The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (25 page)

Back at the factory they hashed it out with Mahoney and his number cruncher and it was agreed that Ryan would deliver a finished plane, with engine, in sixty days, for $10,580, instruments extra. This was telegraphed back to St. Louis and the deposit was wired into the Ryan company’s account. It was a risky decision for Lindbergh and his backers, because Ryan was not nearly as well established as Wright or some of the other aircraft makers. But he felt himself a good judge of character, and he liked what he saw in Hall and Mahoney. In this instance Lindbergh judged well.

Lindbergh stayed in San Diego to supervise the building of the
Spirit of St. Louis
. He was a man of few worldly wants and needs other than food, shelter, and a respectable latrine. Otherwise, he was to be found at the Ryan Aeronautical factory from opening to well after official closing time. This job, for everyone involved, was going to require overtime every day, Sundays included.

One of the first design questions Hall had was where to put the cockpit. Lindbergh told him to put it behind the fuel tank.

“But then you couldn’t see straight ahead,” Hall said incredulously. He didn’t call Lindbergh “Slim”; he called him “Charlie.”

“You know we always look out at an angle when we take off,” Lindbergh said. “The nose of the fuselage blocks the view straight ahead, anyway.”

Hall replied that he wasn’t talking about takeoff, but of flying forward at altitude. Lindbergh repeated he didn’t need to see ahead. Where he was going, he wouldn’t be in any danger of hitting another plane, and when it came time to land he could size up the situation by banking and looking out of the side windows. Hall began to rough in a single-seat cockpit with no forward view. Next he asked about safety equipment. Lindbergh wanted a parachute, night-flying gear, a radio. Too much weight, was the reply. He would take a small inflatable life raft, though, in case he had to put down in the ocean. At least that would give him a fighting chance.

About this time a San Diego paper carried a story about the New York to Paris race, with headlines stating that Rodman Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate, had put up $100,000 to sponsor Commander Byrd’s attempt at the Orteig Prize, and that he would probably be racing against Fonck, who was back in the game after his crack-up, with a big Fokker trimotor. The story reported that these men were preparing to take off sometime in May. It went on about how Byrd would be carrying “the most advanced instruments and navigational devices known to science.” At the very bottom, more or less as an “added starter,” or even an “also ran,” the article mentioned that Charles Lindbergh, who was identified as a “St. Louis mail pilot,” had likewise filed an entry in the competition.

N
OW
L
INDBERGH HAD A MAJOR HURDLE
to contend with—specifically, how to navigate over thousands of miles of empty ocean. They’d never taught him that in flying school, because the army fought its battles over land where there were identifying features that could be put on maps such as towns, lakes, rivers, railroad tracks, and so on. Over water the compass would be his only reference. Because the Earth is round, long-distance pilots have to fly what is known as a great circle route; if you tried flying a straight line from New York to Paris, you’d probably wind up in Portugal, or even Africa. Lindbergh hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to lay out a great circle route. Instead of approaching some of the many naval officers stationed in San Diego, who would be experienced in such things, he decided to do it on his own. His reasoning was that there was so much skepticism about his adventure that he didn’t wish to add to it. People now looked at him “askance,” he said, after they learned what he planned to do—alone and in a monoplane. They would shake their heads and tell him he was too young to know what he was doing.

Lindbergh found a ship chandlery on the San Diego waterfront but they carried only charts of the Pacific. At San Pedro, however, he found a chandler who pulled out “two oblong sheets” of Mercator projections that covered the North Atlantic, including New York and Paris. He also found there a trove of useful tools—world time zone chart, gnomonic projection,
^c
magnetic variation chart, prevailing winds chart. Back at Ryan Aeronautical, Hall cleared off a table in the drafting room for Lindbergh to spread out his charts and compasses. First he drew a straight line on the gnomonic projection, and then with a compass divider he measured thirty-six intervals of a hundred miles each, which he transferred to the Mercator projection, connected with straight lines. In this way, he was able to ink in his magnetic compass course to be checked and corrected every hour or every hundred miles, assuming he was able to cruise consistently at 100 miles per hour.

Lindbergh was so cheap about weight that he sliced the edges off his charts, and he eschewed bringing along a sextant to check his celestial positions because it weighed too much. Instead he would take two different compasses and compare readings between them; everything else when he got over water would be stars and dead reckoning.
⁷

The way Lindbergh saw it, navigation was not so tricky but having a sizable reserve of fuel was. He concluded that even if he was off course a little on some of his intervals, and if he just kept heading east, at some point he was going to run into Europe—assuming the plane didn’t conk out on him. If he navigated poorly he might wind up in Norway, but at least he’d be over land and with enough fuel could find his way to Paris. So everything came down to weight. Lindbergh became so weight obsessed that he considered having Ryan build a landing gear, which weighed several hundred pounds, that could be discarded once the plane took off. It would mean he’d have to crash-land in Paris, but the prize rules said nothing about having to come in on a three-point landing.

Ryan was building the plane at a pace one stop short of frantic. Hall arrived at five every morning to check on the work. Everyone at the factory seemed to take a personal interest in its progress. Many workmen even volunteered for overtime. Construction on other planes practically ceased, and all energy went into the mighty effort to construct the
Spirit of St. Louis
, which had begun to take shape with tubular skeletons of the fuselage and wings. But even Lindbergh knew you could not build a sound plane frantically, so he took charge and told Hall he needed to stop working so hard and get some sleep.

Around this time a stamp collector offered Lindbergh a thousand dollars to carry one pound of airmail letters with him—this would be of course the first cross-Atlantic airmail and invaluable as such. It was a temptation almost too rich to resist. But then, in typical Lindbergh fashion, his conscience gave him second thoughts. It was “the principle involved,” he said. “If I start compromising, I won’t know where to stop.” A single pound of airmail for a thousand dollars, he marveled. “I’ll write my partners about it,” but in the end he turned the offer down.

In late March the J-5 Whirlwind engine arrived from Wright. “We gather around the wooden crate as though some statue was about to be unveiled,” he wrote later. “It’s like a huge jewel, lying there set in its wrappings. We marvel at the quality of its cosmoline-painted parts. Here is the ultimate in lightness of weight and power … On this intricate perfection, I am to trust my life across the Atlantic Ocean.”

News of Lindbergh’s bid for the prize began to stir up interest. Aviators dropped by the factory to see the plane, as did several reporters, who wrote stories in the local papers. Imagine his chagrin when at one point a naval aviator arrived to ask Lindbergh if he would come to the air station and give a talk on long-distance aerial navigation! Imagine his trepidation when, caught off guard and not knowing what else to do, he accepted.

The race for the Orteig Prize was seriously heating up. In addition to Commander Byrd and René Fonck, another navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Noel Davis, sponsored by the American Legion to the tune of $100,000, planned to take off in June in a Keystone Pathfinder biplane powered by three of Wright’s big Whirlwind engines. A few days later the papers carried this headline: “French Ace Announces Paris to New York Flight.” This was the legendary Captain Charles Nungesser, former ace fighter pilot of the Lafayette Escadrille, who planned to enter the race in a two-man French-built monoplane carrying 800 gallons of fuel and powered by a 450-horsepower engine.

I
T WAS BEGINNING TO LOOK AS THOUGH
Lindbergh would end up on the short end of the race, so to speak, for the Orteig Prize. Several contestants had got their planes to New York before him. But then a string of calamities ensued. On April 16 Commander Byrd’s Fokker trimotor crashed on takeoff, injuring three of the four crew members and seriously damaging the plane. On the twenty-fourth Clarence D. Chamberlin, a former army flier, wrecked his landing gear on takeoff and then, after he got mixed up with Lindbergh’s old nemesis the duplicitous Charles Lavine, he became embroiled in a legal dispute that kept the plane on the ground. On April 26, navy commander Noel Davis and his navigator Stanton Wooster were killed in a crash trying to take off in their big Keystone trimotor. Oddsmaker Lloyd’s of London was forecasting 10 to 1 odds against a successful crossing by anybody.

Lindbergh remained undeterred, though certainly he took no joy in the misfortune of his competition. “Crashed planes and flyers in hospitals,” he wrote, noting that his friend Floyd Bennett’s leg had been crushed in the Byrd disaster, “impair all of aviation, and destroy the joy of flight.” In fact, Lindbergh’s self-image at this point was not as a seeker of prizes and fame but, as he wrote much later, “When I became convinced that man had a great destiny in the air—that planes would some day cross continents and oceans with their cargoes of people, mail and freight, I believed that America should lead the world in the development of flight. I devoted my life to planes and engines, to surveying airlines, to preaching, whenever men would listen, the limitless future of the sky.”
⁸
Although he didn’t know it at the time, Lindbergh was already becoming exceptional.

O
N
A
PRIL 24, AT NEARLY
two o’clock in the morning, work on the
Spirit
was finished. Lindbergh wired his backers in St. Louis. Next morning the workmen at Ryan faced a situation similar to the apocryphal story of the man who builds a boat in his basement, only to find he has made it too large to get it out. The wings and fuselage of
Spirit
were constructed separately, but they had to remove the landing gear from the plane so as to get it through the doors. Constant design changes to the wings had left them ten feet longer than originally planned and, with a fraction of an inch to spare, they managed to slide them out the second-floor windows onto the top of a railroad boxcar and from there onto a truck, which hauled the
Spirit of St. Louis
to the flying field hangar in several parts, with the fuselage on a trailer bringing up the rear.

At Dutch Flats, on the eastern edge of San Diego, the plane was assembled. All the workmen lined up and signed their names to the fabric covering the wing, “to ride along on the flight for good luck.” It was nearly half again as wide as it was long—twenty-seven feet from prop to rudder, while the wings spanned forty-six feet. On April 28 Lindbergh went on his initial test flight. Other than noting a few needed adjustments, he was thoroughly satisfied with the plane, but more testing was in order.

On May 8 the newspapers screamed:
NUNGESSER OVER THE ATLANTIC
–
DUE IN NEW YORK TOMORROW
. The great French aviator had taken off. Lindbergh was deflated but not defeated. He began examining charts for a cross-Pacific flight instead. On May 9 the world waited for news of Nungesser and his navigator and wartime colleague François Coli. Early press editions began with a report that the plane had been sighted over Cape Race, at the southernmost tip of Newfoundland. But as the day wore on headlines became grimmer, until the late editions carried stories saying, “Nungesser and Coli lost—Paris Fears Worst.”

In the midst of this, Slim Lindbergh was making ready to depart. The first leg of the trip was San Diego to St. Louis, which would be easy because he had friends in both places and along the route. But on the second and third legs he knew no one he could count on, either in New York or in Paris. The weather bureau was forecasting a low-pressure system in the mountains, limited visibility, clouds, rain, ice, hail, fog. Of these, fog was, of course, the worst. As Lindbergh said, “Aviation will never amount to much until we learn to free ourselves from mist,” adding that the gyroscopic turn indicator was “a step in the right direction, but it will take much more than that.” Just how much more, Jimmy Doolittle would prove in a few short years.

On the afternoon of May 10 Lindbergh packed a light bag with a few personal items and went to the airfield. His friends had advised him against trying to fly through the mountains at night in the deteriorating weather but, as usual, he was impossible.

A small crowd of well-wishers was there to see him off: Hall, Mahoney, and many of the work crew from Ryan, plus officers from the naval base. Just before four p.m. he donned his heavy flying suit and climbed into the cockpit. Within minutes the
Spirit of St. Louis
was airborne, bound fifteen hundred miles east for St. Louis.

The trip went surprisingly well, all things considered. He ran into some ice problems over Arizona but by sunrise Lindbergh was flying over his old barnstorming haunts in Colorado. At 8:20 a.m. Central Time he landed at Lambert Field in St. Louis in time for a breakfast of ham and eggs at Louie’s shack, a celebrated diner, with his old pals from the Robertsons’ mail-flying enterprise. Owner Louie DeHatre had assembled a collection of photographs of fliers that he hung on his walls—aviators still living were on one wall and those who’d been killed were on another. Lindbergh checked the pictures to make sure he was on the right wall. Once in a while some joker would switch them around. Around here, in the “suicide club,” they still called him Slim.