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

by Winston Groom

  Tomorrow, for one thing, he would need to buy a suit of clothes; there would be reporters to contend with, and photographers. They would want to see the Spirit of St. Louis. “That will be fun,” he said. “I like showing off the plane.” For another, he’d have to find a telegraph office where someone spoke English and send a wire informing his people back in St. Louis that he’d arrived.

  What he didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that after tonight, for the rest of his life, he would never have to inform anyone that Lindbergh had arrived.

  THE FRENCH FARM FIELDS, Lindbergh reported with some relief, were larger than those of Ireland and England, with plenty of places “where I could land in emergency without cracking up.” Otherwise, his reception was the same: people rushing out of their houses in the dim twilight and waving up at him, “looking as though they had jumped up from the supper table.” Which reminded him, it was 9:20 p.m., Paris time, and he was hungry and grabbed a sandwich. He started to fling the paper wrapping out the window but stopped himself. “I don’t want the litter from a sandwich to symbolize my first contact with France,” Lindbergh said.

  He flew on toward Paris, a hundred miles ahead, following the Seine, over the winking lights of villages, towns, and cities, until he spied one of the bright air navigation beacons set up by the French to guide aircraft after dark. He followed the beacons right into Paris, which appeared, he said, as “a patch of starlit earth under a starlit sky.” Soon the city itself took shape, with buildings, parks, and avenues seeming to radiate from a gigantic pillar lit by thousands of electric lights, which Lindbergh recognized immediately as the Eiffel Tower. All sense of sleepiness had vanished now. He felt as if he could fly another three thousand miles.

  Le Bourget airport was just northeast of the city, so he circled the Eiffel Tower once and headed that way. There were no beacons or searchlights but he did see a large semidarkened space that could have been an airport, yet it seemed surrounded by a factory with hundreds of lighted windows. He dropped down to investigate, only to discover it wasn’t a factory but thousands of automobiles that appeared stuck in some kind of traffic jam. Only half of the grass runway was lit, Lindbergh noted—at least he hoped that was the case; if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be long enough to land on. Spiraling down three times, he sized up the field and began his approach—there were no visible obstructions—and he cut his speed at half throttle, still worried about what might lie in the unlit part of the runway.

  The airspeed indicator read 90 miles per hour—way too fast—but the plane felt as if it might stall. He closed the throttle, which set the engine to idling, and timed his descent to touch down not far beyond the hangars. He’d never landed Spirit at night before and was arrested by conflicting instincts—too high, too fast; too low, too slow. He started to do a touch-and-go and reached for the throttle, then just as quickly decided against it, and in another instant he was on the ground, just like that. After thirty-four hours and thirty-six hundred miles in the air, Lindbergh was bumping along toward he knew not what in the darkened part of the runway. “What” turned out to be perfectly good grass, and Lindbergh let himself roll to a solid stop on terra firma before turning to taxi back toward the hangars. That was when he saw the crowd, or mob, and they saw him, more than a hundred thousand of them, men, women, and children, rushing toward him screaming things in French, of which the only thing he understood was his name.

  It was suddenly startling, then terrifying, not the least because these people seemed to be rushing toward certain decapitation by his spinning propeller. Now, wouldn’t that be a fine spectacle upon his arrival in Paris? Lindbergh’s flight had been tracked from Nova Scotia to Ireland, to England, and across the French coast. By the time he put down in Paris the media had turned his arrival into a frenzied carnival of celebration and adulation. The police and aviation authorities, fearing such a demonstration, had contained the crowd behind steel fences, but they broke through them anyway and rushed the field.

  Lindbergh, still inside the cockpit, could feel the stiff fabric skin of the plane begin to crack as the mob surged against the fuselage. He opened the door and stepped out on the wing to try to reason with them, but he was seized by frantic hands and carried around and around on people’s shoulders, who were all the while shouting and screaming in an incomprehensible babble. It went on that way nearly half an hour, with Lindbergh at times fearing for his life—that he might be smothered or trampled to death. He shouted in English if there were any mechanics around but his pleas were consumed by the din.

  Someone suddenly jerked his leather flying helmet off, and just as suddenly he found himself on his feet—on French soil at last! Friendly, firm hands gripped his arms and steered him out of the crowd. It turned out that two savvy French pilots had seen his distress and intervened. It had been they who took his flying helmet and jammed it on the head of an unsuspecting bystander, shouting and pointing, “Here is Lindbergh!” And soon enough that hapless man was hoisted up and trundled around the field as Lindbergh had been before him.

  They took Lindbergh to a hangar where there was a private room and asked what he needed—food, drink, doctor, bathroom? Lindbergh told them he was fine but embarrassed that he had neglected to bring a visa. Would there be trouble? They only laughed at him. He asked if there was any news of Nungesser and Coli. The pilots shook their heads sadly.

  Presently the proud U.S. ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick, appeared with congratulations and offers of assistance. He would have come sooner, he said, but had been delayed when the bystander wearing Lindbergh’s flying helmet had been presented to him as the real McCoy, and by the time that was straightened out the crowd had once more gone berserk.

  The ambassador wanted Lindbergh to come with him to stay at the American embassy, but Lindbergh wanted to see his plane. He feared for the damage it had suffered. Reluctantly, they took him to the hangar in which the Spirit of St. Louis had been placed under lock and key and guarded by armed soldiers. Lindbergh was appalled at the sight. The crowd had gouged holes in the fuselage fabric and jerked small parts off of the engine as souvenirs, but on closer examination it appeared that no serious damage had been done. It was mostly cosmetic and the plane would be good as new by tomorrow afternoon. The French would gladly see to that.

  The pilots drove Lindbergh to the embassy by side roads to avoid the traffic but turned back down the Champs-Élysées and came to a halt beneath the Arc de Triomphe, which contained the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of France in the Great War. Lindbergh did not know this, and didn’t understand what the pilots were saying, but he did recognize that this place was important to them.

  It was after three a.m. before Ambassador Herrick, having himself been caught up in the wild traffic jams outside the airport, returned to his residence. He arrived to find Lindbergh munching on a fine nocturnal repast, courtesy of his kitchen staff. At the ambassador’s suggestion, Captain Charles Lindbergh took a few minutes to speak with reporters, and then, in pajamas borrowed from the ambassador, he turned in for the night.

  * The Jenny is the plane featured on the famous 1918 “inverted Jenny” airmail stamp, in which a printing error caused the plane to appear upside down. Only a handful of these stamps exist today and an example brings near $1 million.

  † Fortunately, the Air Service had recently adopted parachutes as standard equipment for its fliers; in fact, the class of 1925, Lindbergh’s class, was the first to use them.

  ‡ The club was formed in 1922 by a parachute maker. To date it can claim an estimated one hundred thousand current or former members.

  § Roughly $200,000 today.

  ‖ René Fonck was an Allied Ace of Aces in World War I with seventy-five victories. Fonck’s attempt at the Orteig Prize ended on September 21, 1926, in a fiery crash that killed two crew members, though he survived.

  a Including the weight of the tank.

  b In 1919 the U.S. Navy attempted an Atlantic crossing from New York City to the Azores using three se
aplanes and stationing destroyers every sixty miles along the proposed route. Two planes crashed or gave out, one made the Azores.

  c A chart that shows all the circle lines on a globe as imaginary straight lines.

  CHAPTER 7

  MAN’S GREATEST ENEMY

  IN THE AIR

  Man’s greatest enemy in the air, fog, was conquered yesterday …

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1929

  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1928 Jimmy Doolittle was entirely in his element when he went to work for Harry Guggenheim at the Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field, Long Island, New York. He lived with Joe and the boys—Jim, eight, and John, six—in “a long termite-ridden building built in World War I,” and Doolittle enjoyed every moment of it. At the age of thirty-one, the man and the hour had met. Doolittle’s outstanding qualities as a pilot and his professional knowledge as a Phd in aeronautical engineering would now be put to use in tandem to solve the dilemma his friend Slim Lindbergh had alluded to when he declared before his famous Atlantic flight that “aviation will never amount to much until we learn to free ourselves from mist.”1

  It was too true. Since the inception of flight, aviation had been used for war, to carry mail, and for barnstorming performances and sport racing. But for ordinary civilians airplanes remained, basically, a novelty. Even though airplane cockpits were beginning to be enclosed to make more comfortable cabins, mass transportation was left to ships, trains, and automobiles, because without the ability to fly in fog, blizzards, and other heavy weather—flying “blind” was the expression—airlines could guarantee no regular schedules, and without dependable schedules, as Lindbergh pointed out, they were not attractive for either freight or passengers.

  Lindbergh found out the hard way during one of his mail runs to Chicago. Both St. Louis and Springfield were fogged in and night had closed around him and his de Havilland mail plane. He’d been trying to find a hole in the cloud ceiling when suddenly he saw a blur of treetops less than a hundred feet below and jerked up hard on the stick, forced to rely on his “untrusted” instruments in the black nothingness. He went up too fast, however, lost control, and began dropping down, but he caught the plane and leveled it out. Then the controls went loose, the engine lost power, the wings began to tremble, and the nose dropped again. He was in a stall because he had failed to keep the turn indicator centered and the airspeed needle high. Instead, he’d been flying seat-of-the-pants—controlling the plane the way he thought it ought to be controlled, instead of relying on his instruments to warn him of danger. Lindbergh fought the stall with stick, pedals, and throttle and was preparing to jump but luckily he reclaimed control after the second whip. As the plane slowly climbed, he vowed to teach himself to fly by instruments in the future.

  Many other pilots weren’t so lucky. Too many tried to tough it out against the weather; through some sort of misguided machismo they actually held the weather in contempt. Thousands of accidents and deaths and injuries could be directly attributed to pilots who either couldn’t fly by instruments or refused to believe them.

  The way Doolittle saw the problem, if scientific advances in airplane design, navigation instruments, and radio communication “could be merged, I thought flying in weather could be mastered.” That was a big, bold statement but, like Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle thought big and bold. He was not a boaster. He was a serious, competent pilot and scientist, and he set about his quest for supremacy over the weather with persistence and ferocity.

  With the help of U.S. Navy Captain Emory “Jerry” Land, the vice president of the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, as well as Slim Lindbergh’s first cousin, Doolittle procured two modern planes with which to conduct experiments. One was a Consolidated NY-2 Husky, a sturdy two-seater with a Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine, that was to be used in instruments testing for blind flying. To that end, a special canvas hood was put over the pilot’s cockpit so he saw nothing before him of the outside world—only his instrument panel. The second plane was a navy Vought O2U-1 Corsair, a fast-flying aircraft that the team used for cross-country flying and transportation to locations they might need to visit in the course of the project. Doolittle, the famous aviation racer, was quite fond of the Corsair, but he had little use for the Husky, whose slowness he complained of in a letter to the president of Consolidated Aircraft, saying, among other things, “On one occasion, while we were flying low over a road and into a head wind, a green automobile overtook and passed us. It hurt my pride.”

  The first thing Doolittle realized as he studied the problem was that the instruments fliers were presently using—the magnetic compass, earth inductor compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator, turn-and-bank indicator, and artificial horizon—were too crude to be trusted in a blind landing when a pilot had to know his exact position, speed, altitude, attitude, and distance from the ground. Doolittle cast about for ways to refine these mechanisms’ accuracy down to the linear foot, if possible, so that a pilot could comfortably guide his plane onto a runway and put it safely on the ground, even in a dense fog.

  At Doolittle’s request the Sperry Gyroscope Company, led by the renowned scientist and engineer Elmer A. Sperry Sr. and his son Elmer Jr., devised a new, highly improved directional gyroscope and artificial horizon,* which gave the pilot both a precisely accurate compass and a leveling indicator from which today’s space-age electronic aviation instruments were originated.

  Next Doolittle needed an altimeter that gave more than a rough approximation of the plane’s height over the ground. Present altimeters gauged the pressure based at sea level, which was fine if you were flying along an ocean beach, but pilots needed a more accurate reading in all types of terrain. Fortunately, word had gotten out about the Guggenheim project, and inventors from far and wide began submitting various gadgets and apparatuses to the U.S. Bureau of Standards, which gave them over to Captain Jerry Land, who in turn passed them along to Doolittle if they seemed to have any merit.

  A German-born American named Paul Kollsman turned up with an idea for an altimeter. He had worked for the venerable Pioneer Instrument Company until he was fired for saying the altimeter the company produced was no good. Kollsman decided the only way to prove his bosses wrong was to build a better altimeter. In this endeavor he sought the help of a Swiss watchmaker in New York, whom he induced to cut the tiny gears “more accurate than the best watch ever made.”2 Meanwhile, Kollsman, working out of his garage in Brooklyn, set about crafting a diaphragm and barometric pressure device that would allow the altimeter to adjust for precise changes in atmospheric pressure, solving one of the major problems of altitude gauging. Soon, Doolittle’s instrument panel included the finest and most accurate altimeter ever constructed.3

  None of this was as easy as it sounds. Doolittle spent many long hours in tedious flight with Elmer Sperry Jr., Paul Kollsman, and others, testing, adjusting, and refining these instruments until they were as exact as possible. Similar tweaking was done with the airspeed indicator. As well, during the better part of a year that Doolittle had spent with the Full Flight Laboratory, many other ideas and inventions had been tried and discarded.

  Not only that, but Doolittle himself came extremely close to losing his life while experimenting in bad-weather flying.

  On March 15, 1929, he took off at night from Buffalo for Mitchel Field, about a four-hundred-mile flight, in the O2U-1 Corsair, which was the utility plane and not equipped with any blind-flying instruments. Doolittle knew in advance that the weather would be bad the farther south he flew, but he justified the attempt by reasoning that he could always return to Buffalo if the situation got dicey. By the time he reached Albany the weather had deteriorated; the ceiling closed in and visibility was minimal. That was also when he reached the point of no return—when he had used up too much fuel to fly back.

  Doolittle dropped through the soup and managed to catch the lights of a southbound passenger train along the Hudson. He hovered above it for a whil
e until it disappeared into a tunnel or a cut bank and he was on his own. This was the sort of weather in which pilots needed to get on the ground as quickly as possible. Doolittle thought of landing on the parade field at West Point but abandoned the idea and followed the river into New York City, which was thoroughly socked in—halfway to the tops of the skyscrapers. The fog blanket was so vast that reaching Mitchel Field was impossible. He considered landing on Governors Island but the fog was right on the ground. He turned back to the Yonker’s golf course and found it similarly cloaked. He tried Battery Park but that didn’t work either. And he thought about ditching in the river but the idea of water gave him chills. He tried instead to get to Newark Airport … to no avail; the fog was all-enveloping.

  Discouraged and running out of gas, Doolittle climbed above the fog and headed west out of the populated area. A parachute landing of some kind seemed inevitable. He had flown about twenty miles into New Jersey, past Newark, when he saw through a hole in the fog what he took for an aircraft beacon and popped down to take a look. Immediately he scraped a treetop that tore his wing but he was able to maintain enough control to crash-land—deliberately, so he said—wrapping the left wing around a tree to slow the crash and break the impact. The Corsair was a total wreck, and it is nothing short of amazing that Doolittle walked away from it alive, without a bruise or a scratch.

  THERE WAS ONE FINAL DEVICE needed to finish the job. Despite the remarkable refinements in the plane’s instrument panel, there was nothing to tell the pilot where the airfield was, let alone the runway. Only a radio beam could do that. The team had been experimenting with beams for some time, but now they would have to perfect it so the airplane could always make contact with an accurate radio beacon that could guide the pilot in and down.