The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  Then there was an encouraging telegram from Giuseppe Bellanca saying that Lavine might be willing to sell the Bellanca. Lindbergh put on his best suit and caught a train to New York, only to be told the plane would now cost fifteen thousand dollars and Lavine reserved the right to say who flew it.

  If all this sounds odd, it must be remembered that enormous prestige would attach to any company owning the plane that won the New York to Paris contest—but a corresponding discredit would result if the plane failed to make it. And so Lavine jerked Lindbergh around outrageously over the next several weeks, with phony offers to sell the plane only to continue to insist that he reserved the right to choose who flew it.

  There were only two other companies that made planes comparable to the Bellanca—one was Travel Air in Kansas and the other was Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego. Travel Air turned Lindbergh down almost immediately but Ryan responded that it could build a plane similar to the Bellanca, and with a Wright Whirlwind engine, for six thousand dollars minus motor and instruments. It was Lindbergh’s twenty-fifth birthday and his best present ever; immediately he wired for the aircraft’s specifications and asked if it could be built in quicker than three months. Word came back that the plane would cruise at a hundred miles per hour and carry 2,280 pounds of gasoline—380 gallons—enough to fly him from New York to Paris. Furthermore, Ryan guaranteed finishing the work in two months, upon receipt of a deposit of half the cost of the machine.

  On February 23, 1927, Lindbergh left St. Louis in a sleet storm. Two days later he arrived in San Diego amid waving palms and pristine Pacific beaches to see the Ryan people about the project.6 Despite its somewhat lofty name, Ryan Aeronautical’s factory was a dingy low-slung building with no hangar or runway, permeated by the odor of a sardine canning plant next door and the pungent aroma of “dope” from drying fabric material. There were no great experimental engines roaring; instead a couple of dozen workers were absorbed in various tasks: grinding, welding, splicing cables, sawing, measuring, and cutting, while in the drafting room, bent studiously over their drawing boards, were several engineers, chief among them Donald Hall, who would shepherd the Spirit of St. Louis project from beginning to end. Lindbergh immediately took a shine to the place.

  Ryan had been formed a few years earlier by Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, a financial trader who had taken a few flying lessons and then bought the Claude Ryan Flying School, which he turned into a factory turning out airplanes from war surplus craft.

  Hall, a handsome, tanned, well-made man who stood a foot shorter than Lindbergh, quickly got around to discussing technical particulars. Lindbergh listed what he needed in the way of performance and instruments. Hall said they would have to design a new fuselage from the standard Ryan pattern. All of Ryan’s fuselages, Hall said, were constructed of tubular metal frames. While Hall sketched out a form, lengthening the wingspan and fuselage and drawing in heavier landing gear, Mahoney discussed money. He said he’d be unable to come up with an exact figure for the Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine and instruments but offered to charge only what they cost him, which struck Lindbergh as more than fair.

  Hall said the main fuel tank would have to go in front of the cockpit for balance, then looked up and asked, “Now where are you going to put the cockpits for you and the navigator?”

  “I only want one cockpit,” Lindbergh replied. “I’ll do the navigating myself.”

  There was a stony silence. Clearly startled, Hall looked at Mahoney, then back to Lindbergh.

  “You don’t plan to make this flight alone, do you?”

  Unfazed, Lindbergh explained that he had considered it at length and decided he’d do much better alone. “I’d rather have the gasoline than an extra man,” he said.

  Hall wrestled with this new concept a few moments before he grasped it. Then his mind shifted back into gear. “Well, of course that would be a big help from the standpoint of weight and performance,” he said. With just one pilot the fuselage would not have to be lengthened or widened after all; the weight saving would probably total three hundred and fifty pounds—about fifty extra gallons of gas.a

  Then Hall asked Lindbergh if he was sure he could fly that distance by himself—perhaps forty hours in the air with no sleep, he guessed. “Say, exactly how far is it between New York and Paris by the route you’re going to follow?” he asked.

  Lindbergh replied it was about thirty-five hundred miles. “We could get a pretty close check by scaling it off a globe,” he offered. “Do you know where there is one?”

  Minutes later they were in Hall’s 1923 Buick convertible heading for the San Diego library, where Lindbergh, hovering over a large globe, used a piece of grocery store string to measure off the miles along the great northern route, which turned out to be thirty-six hundred, give or take a mile or two.

  They discussed contingencies—tailwinds or, God forbid, headwinds; fuel reserves, wing tensions; would Lindbergh follow the shipping lanes? No, “I’ll fly straight,” he said. “What’s the use of flying extra hours over water just to follow the ship lanes?”b Hall was scribbling all this on the back of an envelope. He said he’d figure to load the plane with enough gas to give Lindbergh a four-thousand-mile range. If he flew the thirty-six hundred miles from New York to Paris at cruising speed, in still air, Hall said, Lindbergh should have some four hundred miles of fuel left over. If he deviated from the route, got lost, ran into headwinds or weather, he was on his own.

  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.

  NOW LINDBERGH 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.

  IT 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.

  ON APRIL 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 D
iego, 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.