by Bryson, Bill
The first to try was France’s greatest war ace, René Fonck, in partnership with the Russian émigré designer Igor Sikorsky. No one needed the success more than Sikorsky did. He had been a leading airplane designer in Europe, but in 1917 he had lost everything in the Russian Revolution and fled to America. Now, in 1926, at the age of thirty-seven, he supported himself by teaching chemistry and physics to fellow immigrants and by building planes when he could.
Sikorsky loved a well-appointed airplane—one of his prewar models included a washroom and a “promenade deck” (a somewhat generous description, it must be said)—and the plane he now built for the Atlantic flight was the plushest of all. It had leather fittings, a sofa and chairs, cooking facilities, even a bed—everything that a crew of four could possibly want in the way of comfort and elegance. The idea was to show that the Atlantic could not simply be crossed but crossed in style. Sikorsky was supported by a syndicate of investors who called themselves the Argonauts.
For a pilot they chose Fonck, who had shot down 75 German planes—he claimed it was over 120—an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he had flown only for the last two years of the war, having spent the first two digging ditches before persuading the French air service to give him a chance at flight school. Fonck was adroit at knocking down enemy planes but even more skilled at eluding damage himself. In all his battles, Fonck’s own plane was struck by an enemy bullet just once. Unfortunately, the skills and temperament needed for combat are not necessarily the ones required to fly an airplane successfully across a large and empty sea.
Fonck now showed no common sense in regard to preparations. First, to Sikorsky’s despair, he insisted on going before the plane was adequately tested. Next, and even worse, he grossly overloaded it. He packed extra fuel, an abundance of emergency equipment, two kinds of radios, spare clothes, presents for friends and supporters, and lots to eat and drink, including wine and champagne. He even packed a dinner of terrapin, turkey, and duck to be prepared and eaten after reaching Paris, as if France could not be counted on to feed them. Altogether the plane when loaded weighed twenty-eight thousand pounds, far more than it was designed, or probably able, to lift.
On September 20 came news that two Frenchmen, Major Pierre Weiss and a Lieutenant Challé, had flown in a single leap from Paris to Bandar Abbas in Persia (now Iran), a distance of 3,230 miles, almost as far as from New York to Paris. Elated at this demonstration of the innate superiority of French aviators, Fonck insisted on immediate preparation for departure.
The following morning, before a large crowd, the Sikorsky airplane—which, such was the rush, hadn’t even been given a name—was rolled into position and its three mighty silver engines started. Almost from the moment it began lumbering down the runway things didn’t look right. Airfields in the 1920s were essentially just that—fields—and Roosevelt Field was no better than most. Because the plane needed an especially long run, it had to cross two dirt service roads, neither of which had been rolled smooth—a painful reminder of how imprudently over-hasty the entire operation was. As the Sikorsky jounced at speed over the second of the tracks, a section of landing gear fell off, damaging the left rudder, and a detached wheel went bouncing off into oblivion. Fonck pressed on nonetheless, opening the throttle and continually gaining speed until he was almost going fast enough to get airborne. Alas, almost was not good enough. Thousands of hands went to mouths as the plane reached the runway’s end, never having left the ground even fractionally, and tumbled clumsily over a twenty-foot embankment, vanishing from view.
For some moments, the watching crowds stood in a stunned and eerie silence—birdsong could be heard, giving an air of peacefulness obviously at odds with the catastrophe just witnessed—and then awful normality reasserted itself with an enormous gaseous explosion as 2,850 gallons of aviation fuel combusted, throwing a fireball fifty feet into the air. Fonck and his navigator, Lawrence Curtin, somehow managed to scramble free, but the other two crew members were incinerated in their seats. The incident horrified the flying fraternity. The rest of the world was horrified, too—but at the same time morbidly eager for more.
For Sikorsky, the blow was economic as well as emotional. The plane had cost more than $100,000 to build, but his backers had so far paid only a fraction of that, and now, the plane gone, they declined to pay the rest. Sikorsky would eventually find a new career building helicopters, but for now he and Fonck, their plane, and their dreams were finished.
With regard to the Orteig Prize, it was too late for other ocean fliers as well. Weather patterns meant that flights over the North Atlantic were safely possible for only a few months each year. Everyone would have to wait until the following spring.
Spring came. America had three teams in the running, all with excellent planes and experienced crews. The names of the planes alone—Columbia, America, American Legion—showed how much this had become a matter of national pride. The initial front-runner was the Columbia, the monoplane in which Chamberlin and Acosta had set their endurance record just before Easter. But two days after that milestone flight, an even more impressive and vastly more expensive plane was wheeled out of its factory at Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. This was the America, which carried three powerful, roaring engines and had space for a crew of four. The leader of the America team was thirty-seven-year-old naval commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, a man seemingly born to be a hero. Suave and handsome, he came from one of America’s oldest and most distinguished families. The Byrds had been dominant in Virginia since the time of George Washington. Byrd’s brother Harry was governor of the state. In 1927, Richard Byrd himself was already a celebrated adventurer. The previous spring, with the pilot Floyd Bennett, he had made the first flight in an airplane over the North Pole (though in fact, as we will see, there have long been doubts that he actually did so).
Byrd’s present expedition was also by far the best funded and most self-proclaimedly patriotic, thanks to Rodman Wanamaker, owner of department stores in Philadelphia and New York, who had put up $500,000 of his own money and gathered additional, unspecified funding from other leading businessmen. Through Wanamaker, Byrd now controlled the leasehold on Roosevelt Field, the only airfield in New York with a runway long enough to accommodate any plane built to fly the Atlantic. Without Byrd’s permission, no one else could even consider going for the Orteig Prize.
Wanamaker insisted that the operation be all-American. This was a little ironic because the plane’s designer, a strong-willed and difficult fellow named Anthony Fokker, was Dutch and the plane itself had been partly built in Holland. Even worse, though rarely mentioned, was that Fokker had spent the war years in Germany building planes for the Germans. He had even taken out German citizenship. As part of his commitment to German air superiority, he had invented the synchronized machine gun, which enabled bullets to pass between the spinning blades of a propeller. Before this, amazingly, all that aircraft manufacturers could do was wrap armor plating around the propellers and hope that any bullets that struck the blades weren’t deflected backward. The only alternative was to mount the guns away from the propeller, but that meant pilots couldn’t reload them or clear jams, which were frequent. Fokker’s gun gave German pilots a deadly advantage for some time, making him probably responsible for more Allied deaths than any other individual. Now, however, he insisted that he had never actually been on Germany’s side. “My own country remained neutral throughout the entire course of the great conflict, and in a definite sense, so did I,” he wrote in his postwar autobiography, Flying Dutchman. He never explained in what sense he thought himself neutral, no doubt because there wasn’t any sense in which he was.
Byrd never liked Fokker, and on April 16, 1927, their enmity became complete. Just before six in the evening, Fokker and three members of the Byrd team—the copilot Floyd Bennett, the navigator George Noville, and Byrd himself—eagerly crowded into the cockpit. Fokker took the controls for this maiden flight. The plane took off smoothly and performed
faultlessly in the air, but as the America came in to land it became evident that it was impelled by the inescapable burden of gravity to tip forward and come down nose-first. The problem was that all the weight was up front and there was no way for any of the four men onboard to move to the back to redistribute the load because a large fuel tank entirely filled the middle part of the fuselage.
Fokker circled around the airfield while he considered his options (or, rather, considered that he had no options) and came in to land as gingerly as he could. What exactly happened next became at once a matter of heated dispute. Byrd maintained that Fokker abandoned the controls and made every effort to save himself, leaving the others to their fates. Fokker vehemently denied this. Jumping out of a crashing plane was not possible, he said. “Maybe Byrd was excited and imagined this,” Fokker wrote with pained sarcasm in his autobiography. Surviving film footage of the crash, which is both brief and grainy, shows the plane landing roughly, tipping onto its nose, and flopping onto its back, all in a continuous motion, like a child doing a somersault. Fokker, like the other occupants, could have done nothing but brace and hold on.
In the footage the damage looks slight, but inside all was violent chaos. A piece of propeller ripped through the cockpit and pierced Bennett’s chest. He was bleeding profusely and critically injured. Noville, painfully mindful of the fire that had killed two of Fonck’s men, punched his way out through the plane’s fabric covering. Byrd followed and was so furious with Fokker that he reportedly failed to notice that his left arm had snapped like a twig and was dangling in a queasily unnatural way. Fokker, uninjured, stood and shouted back at Byrd, blaming him for overloading the plane on its first flight.
The episode introduced serious rancor into the Byrd camp and set back the team’s plans by weeks. Bennett was rushed to a hospital at Hackensack, where he lay close to death for the next ten days. He was lost to the team for good. The plane had to be almost completely rebuilt—and indeed extensively redesigned to allow the weight to be distributed more sensibly. For the time being, the Byrd team was out of the running.
That left two other American planes, but fate, alas, was not on their sides either. On April 24, eight days after the Byrd crash, Clarence Chamberlin was prevailed upon to take the nine-year-old daughter of the plane’s owner, Charles A. Levine, and the daughter of an official from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce up for a short flight above Long Island. Chamberlin’s young passengers got a more exciting flight than they expected because the landing gear fell apart during takeoff, leaving one wheel behind, which meant he had only one wheel to land on. Chamberlin made a nearly perfect landing without injury to himself or his passengers, but the wing hit the ground and the damage to the plane was sufficient to set back the Columbia’s plans considerably.
Hopes now turned to two popular naval officers at the Hampton Roads Naval Airbase in Virginia, Noel Davis and Stanton H. Wooster. Davis and Wooster were smart, able aviators, and their plane, a Keystone Pathfinder built in Bristol, Pennsylvania, was gleamingly new and powered by three Wright Whirlwind engines. What the outside world didn’t know was that upon delivery the plane turned out to weigh 1,150 pounds more than it was supposed to. Davis and Wooster took it up in a series of test flights, each time cautiously increasing the fuel load, and so far had experienced no problems. On April 26, two days after Chamberlin’s emergency landing, they scheduled their final test flight. This time they would take off with a full load of seventeen thousand pounds, nearly a quarter more than the plane had attempted to lift before.
Among those who came to cheer them on were Davis’s young wife, their infant son in her arms, and Wooster’s fiancée. This time the plane struggled to get airborne. At length it rose into the air, but not enough to clear a line of trees at the far side of a neighboring field. Wooster banked sharply. The plane stalled and fell to earth with a sickening crash. Davis and Wooster died instantly. America, for the time being at least, was out of contenders.
To make matters worse, things were going rather well for foreigners. While the American fliers were investing all their energies in land planes, the Italians saw seaplanes as the way of the future. Seaplanes had much to commend them. They eliminated the need for landing fields since they could put down on any convenient body of water. Seaplanes could island-hop their way across oceans, follow rivers deep into jungly continents, stop at coastal communities with no clearings for airstrips, and otherwise go where conventional airplanes could not.
No one demonstrated the versatility and usefulness of seaplanes better than the Italian aviator Francesco de Pinedo. The son of a lawyer from Naples, Pinedo was well educated and headed for a career in the professions when he discovered flying. It became his life. In 1925, accompanied by a mechanic named Ernesto Campanelli, Pinedo flew from Italy to Australia and back via Japan. They did it in comparatively short hops, always sticking close to land, and the trip took seven months to complete, but it was still a voyage of thirty-four thousand miles, epic by any standards. Pinedo became a national hero. Benito Mussolini, who had come to power in 1922, showered him with honors. Mussolini was enthralled by flight—by its speed and daring and promise of technological superiority. All of those qualities were magically personified, in his view, by the stout little Neapolitan, who became his emissary of the air.
Time magazine, four years old and enchanted with stereotype, described Pinedo in the spring of 1927 as a “swart Fascist ace.” (Almost anyone from south of the Alps was “swart” in Time.) Pinedo was in fact not especially swart and not at all an ace—he had spent the war flying reconnaissance missions—but he was indeed a loyal Fascist. With his black shirt, brilliantined hair, thrusting jaw, and habit of standing with his fists pinned to his hips, Pinedo was, to an almost comical degree, the very model of a strutting, self-satisfied Fascist. This was not a problem to anyone so long as he stayed in Europe, but in the spring of 1927 he came to America. Worse, he did it in the most heroic possible way.
While America’s Atlantic hopefuls were struggling to get their planes ready, Pinedo efficiently made his way to the United States via coastal Africa, the Cape Verde Islands, South America, and the Caribbean. It was the first westward crossing by airplane of the Atlantic Ocean, a feat in itself, even if it was not done in a single bound. Pinedo reached the United States in late March at New Orleans and began a lavish, if not always wholly welcome, progress around the country.
It was hard to decide what to make of him. On the one hand, he was unquestionably a gifted flier and entitled to a parade or two. On the other, he was a representative of an obnoxious form of government that was admired by many Italian immigrants, who were thus deemed to represent a threat to the American way of life. At a time when America’s air efforts were suffering one setback after another, Pinedo’s prolonged victory lap around the country began to seem just a little insensitive.
After New Orleans, Pinedo proceeded west to California, stopping at Galveston, San Antonio, Hot Springs, and other communities along the way to refuel and receive ovations from small bands of supporters and a rather larger number of the merely curious. On April 6, en route to a civic reception in San Diego, he landed at a reservoir called Roosevelt Lake in the desert west of Phoenix. Even in this lonely spot a crowd gathered. As the observers respectfully watched the plane being serviced, a youth named John Thomason lit a cigarette and unthinkingly tossed the match on the water. The water, coated with oil and aviation fuel, ignited with a mighty whoompf that made everyone scatter. Within seconds, Pinedo’s beloved plane was engulfed in flames and workmen were swimming for their lives.
Pinedo, having lunch at a lakeside hotel, looked up from his meal to see smoke where his plane should be. The plane was entirely destroyed but for the engine, which sank to the lake bottom sixty feet below. The Italian press, already hypersensitive to anti-Fascist sentiment in America, concluded that this was an act of treacherous sabotage. “Vile Crime Against Fascism,” one paper cried in a headline. “Odious Act of Anti-Fascists,” echo
ed another. America’s ambassador to Italy, Henry P. Fletcher, made matters even worse by dashing off a letter of apology to Mussolini in which he described the fire as an “act of criminal folly” and promised that the “guilty will be discovered and severely punished.” For days afterward, a Times correspondent reported from Rome, the citizens of Italy talked of little else but this catastrophic setback to “their hero, their superman, their demigod, de Pinedo.” Eventually, all sides calmed down and accepted that the act was an accident, but suspicions simmered and henceforth Pinedo, his crew, and his possessions were guarded by menacing Fascisti armed with stilettos and blackjacks.
Pinedo left his lieutenants to haul the dripping engine from the lake and get it dried out while he headed east to New York to await delivery of a substitute plane from Italy that Mussolini promised to dispatch at once.
He could have no idea of it, of course, but his troubles, in life and in the air, had only just begun.
The world’s attention moved to Paris, where at dawn on May 8 two slightly aging men in bulky flying suits emerged from an administration building at Le Bourget airfield to the respectful applause of well-wishers. The men, Captain Charles Nungesser and Captain François Coli, walked stiffly and a little self-consciously. Their heavy gear, which was necessary because they were about to fly 3,600 miles in an open cockpit, made them look almost uncannily like little boys in snowsuits.
Many of their well-wishers had been out all night and were still in evening dress. The New York Times likened the scene to a garden party. Among those who had come to see them off were Nungesser’s pal the boxer Georges Carpentier and the singer Maurice Chevalier, with his mistress, a celebrated chanteuse and actress who went by the single sultry name Mistinguett.