The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (27 page)

At New London the mist began to lift. He climbed up to 600 feet. He’d reached the first hundred-mile leg of the great circle route, not far off course, and a hundred pounds lighter—just thirty-five legs left to go. It was 8:54 a.m. Suddenly he was over Rhode Island, astonished at how compact New England was. Below were farms along the rivers with pastures of cattle and sheep—and stone; great boulders of it were everywhere, and there would be no field in New England where he could put down without smashing up.
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Presently he came to Narragansett Bay and entered Massachusetts airspace. He’d been through four U.S. states in the time it took to walk a single mile. The sky was changing; there were patches of blue. He put aside his New England maps and reached for the Mercator projection of the Atlantic that he’d spent so many hours calculating a course on back in San Diego. Once he left the coast, this strange-looking chart, his compass, and the sun and stars would be the only things to guide him.

Now he was over the Atlantic, where the skies were clear. He dropped down to ride the ocean air, just twenty feet above the waves, and savor the smell of saltwater. The next land he’d see was Nova Scotia, about 250 miles NNE, which would also be the first big test of his over-ocean navigation skills.

A fishing schooner appeared, probably headed to the Grand Banks. Lindbergh gave the fishermen a thrill by flying past at mast-top level. He took the plane up a hundred feet where, on both sides, cumulus clouds billowed, which could electrify and turn dangerously stormy without much warning. He climbed higher, worrying about the clouds. The wind was blowing fairly steady from the northwest, not what he wanted, or needed—it could mean that a storm was making up ahead. What he wanted was the opposite, a southwest wind to push him along.

His legs felt cramped and the sun was hot in the cockpit. He began to feel tired but caught himself—he was less than a tenth of the way to Paris with a long way to go. Out on the bottom of the left wing he spied a clump of mud that the wheel had thrown up during takeoff. It bothered him. He wanted to reach out and scrape it off but it was too far out. He considered that he had torn pages from his notebooks and sliced the margins off his charts, only to be weighted down now by a clump of mud that he’d have to look at all the way to Paris. That bothered him more. He pulled the periscope into the cockpit, on grounds that eliminating its resistance to the wind would compensate for the mud. Before he knew it he was half asleep; he put a hand out the side to direct a stream of air to his face and saw the mud again. He couldn’t help looking at it. Suddenly he became afraid it might drive him batty.

L
AND HO
! The green of Nova Scotia appeared ahead, streaked with rays of sunshine. It was just past noon. Even from 200 feet (the height of a twenty-story building) Lindbergh could take it all in—the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick to the west, and the verdant forests and fields of Nova Scotia (New Scotland) stretching back to a line of mountainous hills to the northwest. There were towns below, with bays filled with fishing boats. He climbed to 1,000 feet and took readings from his compasses—only six miles off course, not bad, considering. He calculated that if this margin of error held, the worst he could do would be fifty miles off course when he hit Ireland, and Ireland was hard to miss. Lindbergh was now on the fifth leg of his great circle route.

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?”

H
E
’
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.

S
OON 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.