The Aviators by Winston Groom
It was all the more remarkable that Lindbergh was able to achieve his academic and practical success because he received a most severe emotional blow. He had not been at Brooks Field more than three weeks when a telegram arrived from his half sister informing him that his father, C.A., was in the hospital ill with a “bad breakdown.” Two weeks later a second, more urgent, telegram arrived, saying Lindbergh’s father was “very low.”
C.A. had been taken to the hospital founded by the two Mayo brothers in Rochester, Minnesota, after his behavior became increasingly unstable. He was confused, had lost his sense of taste, repeatedly asked the same questions, and had motor-physical difficulty. Charles arranged for a short furlough, but by the time he arrived in Rochester the doctors had diagnosed an inoperable brain tumor. Charles spent as much time as possible with C.A. and at first the sixty-five-year-old brightened to see his son, only to drift back into confusion and stupor minutes later. Before Charles’s eyes, C.A. was losing his senses, and after a week it became clear that death was only a matter of time.
When it was apparent that C.A. could no longer recognize him, Charles decided to return to Brooks Field; if he pushed his furlough longer he could be washed out of flying school. On May 24, 1924, C.A. died.
The service was held three days later at the First Unitarian Church in Minneapolis, attended by family and many old political associates, after which the body was cremated. It had been C.A.’s wish that Charles “throw his ashes to the winds” from a plane over the old farm at Little Falls. It would take him ten years to do it.
After his father died, Charles’s personality seemed to open up somewhat. Where before he had been an introspective loner he now engaged in practical jokes with the other cadets, was friendly with everyone (but close to no one), and kept a smiling disposition. He still abstained from alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and women but nobody seemed to mind.1
After graduation in September the thirty-two remaining cadets were taken to Kelly Field a dozen or so miles away for advanced training. Here they flew the de Havilland DH-4B observation plane, which had a 400-horsepower engine and an unfortunate tendency for the wings to fall off if pushed too hard. They also flew the SE-5 Sopwith pursuit fighter.
Lindbergh almost didn’t make it out of flight school, or anyplace else, due to a midair accident during a dogfight exercise barely a week before graduation. He and a Lieutenant McAllister were in fighters at 8,000 feet and instructed to dive and mock fight a DH-4B “enemy” flying below at 5,000 feet. They came at the enemy from different angles and Lindbergh ducked under the de Havilland, expecting to come up on the other side into empty air. Instead he felt a jolt, and then a crash, and to his shock and amazement, when he’d recovered from banging his head on the cowling, he discovered that McAllister’s plane and his had not only collided but were locked in a wing-to-wing, fuselage-to-fuselage dance of death—a slow, unrecoverable spin, revolving toward earth “like a windmill.”
Lindbergh looked over and saw McAllister, not four feet away, who had climbed out of his cockpit and was preparing to jump. Lindbergh did the same, crawling out on the engine cowling, which at that point was almost vertical, he said.† Jumping from an airplane was old hat for Lindbergh, but this was the first time he’d ever been forced to jump. He and McAllister thus became, respectively, the twelfth and thirteenth members of the so-called Caterpillar Club, a select fraternity including, later, Jimmy Doolittle, who had parachuted out of airplanes to save their lives.‡
On March 14, 1925, Lindbergh graduated from the army’s Advanced Flying School at the head of his class and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.
HE HAD ALSO, HOWEVER, graduated at the absolute nadir of military aviation. At the end of World War I there had been nearly two hundred thousand men and eight thousand aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Service. By 1925 there were fewer than ten thousand men and fifteen hundred aircraft on active duty. At that point the only person of any consequence hustling for a strong air corps was Billy Mitchell, and he was about to find himself sacrificed on the altar of internecine rivalry.
Lindbergh applied, without much hope, for a slot in the regular army. While he waited to hear he resumed his barnstorming career, but he realized that, ultimately, it was a dead end. The only other possibility lay in getting involved with airmail. In 1918 the federal government began a scheduled airmail service between New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., expanding in 1920 to California on a route laid out by Eddie Rickenbacker, who had recently returned from the war and entered the aviation business. But in 1925 the government decided to get out of flying its own airmail and let contracts to private enterprises, a godsend to small aviation companies struggling for income. Lindbergh applied to one of these companies, Robertson Aircraft of St. Louis, to become an airmail pilot, and he was accepted pending confirmation of the Robertson company’s airmail contract with the U.S. Postal Service.
Action on both his request for a regular army commission and the airmail contract were agonizingly slow, so that summer he took a job with Captain Wray Vaughn’s Mil-Hi Airways and Flying Circus in Denver, Colorado—mainly to study the behavior of updrafts, downdrafts, and other turbulence in the mountain canyons. It was dangerous business involving many unknowns and unpredictables, but Lindbergh had by now developed—at least in the beginning stages—the curious mind of a scientific intellectual, wanting to sop up knowledge for its own sake, no matter what the cost.
In Denver all that summer and into the fall, for $400 a month, Lindbergh was a wing walker, parachute jumper, all-around stuntman, and mechanic as the little flying circus made the rounds of small country fairs in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, and Wyoming. At some point he acquired a dog that enjoyed seeing the sights from the front cockpit of the plane, and was strapped in when Lindbergh was doing stunts, and people came from miles around to see them. “Ranchers, cowboys, storekeepers in town, followed with their eyes as I walked by,” Lindbergh said. “Had I been the ghost of ‘Liver-Eating Johnson’ I could hardly have been accorded more prestige. Shooting and gunplay those people understood. But a man who’d willingly jump off an airplane’s wing was beyond them.”2
At last the Robertson brothers’ airmail contract was confirmed, and the winter of 1926 found Lindbergh back in St. Louis as chief pilot, mapping the mail route, going over aircraft, and hiring pilots. They had five planes, army surplus de Havillands—the old “flaming coffins,” whose fuel tanks were located behind the pilot—and the pilots that he hired were pals from army flying school Phil Love and Thomas Nelson. Lindbergh surveyed nine landing fields along the three-hundred-mile route from St. Louis to Chicago, which were little more than spacious farm fields where a pilot could put down near a small storage of gasoline and a nearby telephone. A majority of the flying would be at night, and if a pilot got in trouble his only landing lighting was by parachute flare, which he would throw out over the field and then circle back to and come down as quickly as possible. If fog moved in, or fierce rainstorms, or a low ceiling, the pilot was basically out of luck. There were no aeronautical instruments tested as yet to permit blind landings.
The Robertson company had agreed to fly five round-trips a week, and Lindbergh inaugurated the first of them at 3:30 on the afternoon of April 15, 1926. The occasion was especially festive, and all the town fathers, pols, and hoity-toity folks of St. Louis turned out with speeches and ribbon cuttings captured on motion picture film. The highlight of the affair was when Myrtle Lambert, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the airfield owner, strewed flowers on the wings of Lindbergh’s plane and said, “I christen you ‘St. Louis.’ May your wings never be clipped!” whereupon Slim Lindbergh roared off northward toward Springfield to pick up fifteen thousand pieces of mail bound for Chicago.
The airmail service saved a day over regular scheduled trains, which to some people—such as bankers—was important.3 But it was frightfully dangerous work. Navigation was visual only except for a compass, especially at night. A
Around seven o’clock on the night of September 16, 1926, fog closed in somewhere over Peoria; Lindbergh turned away from Chicago into open country, hoping to find a hole in the fog. He tossed out a flare but it failed to ignite. He kept on flying, right on through his regular and reserve gas tanks when, at 5,000 feet, the engine died. Lindbergh rolled out over the right side of the cockpit, pulled the rip cord, and was sinking down toward the fog bank with nothing but the wind whistling in his ears when he heard a chilling sound. The engine of the plane had sputtered back to life, apparently because its angle had shifted with his bail-out and whatever gas was left ran back into the carburetor. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the ignition because he thought the fuel was all gone.
He could hear the plane spiraling around him with its engine roaring, threatening to mow him down in midair. But soon the plane veered off and Lindbergh landed safely in a cornfield. With the help of a nearby farmer he located the aircraft, which was smashed into a pile. But with no gas there was no fire, and they managed to get the mail on the 3:30 milk train to Chicago.
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
IMMEDIATELY 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 am
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.