AERONAUTICS: Consequences

Let three men set out in a boat from Ireland and the consequences are their own. Let the three whirl a propeller in the dim mist of an Irish morning, eat nibbly breakfasts, wave carefully courageous goodbyes and set off into the West as though frightened by the rising sun, and the wheels of the world are set churning with their own.

Hope, adventure, romance, work, love & hate, tragedy follow in the trail of their wake. The effect of their flight is felt in the farthest corners of civilization. To some it brings fame and money. To rivals it brings disappointment. To the daring it brings danger. To the glib it brings endless speeches. To one, needlessly, it brings death. To many, sorrow.

During those fretful days when two Germans and an Irishman bent over maps in the mess hall of Baldonnel Airdrome, little did they reck the possible consequences of their flight. Theirs at that moment must have been a single-tracked mind. They meant to fly from Dublin to New York; they were taking all the risks, facing the supreme danger with shining faces. They asked no man to do what they were doing.

Reporters, telegraphers, editors, printers were the first to feel the effect of their flight; to them it meant just another day of newspapers. Skippers of steamships next craned their necks, scanning the leaden skies for some sign of this fleeting Bremen.* But when Baron Ehrenfried Gunther von Huenefeld, Capt. Hermann Koehl and Maj. James C. Fitzmaurice dropped onto the frozen waste of Greenly Island in Southern Labrador, far off their expected course, they gave Lighthouse Keeper Le Tempier a torch with which to light the fires of the world.

A hurried tramp through the snow, excited taps on the key at Point Armour, and William Barrett transmitted word that the flyers had landed safely, first to cross the Atlantic by airplane from east to west. Erwin Stuart Davis, an amateur wireless operator of Manchester, N. H., caught the message, and gave it to the Associated Press for broadcasting.

With commendable enterprise, newspapers fought for airplanes. In amazing time, the first got through; C. A. (“Duke”) Schiller and Dr. Louis Cuisinier risked their lives in the flight, almost as dangerous in that stormy maelstrom as the plunge across the Atlantic. More planes started up, with insanely jealous cameramen, writers, mechanics, until the frozen corner of Canada began to bulge.

The Hotel Savard, in snowy Murray Bay (La Malbaie, the French-Canadians call it) became jammed with men & women; two slept in a bed and cots filled up the dinky corridors, just as though a notorious murderer were to be tried. Sleighs were requisitioned, as recklessly as planes. More men, more money, were poured into the northland. … In New York, hawkers sold flags and buttons, carpenters started building grandstands.

. . . In Beauceville, Quebec, a young girl wrote her first mashnote, to an Irishman.

. . . On the westward-bound liner Dresden Mrs. Koehl and Mrs. Fitzmaurice started an eventful voyage. . . .

In Detroit, two fliers arose from sickbeds to join in the rescue: Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen. At 5 o’clock of a morning they set out in a giant Ford trimotored liner. At Lake Ste. Agnes, Bennett had a fever of 102, could go no further. He was rushed to Quebec, deathly ill of pneumonia. Commander Richard Byrd came to his side; Col. Charles A. Lindbergh made an inspired flight to bring him succor (see MEDICINE, p. 22). Canada suddenly contained a noble percentage of the world’s greatest fliers, for by now Clarence D. Chamberlin had joined the arctic air circus.

Bennett died. Threatened by fate a year ago, when he was hurt testing the ship in which Byrd flew across the Atlantic, he was finally struck down. He who had survived the terrors of a flight over the North Pole in 1926, succumbed at the prime of his flying career, at 38. He who was to go with Byrd to the Antarctic this year died in Jeffrey Hale Hospital, Quebec, despite all that science and medicine could do.

His body was taken to Washington, there to be buried beside that of another explorer in cold places, Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary. A Negro was sent out to dig the grave in Arlington National Cemetery; he related that while he was making this dusty place for a flyer to stay in, a tall man had come quietly to his side and watched him at his work. The Negro asked his name but the man, as mysterious as a spirit, said merely “I was his friend.” The stranger borrowed the Negro’s spade and stood with his feet planted in the hole, lifting out the earth. For a moment he leaned back on his shovel; “So this is the end. . . .” he said. Then he stepped out of the grave and went away. In the silence, under a grey sky, the Negro went on digging.

Sadness, like fame, is fleeting. When the trans-Atlantic heroes reached Manhattan a city went mad with welcome. . . . Once again the wires hummed with consequences.

* Meticulous editors, discovering German, announced in the Manhattan newspapers that the trans-Atlantic plane’s name should be pronounced as though it were spelled “Bray-men.”