The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (26 page)

Harry Knight and several of Lindbergh’s St. Louis partners arrived with excitement. It seems Lindbergh’s San Diego–St. Louis flight had broken a cross-country flying record. They were duly impressed when he showed them the plane and asked him how long he was staying around—there were numerous dinner invitations dangling in front of him.

He’d stay for as long as they wanted, he told them, then said, “But I think I ought to go right on to New York. If I don’t, somebody else will beat us to the takeoff.”

He flew out of St. Louis a little after eight the following morning into a clear sky headed straight to New York City. Three hours out, over Columbus, Ohio, the weather became overcast. Lindbergh had caught up with the tail of the storm that had been raging over the Sierras when he’d left San Diego. The Alleghenies were always a challenge in this kind of weather. Lindbergh picked his way through passes and valleys, emerging into Pennsylvania, riding the edge of the bad weather. If it stuck around for a few days the storm would keep his competitors grounded.

After surveying several flying fields from the air halfway out on New York’s Long Island, Lindbergh chose Curtiss Field because it had the longest runway. The choice was critical. All of the crack-ups so far had been on takeoffs, and with his heavy load of fuel it would take Lindbergh a long time to become airborne.

Word of his pending arrival had traveled fast; as Lindbergh circled to land he saw a mob of several hundred spectators. As he made his approach they closed in on the runway, and some of them actually got out onto the runway. He veered to avoid them and hit the ground at 4:30 p.m., then looped around to taxi as the crowd, led by dozens of photographers and reporters, quickly surrounded the plane. “Get clear of the propeller!” he shouted. Someone was grinding away at a big Fox Movietone camera on a tripod; flash pans exploded around the plane; some of the photographers began to climb onto the wings to get close-ups. Mechanics came to the rescue. Rushing from the hangars, they burst through the throng, drove people back from the prop, shooed the newsmen off the wings, and cleared a way to lead Lindbergh as he taxied the
Spirit of St. Louis
toward a hangar.

An excitement coursed through the air as the handsome young aviator stepped down from his plane. A phalanx of photographers had arrived beside him and somebody asked Lindbergh if he’d mind posing with his plane, as some had deadlines. Lindbergh agreed but felt uncomfortable at their shoving and cursing and jostling one another for position. They ordered him around like a servant—“Look this way!” “Smile!” “Say something!”—as dozens of flash pans snapped and popped, nearly blinding him with the light, while reporters shouted questions. “Hold it!” “Just one more!”

This was Lindbergh’s introduction to the infamous New York press corps, which, for the most part, were as competitive as piranha and ethical as ghouls. It was the start of a long and trying relationship. All the recent crashes and deaths associated with the Orteig Prize had created a frenzy over this race to cross the Atlantic, which the press people were pumping up with tornadolike intensity. Some editors were calling it the “story of the year”—maybe even the century. Reporters took out their notepads and scribbled away as Lindbergh attempted patiently to answer their questions, but he drew the line at “Do you have a sweetheart?” and “What’s your favorite pie?”

When at last these people had been sent away, Lindbergh was besieged yet again. A representative from the distinguished Pioneer Instrument Company had brought Lindbergh the earth-inductor compass he had requested, so as to compare its readings against those of his magnetic compass. An oil company man was there to sell him the best gas, the airport offered him its best mechanic, Wright’s best engineer was on his way, and so forth.

Next morning the weather was still bad. Commander Byrd’s plane had been repaired and Byrd was still planning to make the attempt. He came to Lindbergh’s hangar to wish him well and offer him the use of his runway at Roosevelt Field, which he had under lease. So did Chamberlin, who still expected to fly the Bellanca. The Roosevelt’s runway was better than the Curtiss’s for a heavy-load takeoff, Byrd said. After walking over both fields, Lindbergh gratefully accepted the offer.

The day’s newspapers were strewn about the office in the hangar. Lindbergh was startled to find his picture featured prominently on page one. One of the tabloids dubbed him the “Flying Fool.” He became further distressed after reading some of the stories. Everything he had told them the evening before was either ignored or twisted beyond recognition. Papers insisted he was from Michigan instead of Minnesota; that he had learned to fly in Omaha instead of St. Louis; that his plane had periscopes to look through for takeoffs and landings. When he returned to his hotel he found the lobby clogged with newspapermen wanting him to answer more questions. It was the same when he returned to his hangar—they mobbed about outside and shouted at him as he got out of the car. All this did not take long to wear on Lindbergh’s nerves. Then a bellhop knocked on his door with a telegram:

ARRIVE NEW YORK TOMORROW MORNING
—
MOTHER
.

True to her word, Lindbergh’s mother arrived on May 14, spent one day with him, and left. “She felt she had to have that day,” Lindbergh said later. Lindbergh’s disgust with the tabloid press reached new lows when, after he and his mother refused to embrace each other for the cameras as she was leaving the train station, several editors, in an early version of Photoshop, created a fake photo by having two people hug each other and then substituting old headshots of Lindbergh and his mother.

By the sixteenth the weather was still too bad along the route of flight to try a takeoff and Lindbergh was getting antsy. With each passing hour, it seemed, interest in the race to Paris increased. Wire services had spread Lindbergh’s story to every city and village on both sides of the Atlantic. Telegrams of encouragement were coming in by the hundreds, as well as sales pitches, offers of marriage, and threats by cranks.

Similarly, the mail brought autograph seekers, advice givers, religious nuts, and inventors with projects to offer. Seventy-five hundred people showed up at the airport on Saturday to see if anyone was taking off. By Sunday, according to the
New York Times
, the crowd had reached thirty thousand.

The weather persistently refused to clear, and all sorts of aviation pioneers arrived to see Lindbergh, including the head of the Curtiss Corporation and Anthony Fokker, the Dutchman who had created the infamous fighter planes for Richthofen’s Flying Circus, as well as the debonair and unfortunate René Fonck, who’d dashed his hopes beyond repair eight months earlier when he’d crashed his Fokker trimotor. Lindbergh was also touched when the philanthropist Harry Guggenheim and his handsome wife Caroline, who were to be such good friends with Jimmy Doolittle, dropped in to wish him well.

A week had passed and still the weather refused to cooperate—rain, fog, and a low-pressure system clung stubbornly to the eastern seaboard. Lindbergh now had an official aide, courtesy of his National Guard flying squadron back in St. Louis, which sent out a young spiffed-up lieutenant to handle Slim’s mundane chores. Harry Knight phoned from St. Louis to say they had sold the exclusive rights to Lindbergh’s story to the
New York Times
for national syndication.

Lindbergh made friends with the U.S. Weather Service’s New York bureau chief Dr. James Kimball, who in turn kept him advised on conditions locally and along his route of flight. Like most things scientific, weather forecasting in the 1920s was crude by today’s standards, with no radar or scout planes, let alone satellites. Weathermen relied on the barometer, overseas cable, and radio reports from land stations and ships at sea. For Lindbergh this meant there would be spotty coverage of any weather he might encounter across the Atlantic.

Word got around that Commander Byrd was stocking his plane and preparing to take off, but Lindbergh put no substance in it. There was also a rumor Chamberlin would depart, but the afternoon’s newspapers carried stories that the Bellanca was tied up by three separate court injunctions. To Lindbergh’s mortification, a headline read, “Flying Fool Adopts Mystery Air, Indicating Quick Takeoff.” It seemed there was nothing in the newspapers, here or abroad, but the cross-Atlantic contest, and Slim Lindbergh had risen from added starter to house favorite in the eyes of the press.

That night a group of Lindbergh’s aviation contingent went into the city to watch the new stage musical
Rio Rita
from backstage, courtesy of an aviation publicist. It was damp and foggy as they drove down Forty-second Street but Lindbergh insisted they stop and call Dr. Kimball about the weather. Word came back, “Weather over the ocean is clearing.” The low-pressure system, it seemed, was moving out, but it would take another day for the skies to clear entirely. In modern times the decision would likely be made by a committee or at least some kind of headman, but in those times pilots were their own headman, and Lindbergh told the driver to go back to the airfield. The time had come, he said. He would take off in the morning.

The
Spirit
was ready, but there were details to attend to: fueling, moving the plane from Curtiss to Roosevelt Field, double-checking everything from water canteens to flares to charts. They ordered extra sandwiches. All these things the crews accomplished in a state of highest agitation disguised as utmost calm, under the supervision of twenty-five-year-old Charles Lindbergh, who remained composure personified.

He was surprised upon his return to the airfield that in his competitors’ camps nothing was stirring. Lindbergh was the lone contestant that day. Going on midnight, several autograph hounds appeared out of nowhere in his hangar, and there was a man who thrust a movie contract at Lindbergh, promising him $250,000. Another, talking similarly high figures, wanted him to agree to appearances on the stage. He dismissed them politely, saying that he was not making any future plans “until after I reach Paris.” He returned to the hotel, only to find he couldn’t sleep, in part because the spiffy lieutenant from his National Guard unit kept waking him up for all those people making fantastic money offers.

It was three in the morning when he returned to the flying field, and it was still drizzling. It wasn’t much better at daybreak but he pulled on his flying suit and entered the cockpit. The mechanics spun the prop, the engine caught, but revs were thirty revolutions low—when each revolution counted. “It’s this weather,” said the mechanic. More ominous, the wind had shifted from head to tail. Not good for a takeoff. The runway was soggy, with occasional pools of water. A mile down at the end lay a tangle of telephone and telegraph wires that spanned the field like a high fence. The mechanics stood outside as if frozen in time; they knew the plane was ready and understood the problems now arisen. The air seemed to pancake down heavily.

L
INDBERGH LEANED OUT THE LEFT SIDE
window and sighted down the runway, then pushed the throttle wide open. Men behind were shoving against the wing struts. The
Spirit of St. Louis
lurched forward more like a truck than an airplane. Lindbergh began lumbering down the soggy runway at a maddeningly low speed. He had to reach at least 60 miles per hour for takeoff—maybe more, with no headwind—but he felt as if he were being pressed down by the five thousand extra pounds he was trying to lift off the runway.

The grass began to blur and he felt the controls tighten up—good signs; then he felt the tail skid lift up off the runway, causing a wobble as the load shifted its balance. At the halfway mark a huge decision had to be made—whether to continue or abort—and in an instant Lindbergh made it. Pulling the stick he felt the wheels lift off, and just as quickly they bounced back into a puddle that sprayed mud and water everywhere. This unsteadied the plane for a moment as Lindbergh fought for control, regained it, and bounced again, and then tension in the controls shivered up from wing and strut and tail and rudder. He was airborne!

Ahead the phone wires, snarled on their poles thirty feet high, loomed at the end of the runway. He had a glimpse of them out the side of the cockpit: he pulled his chin up, as if to lift the plane, and then they were below and behind him! Barely hanging in the sky, there was a moment, Lindbergh said, when the
Spirit of St. Louis
“seems balanced on a pin point, as though the slightest movement of controls would cause it to topple over and fall.”

Slowly, still she climbed, clawing at the heavy air; more than flying, it felt as if the prop was merely dragging him along. He cleared a hill with trees and, confident now, eased off on the throttle—1,875 rpm—1,800 rpm—1,775 rpm—he was flying 100 miles per hour at 1,775 rpm, cruising speed. Below were the grand Long Island estates of New York’s wealthy, including Falaise, the fabulous French Norman manor house of Harry Guggenheim, where Lindbergh was destined to spend so much time in future years. He glanced at his watch—it was 7:54 a.m., May 20, 1927; he’d had no sleep in twenty-three hours and there were thirty-six hundred miles to go.

Spirit
seemed to get its “air legs,” flying low at 150 feet, just beneath the cloud ceiling. Lindbergh set his compass course at 65 degrees for the first hundred-mile leg of the great circle route. The Long Island Sound loomed out of the mist and the plane began to buck and shake but Lindbergh knew there was often turbulence where air and water meet. At Port Jefferson he turned northeast out over the Sound toward the Connecticut River, thirty-five miles away. A plane full of newspaper photographers that had been following him dipped a wing and turned back. Good riddance, he thought. The air began to smooth out and Lindbergh settled in. He could touch both sides of the fuselage with his elbows—the “little box with fabric walls,” he called it. “My cockpit has been tailored to me like a suit of clothes.”

As he reached the north shore he worried about the cloud ceiling dropping. There are hills in Connecticut, so if the ceiling dropped another hundred feet he’d have to turn back. Above him were the switches for the various fuel tanks in the wings and fuselage. He turned off the center wing fuel tank and switched on the nose tank. He’ll have to do this every fifteen minutes during the entire trip—switch from tank to tank—to keep the plane in trim. There was a little periscope in the cockpit that allowed Lindbergh to look out the left side to check for hills, tall factory chimneys, or high radio towers.