized into patches, which sooner still became a solid bank—fog, that deadliest of enemies—but luckily he was able to climb above it so that the fog passed below like a soft, white blanket. Inside the cockpit, with his hand controlling the stick, Lindbergh was snug as could be, secure for the moment, as the Spirit throbbed eastward into the night.

  He was flying at 5,000 feet, barely skimming over the top of the fog blanket. Above there were stars. He knew the constellations since childhood and at least they told him he was still flying in the right direction. If he’d brought a sextant, and had three hands to use it, he could have shot a reading from the stars and fixed his exact location on the chart. But without the three hands he would have to make do with his compasses and Mercator.

  The fog bank seem to be growing higher, threatening to cut Lindbergh off from the stars. There was danger in it, because flying blind in fog by instruments alone would be exceedingly tedious, and his battle with sleep was just beginning. Again black thoughts filled his brain. He worried about engine failure, about ice clogging the instruments so they couldn’t be trusted. He thought of crashing, dying: “Do you really meet your God, or does blank nothingness replace your being?”

  HE’D BEEN SKIMMING THE CLOUDS but the altimeter kept climbing, telling him the big cumuli were boiling with trouble. How high can a storm climb? Higher than your plane can fly. “If a storm gets so bad you can’t stay under it, you had better find a field and land.” That was the conventional wisdom. The latter option being unavailable, however, he climbed to 15,000 feet but could go no higher; the air was too light and he didn’t have an oxygen tank. If the storm exceeded that height, then he and the storm were just going to have to fight it out.

  And that’s what they did.

  It took until nearly midnight to outfly the storm. At one point Lindbergh looked out the window and saw lights below, thinking perhaps they were from a ship and that he wasn’t so alone. But a glance at the gauges told him otherwise. In the darkness he’d become disoriented and was flying wing low; the lights he saw were stars.

  As he
fought his way through the storm, sleep returned as Lindbergh’s greatest enemy. “There’s no alternative [to staying awake] but death and failure.” He repeated that truism over and over to keep from going to sleep. Like starvation, sleep deprivation is a cruel punishment. And then to make things worse he flew straight into a blanket of fog.

  He tried to climb out of it but above the fog was such turbulence it was as if a huge hand had seized the plane and was jerking it around in the sky; it slammed Lindbergh from one side of his safety harness to the other and jiggled the instruments so that the needles made no sense. He decided the turbulence was worse than the fog and dove back into it, hoping for the best.

  The sleep danger returned in a pernicious form—he fell asleep with his eyes open. When he woke up—jerked himself awake actually—the Spirit was all over the sky: into a steep left turn, wing down, losing altitude fast, rpms dropping, nose down. He had to bring it under control, but not too fast. Jerking back on the stick could make the plane uncontrollable. He got it back on course but it was a close call. He was down to fifteen hundred feet above the ocean. It was 4:20 a.m., his twenty-first hour aloft and still in the fog, but he was better than halfway to Paris.

  SOON THE PHANTOMS BEGAN TO APPEAR. They were just as real to Lindbergh as if he were chatting with them over a dinner table. They stepped into the fuselage “as though no walls were there,” and provided friendly, reassuring advice on navigation and other difficulties of the flight that were “unattainable in ordinary life.” He didn’t write about or mention the spirits for twenty years after his flight, maybe because he worried that people would think he was nuts. But when he finally did write about them it was a lucid account about the spiritual world. He wondered, in his exhaustion, whether he was actually entering the realm of the dead.

  It was hour twenty-three, the twenty-third leg, 6:05 a.m. Lindbergh’s log had been nearly bare for the past several hours except to record the switching of the fuel tanks. That was critical: he had to keep a record of which was full and which was empty. With unheralded suddenness he erupted through a band of clouds and mist into a clear, blue, boundless morning sky. He had at last passed through most of the great storm that began five hours earlier. Its angry remnants splashed across the sky on all sides but glorious, sunny patches of blue lay ahead and above. He figured to strike the coast of Ireland in eight hours, a workingman’s day.

  Below, upon the mountainous sea, the endless breakers rolled but their whitecaps were fewer, meaning there would be less wind drift. There were also patches of fog above the waves, and patches of clouds in the sky, but he could pick his way in between them.

  Fatigue returned in the form of mirages. A green, rocky coast appeared—an island where none was supposed to be. An entire coastline came into view, complete with spruce trees lining its bluffs. It was so realistic Lindbergh even dived down to investigate, but then it all went poof in his face. If these hallucinations continued, how was he to recognize the real thing when he came upon it? He kept shaking his head and sticking it out the window and stamping his feet to keep awake, but that wasn’t working as well as it had before. He tried playing mind games, calculating the math of how far he had flown, and how far was left, which resulted only in paroxysms of confusion.

  Lindbergh’s mind began to drift between unconsciousness and a sort of living stupor; he was staying awake only moment by moment now. Small tasks broke this phase: spreading the chart on his knees, checking navigation, cupping a hand out the window to direct a flow of cool air on his face. After a period of complex calculation he came up with the disagreeable possibility that he could be some 440 miles south of his intended landfall in Ireland.

  The morning turned to afternoon as Lindbergh and Spirit droned on. The skies were fairly clear now, and he had become remarkably accustomed to the fatigue, the terrible sleepiness, almost automatically catching himself whenever he drifted off. In the water below he saw porpoises, then gulls wheeling above them—signs of the coast? Sunbeams danced in the cockpit and he began to expect to see the coastline any time. He needed to make landfall before dark, otherwise he wouldn’t know where he struck the coast, or where to look for mountains. It would be difficult to tell the cities in the dark only by their lights—he thought he could tell London, though, because of its size. One thing for sure, he was a long way from Peoria.

  Suddenly, in the distance, a small, black dot. A boat! More than one, actually. He dropped down and flew toward them. The fishing boats seemed to blanket him in security for he wasn’t alone anymore. But when Lindbergh circled the first boat about fifty feet above no humans appeared. Maybe they were afraid of him, he thought. He went to the next boat and circled but no one came on deck there either.

  Then, bizarrely, a man stuck his head through a porthole and gawked up at him. The man’s face was pale—or at least it seemed so to Lindbergh. He circled the boat three times and each time the man’s head remained motionless through the porthole, discombobulated, peering up at him, as in a tableau.

  Lindbergh shut down his throttle and shouted: “WHICH WAY IS IRELAND?”

  He received no response to this from the head in the porthole. It might be he speaks no English. But if this was the Irish coast, then it stood to reason the man was likely Irish. Maybe he was too stupefied to answer. Or maybe he was a Portuguese fisherman, or Norwegian. He flew on. If he’d navigated himself this far across the Atlantic, Lindbergh figured, he didn’t need to stop and ask for directions.

  The skies clouded up again. About three o’clock in the afternoon he saw a long shape ahead. He was flying only a hundred feet above the water but it looked like a coastline. After so many illusions Lindbergh took it with a grain of salt, but he climbed a thousand feet for a better look. Slowly, like a time-lapse photograph, the coastline materialized before him—barren islands, bays, rocky fingers of land, inlets, low rounded mountains, green fields. He checked the map on his knees. Dingle Bay and Valentia fit snugly, as in a jigsaw puzzle. Lindbergh had struck the southwest coast of Ireland where, as usual, it was raining. But he was right where he wanted to be, and two hours ahead of schedule! Through all the storms, the spoiling winds and fog, the crude instruments of navigation, sleep deprivation, uncertainties, fears, phantoms, mirages, and haunted heads, if this wasn’t a miracle it ought to be.

  THERE WERE VILLAGES BETWEEN the rock-ledged fields where sheep and cattle grazed. People rushed out of their houses at the first buzz of his plane, waving up at him. Lindbergh began to experience some kind of epiphany, brought on by the knowledge that he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He suddenly realized, and felt ashamed, at all the things he’d taken for granted in life. The mass of waving, friendly, welcoming people below had caused him to repent that. This, in turn, created such mental turmoil that he actually found himself flying once more over the ocean and believed he was having another hallucination—until he realized that in the excitement he’d completely turned around and was going exactly the wrong way, back in the direction he’d come from. He reversed his course and flew on.

  He passed over the St. George’s Channel to strike the English coast along the great cliffs at Cornwall, his mind swelling at the prospects of aviation now that the Atlantic has been crossed. Larger, faster, safer planes will soon come, carrying loads of passengers, freight, and mail between continents, opening up new vistas, new opportunities, new alliances. The possibilities seemed limitless. It’s just a matter of time. He calculated that because of the tailwind that had carried him a full two hours ahead of schedule, he might even have enough fuel left over to reach Rome instead of Paris! What a coup that would be, he thought. Imagine their faces back in St. Louis when he wired them from Rome! Rome! And then … crump! A sinister shudder in the engine spelled trouble, freezing Lindbergh in place—a great cough as the engine strained against its motor mounts, and then another … He was out of gas! The nose dropped down, he began losing altitude, the engine wheezed and knocked. He’d forgotten to switch over from the nose tank, which ran dry.
A quick turn of the switch to the right wing tank and a few pulls on the hand pump got the engine running smoothly again and put him back on course. It seemed there was always some little thing like that to stir up excitement.

  Lindbergh’s first sensation about England was how small it seemed. He was across the southern part in no time, he thought, and then over the English Channel, which at that point was eighty-five miles wide to the coast of France. He struck it in the last rosy gleam of sunset, at the same place near where the unfortunate Nungesser and Coli had crossed over on their fatal flight two weeks earlier. Having experienced the trial of the Atlantic firsthand, Lindbergh couldn’t help but wonder how they died.

  He folded the Mercator projection for the final time and put it away. There was no more water to cross. Below was Cherbourg, and the Norman coast, and Lindbergh felt he could relax somewhat. The worst was certainly over. With no more fog angst, phantoms, navigation nightmares, crosswinds, storms, or mirages to bedevil him, his mind drifted to practical matters, such as what would he actually do once he landed in Paris at Le Bourget airport. He wondered if there would be anyone there to meet him since he was two hours ahead of schedule. He didn’t speak a mot of French and had even neglected to get a visa, which could mean trouble with the authorities. Where would he sleep? Where would he eat? Would anything be open?