The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (24 page)

A few weeks later it happened again. On November 3, Lindbergh took off in good, clear weather but was soon fighting rain, sleet, snow, and dark of night—all at once. Again he turned away toward open country, but when he couldn’t find any hole in the clouds and gas was about gone, he flung himself over the left side, pulled the rip cord, and came down on a barbwire fence. Next day he found the plane and got the mail to the railroad depot, but Lindbergh knew he was due for a change. One day the odds were going to catch up with him and the odds weren’t good. It seemed as if every month an airmail pilot was killed. He gave the Robertsons a few weeks’ notice.

Flying the mail was a solitary business with a lot of time for thinking. As with most pilots, Lindbergh’s calculations were about how to improve his flying conditions—things like speed, capacity, and navigation. The aircraft industry was undergoing a stupendous era of change in the 1920s. From only a handful of enthusiasts before 1918, thousands of pilots had been created by the war, and new inventions and designs were being produced at a furious rate. On one of his seemingly endless trips over Peoria Lindbergh began to wonder how far a plane could fly if it was loaded with as much fuel as it could carry.

It was a moonlit night, with no sign of fog. He tried performing mathematical calculations of how much fuel could be loaded into a plane and still get airborne. He’d heard of a long-range monoplane the Wright Aeronautical company was offering that had less drag and an engine able to lift heavy loads. Monoplanes—with only one pair of wings—were relatively innovative at that point. Most pilots felt the dual wings of a biplane gave greater lift and stability. It had been asserted, however, that this plane could fly nonstop from St. Louis to New York—but the aircraft was expensive, between ten and fifteen thousand dollars.
^§

This was the Wright-Bellanca, named for its designer Giuseppe M. Bellanca, an Italian immigrant; its engine, the Wright J-5 Whirlwind, was a 220-horsepower, air-cooled radial, which allowed the plane to reach speeds upwards of 200 miles per hour. The Wright-Bellanca was designed as a general aviation plane to carry four passengers and their luggage. But what if, Lindbergh mused, those passenger seats and freight compartments were instead filled with fuel tanks? How far could the plane then travel? Lindbergh knew the J-5 Whirlwind had the reputation of being the first wholly reliable and fuel-efficient aircraft engine. Weight of passengers and freight must be about a thousand pounds, he figured. What would the range be with an additional thousand pounds of fuel? Enough to cross the Atlantic? Enough to get to Paris?

He was aware of the Orteig Prize that had been outstanding since 1919—all serious pilots coveted it—which was $25,000 offered by the French-born New York hotelier Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, either way. The Atlantic had been crossed successfully before, in 1919 by two British fliers, but they took off from Newfoundland and (crash) landed in an Irish bog, slightly less than two thousand miles. New York to Paris was a full thirty-six hundred miles. Others had died trying. At the time that Orteig had first announced the prize, Orville Wright weighed in this way: “No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris … [because] no known motor can run at the required speed for four days without stopping.”

Lindbergh was within a few days of quitting the airmail business, wondering why fuel needed to be so heavy. He was flying the night leg of a mail run, droning tediously over some little burg north of Peoria, where the ground was marked only by faint glowing light—beer halls, churches, houses. Gasoline weighed six pounds per gallon. If a gallon of gas weighed only a pound you could fly practically anywhere, so long as the engine kept running. How much fuel
could
a plane carry if its fuselage was filled with tanks? But hadn’t René Fonck, the famous French aviator, tried that out in his big Sikorsky biplane only a few days ago and crashed into flames on takeoff on a New York field?
^‖

If he had the Bellanca, Lindbergh calculated, he could “fly on all night—like the moon.” What if every available bit of space on the plane was used to store gasoline? The plane could stay aloft through daylight and darkness. Lindbergh suddenly thought he saw the way, if the thing could only get off the ground, to make a flight between New York and Paris. This is how some great deeds begin—with simple daydreams in a flight of fancy.

Now it was time to convince himself. One thing for certain was that Slim Lindbergh did not have the money to buy a Bellanca, but he did have four years of aviation experience and nearly two thousand hours’ flying time. He had barnstormed, stunted, wing-walked, dog-fought, crashed, parachuted, and flown day and night through fierce storms, fog, and baffling wind currents—sometimes with paying passengers, sometimes with other people’s mail, and sometimes with a dog riding in the front seat. He was twenty-five years old, in the prime of life and the picture of health—plus, he had just been promoted to the rank of captain in the 110th Observation Squadron of Missouri’s National Guard. The notion, of its own, was breathtaking. Why the hell
not
fly to Paris!
⁴

I
MMEDIATELY HE BEGAN STUDYING
the problem in earnest—or problems, for there were many. The first one was how to acquire and pay for a proper plane. While he was working on that, Lindbergh began to rough out the actual flight itself: the fuel needed, navigation, safety procedures; it was much more complicated than he’d thought. At the time, nobody in aviation but Lindbergh believed the cross-ocean flight could be made with less than a three-engine aircraft, let alone a monoplane. But Lindbergh thought that was what caused Fonck his trouble: Fonck had commissioned Igor Sikorsky to build him a huge three-engine flying club car with leather seats, a bed, two enormous radios, and a crew of four with hors d’oeuvres and croissants, and look what happened. It couldn’t even get off the ground.

A Lindbergh ship would be different. For one thing, it would require a crew of one, himself, and be stripped of absolutely everything not vital to the exploit. His one concession to both weight and comfort would be a wicker pilot’s seat, which was less than a third the weight of leather. Crossing the Atlantic would be a calculated risk, and Lindbergh had calculated that the odds were in his favor.

He polished off his plan, or proposal, and in late September took it to the St. Louis insurance executive Earl Thompson, who was also a flier. Lindbergh emphasized that a successful crossing would be a terrific boost for St. Louis, let alone aviation in general, whose stature would shine with a nonstop transatlantic flight. Lindbergh told Thompson he was seeking backers among wealthy St. Louis businessmen and wanted his advice as to the $25,000-prize flight.

Thompson was skeptical when he found that Lindbergh was proposing a monoplane for the flight. Lindbergh countered that a triplane would cost “a huge amount of money,
⁵
and in this he was correct. It happened that a representative of the Fokker company was in St. Louis to see about opening up a sales agency and Lindbergh approached him about building a plane to fly to Paris. The man had been extolling Fokker’s safety record and the reliability of multiengine craft. It was already under consideration, the man said, and would cost nearly $100,000, provided the order was put in immediately. If that wasn’t enough to stun Lindbergh, Fokker’s man added that the company would have to approve the pilot and crew, the implication being that only highly experienced and well-known fliers would be considered. Building a single-engine plane for that purpose was out of the question, he said. Fokker didn’t want blood on its hands if such a plane failed to make it.

More discouraging news was received when Lindbergh approached Wright about the Bellanca—the company had already sold it to a New Yorker named Charles Lavine, of the Lavine Aircraft Corporation, who intended to enter it in the Paris contest. Then word came that the explorer Commander Richard E. Byrd, of North Pole (and later South Pole) fame, might try for the prize in a Fokker.

Meantime, Lindbergh set about acquiring backers. He went to see his friend Harry Knight, a prosperous stockbroker and president of the St. Louis Flying Club. Knight was receptive and rounded up some friends who were interested. By the time it was over, Lindbergh had eight backers, including Major Albert Lambert of the Lambert Flying Field and Major William Robertson, owner of the airmail service that he flew for. The arrangement was that they would get their money back, with interest, from the $25,000 prize. Banker Harold Bixby, who was head of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, suggested naming the plane the
Spirit of St. Louis
and Lindbergh liked the ring of it.

Then there was an encouraging telegram from Giuseppe Bellanca saying that Lavine might be willing to sell the Bellanca. Lindbergh put on his best suit and caught a train to New York, only to be told the plane would now cost fifteen thousand dollars and Lavine reserved the right to say who flew it.

If all this sounds odd, it must be remembered that enormous prestige would attach to any company owning the plane that won the New York to Paris contest—but a corresponding discredit would result if the plane failed to make it. And so Lavine jerked Lindbergh around outrageously over the next several weeks, with phony offers to sell the plane only to continue to insist that he reserved the right to choose who flew it.

There were only two other companies that made planes comparable to the Bellanca—one was Travel Air in Kansas and the other was Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego. Travel Air turned Lindbergh down almost immediately but Ryan responded that it could build a plane similar to the Bellanca, and with a Wright Whirlwind engine, for six thousand dollars minus motor and instruments. It was Lindbergh’s twenty-fifth birthday and his best present ever; immediately he wired for the aircraft’s specifications and asked if it could be built in quicker than three months. Word came back that the plane would cruise at a hundred miles per hour and carry 2,280 pounds of gasoline—380 gallons—enough to fly him from New York to Paris. Furthermore, Ryan guaranteed finishing the work in two months, upon receipt of a deposit of half the cost of the machine.

On February 23, 1927, Lindbergh left St. Louis in a sleet storm. Two days later he arrived in San Diego amid waving palms and pristine Pacific beaches to see the Ryan people about the project.
⁶
Despite its somewhat lofty name, Ryan Aeronautical’s factory was a dingy low-slung building with no hangar or runway, permeated by the odor of a sardine canning plant next door and the pungent aroma of “dope” from drying fabric material. There were no great experimental engines roaring; instead a couple of dozen workers were absorbed in various tasks: grinding, welding, splicing cables, sawing, measuring, and cutting, while in the drafting room, bent studiously over their drawing boards, were several engineers, chief among them Donald Hall, who would shepherd the
Spirit of St. Louis
project from beginning to end. Lindbergh immediately took a shine to the place.

Ryan had been formed a few years earlier by Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, a financial trader who had taken a few flying lessons and then bought the Claude Ryan Flying School, which he turned into a factory turning out airplanes from war surplus craft.

Hall, a handsome, tanned, well-made man who stood a foot shorter than Lindbergh, quickly got around to discussing technical particulars. Lindbergh listed what he needed in the way of performance and instruments. Hall said they would have to design a new fuselage from the standard Ryan pattern. All of Ryan’s fuselages, Hall said, were constructed of tubular metal frames. While Hall sketched out a form, lengthening the wingspan and fuselage and drawing in heavier landing gear, Mahoney discussed money. He said he’d be unable to come up with an exact figure for the Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine and instruments but offered to charge only what they cost him, which struck Lindbergh as more than fair.

Hall said the main fuel tank would have to go in front of the cockpit for balance, then looked up and asked, “Now where are you going to put the cockpits for you and the navigator?”

“I only want one cockpit,” Lindbergh replied. “I’ll do the navigating myself.”

There was a stony silence. Clearly startled, Hall looked at Mahoney, then back to Lindbergh.

“You don’t plan to make this flight alone, do you?”

Unfazed, Lindbergh explained that he had considered it at length and decided he’d do much better alone. “I’d rather have the gasoline than an extra man,” he said.

Hall wrestled with this new concept a few moments before he grasped it. Then his mind shifted back into gear. “Well, of course that would be a big help from the standpoint of weight and performance,” he said. With just one pilot the fuselage would not have to be lengthened or widened after all; the weight saving would probably total three hundred and fifty pounds—about fifty extra gallons of gas.
^a

Then Hall asked Lindbergh if he was sure he could fly that distance by himself—perhaps forty hours in the air with no sleep, he guessed. “Say, exactly how far is it between New York and Paris by the route you’re going to follow?” he asked.

Lindbergh replied it was about thirty-five hundred miles. “We could get a pretty close check by scaling it off a globe,” he offered. “Do you know where there is one?”

Minutes later they were in Hall’s 1923 Buick convertible heading for the San Diego library, where Lindbergh, hovering over a large globe, used a piece of grocery store string to measure off the miles along the great northern route, which turned out to be thirty-six hundred, give or take a mile or two.

They discussed contingencies—tailwinds or, God forbid, headwinds; fuel reserves, wing tensions; would Lindbergh follow the shipping lanes? No, “I’ll fly straight,” he said. “What’s the use of flying extra hours over water just to follow the ship lanes?”
^b
Hall was scribbling all this on the back of an envelope. He said he’d figure to load the plane with enough gas to give Lindbergh a four-thousand-mile range. If he flew the thirty-six hundred miles from New York to Paris at cruising speed, in still air, Hall said, Lindbergh should have some four hundred miles of fuel left over. If he deviated from the route, got lost, ran into headwinds or weather, he was on his own.