AERONAUTICS: Flight

The Atlantic in its immense indifference was not aware that man-made cables on its slimy bottom contained news, that the silent heavens above pulsed with news— news that would set thousands of printing presses in motion, news that would make sirens scream in every U. S. city, news that would cause housewives to run out into backyards and shout to their children: “Lindbergh is in Paris!”

The Start. Late one evening last week Capt. Charles A. Lindbergh studied weather reports and decided that the elements were propitious for a flight from New York to Paris. He took a two-hour sleep, then busied himself with final preparations at Roosevelt Field, L. I. Four sandwiches, two canteens of water and emergency army rations, along with 451 gallons of gasoline were put into his monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis. “When I enter the cockpit,” said he, “it’s like going into the death chamber. When I step out at Paris it will be like getting a pardon from the governor.”

He entered the cockpit. At 7:52 a. m. he was roaring down the runway, his plane lurching on the soft spots of the wet ground. Out of the safety zone, he hit a bump, bounced into the air, quickly returned to earth. Disaster seemed imminent; a tractor and a gully were ahead. Then his plane took the air, cleared the tractor, the gully; cleared some telephone wires. Five hundred onlookers believed they had witnessed a miracle. It was a miracle of skill.

The Journey. Captain Lindbergh took the shortest route to Paris— the great circle—cutting across Long Island Sound, Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, skirting the coast of Newfoundland. He later told some of his sky adventures to the aeronautically alert New York Times for syndication: “Shortly after leaving Newfoundland, I began to see icebergs. . . . Within an hour it became dark. Then I struck clouds and decided to try to get over them. For a while I succeeded at a height of 10,000 feet. I flew at this height until early morning. The engine was working beautifully and I was not sleepy at all. I felt just as if I was driving a motor car over a smooth road, only it was easier. Then it began to get light and the clouds got higher. . . . Sleet began to cling to the plane. That worried me a great deal and I debated whether I should keep on or go back. I decided I must not think any more about going back. . . .

“Fairly early in the afternoon I saw a fleet of fishing boats. . . . On one of them I saw some men and flew down almost touching the craft and yelled at them, asking if I was on the right road to Ireland. They just stared. Maybe they didn’t hear me. Maybe I didn’t hear them. Or maybe they thought I was just a crazy fool.

“An hour later I saw land. . . . I flew quite low enough over Ireland to be seen, but apparently no great attention was paid to me. . . .”

Captain Lindbergh then told how he crossed southwestern England and the Channel, followed the Seine to Paris, where he circled the city before recognizing the flying field at Le Bourget. Said he: “I appreciated the reception which had been prepared for me and had intended taxiing up to the front of the hangars, but no sooner had my plane touched the ground than a human sea swept toward it. I saw there was danger of killing people with my propeller and I quickly came to a stop.”

He had completed his 3,600-mile conquest of the Atlantic in 33 hours, 29 minutes, at an average speed of 107½ miles per hour.

The Arrival. He did not collapse in his cockpit immediately after landing, as some early despatches stated. His first words were, “Well, here we are. I am very happy”: and not “Well, I did it” or “I got my pardon.”

Some of the crowd of 25,000 attempted to strip souvenirs from the Spirit of St. Louis, while the majority escorted Captain Lindbergh, on somebody’s shoulders, to a nearby clubhouse. Then, there were congratulations from U. S. Ambassador Myron Timothy Herrick and French officials, a massage and some coffee (he had refused to take coffee on the flight), a motor trip through dense traffic to Paris and ten hours’ sleep in the U. S. Embassy.

Next day, he visited the mother of Capt. Charles Nungesser, talked with his own mother over radiophone, related his flight to newspapermen, glanced at hundreds of cablegrams.

The Man. Some say he had “a boyishly stern squint”; others proclaim him a practical joker and tell how he once answered his roommate’s desire for a drink of water with a glass of kerosene. He is 25, more than six feet tall, rangy, handsome, blond. He knows flying as the barnstormer with a $250 plane and as the chief pilot for the St. Louis-Chicago air mail route. He is a prominent member of the Caterpillar Club, having four times become a butterfly and descended to earth in a parachute. In the Missouri National Guard he earned the rank of captain. As his next exploit, he is considering a flight from California to Australia (6,500 miles), with a stop at Hawaii.

The Parents. His father, the late Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh of Minnesota, was born in Stockholm, the son of a member of the Swedish Parliament. Congressman Lindbergh was progressively a Republican, a “Bull Moose,” a Farmer-Laborite. In Washington he was known as “the early bird of Congress.”

Mrs. Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh continued her duties as chemistry teacher, at the Cass Technical High School in Detroit, while her son was somewhere in the atmosphere between New York and Paris. Said she: “I am proud to be the mother of such a boy.”

The Plane. A 27-year-old engineer, Donald Hall, designed the Ryan monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis. It was built in 60 days at San Diego, Calif. It was christened in St. Louis while Captain Lindbergh was pausing in his flight across the continent (TIME, May 23). The fact that it is equipped with a 200-horsepower Wright whirlwind motor, caused Wright Aeronautical Corp. stock, usually inactive, to jump from 29¾ to 34⅜, with the news of Captain Lindbergh’s progress.

The Instruments. Over and over again “Lucky” had repeated that his “luck” had consisted chiefly in a faultless motor, a periscope by which he watched ahead without exposure, and in an earth induction compass by which alone he steered to a point within three miles of his theoretic arrival point in Ireland.

The Reward. Not only did Captain Lindbergh win the $25,000 prize offered by Raymond Orteig, Manhattan hotelman, for the first New York-Paris non-stop flight, but he established for himself the immemorial right of extracting dollars from the hero-gaping U. S. public by appearing on the vaudeville stage, in the cinema, etc. A money-minded New York Herald Tribune writer figured out that Captain Lindbergh, as a professional hero, could (if he chose) earn $1,000,000 in one year in the following manner:

Cinema……………………………..$200,000

Vaudeville…………………………..400,000

Radio…………………………………….50,000

Book……………………………………..50,000

C. C. Pyle spectacle…………..150,000

Articles for the press…………..50,000

Advertising concessions…….75,000

Orteig prize…………………………..25,000