The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  A mirror had been mounted at the panel’s top edge, dead center above the earth inductor dial, and fastened to the plywood with chewing gum. One of the Pioneer technicians had installed the magnetic compass just aft of the skylight, right near Slim’s head—it was the only place to put it, he had said. Any more forward and the engine’s metal parts would cause interference. The problem was, there was no way to see it from the pilot’s seat.

  “I don’t mind reading it through a mirror,” Lindbergh had stated calmly. “The most important thing is to have it accurate and steady.”

  “Will this do?” a woman had called from the knot of spectators standing beyond the roped-off hangar entrance. She was young, like a college girl, and held out a two-inch-round mirror. The technician thanked her, pulled a piece of chewing gum from his mouth, and stuck it on the back. Pressing it onto the plywood panel, he held the mirror a moment then let go, and it remained firmly in place.

  Now, more than eight hours into his flight, Slim stares at the reflection, reading the numbers in reverse. Deviation at this longitude is 27 degrees, so correcting for drift gives . . . a 086-degree compass course. Eyeing the chart, he figures that should put Spirit over the Miquelon Islands, near the mouth of Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay. As long as the magnetic course is maintained and he remains right of the earth inductor course, then all is well. But what if there’s fog again, or bad weather over Newfoundland? What if he can’t fix his position before heading out over the next 1,900 miles of open ocean, at night?

  No. It will be all right. Slim knows self-doubt often curses pilots who fly alone. The Mercator plot shows a landfall over White Bear Bay, on Newfoundland’s south coast, then across to Cape Bonavista and the Atlantic. The weather, at least what he can see of it, seems to be moving in from the north, so it’s best to stay south if possible. After reaching Placentia Bay on the island’s southeast edge, he could fly up it instead and pass directly over St. John’s, the capitol city. Surely someone there would see and report the Spirit’s passage. They would wire New York that the silver plane marked N-X-211 made it at least this far. His mother, teaching in Detroit, his partners in St. Louis, and all the men at the factory in San Diego deserved to know. That is the plan then, and Slim feels another surge of optimism.

  The sea is no longer a stranger and he revels in that thought. As I struck Nova Scotia, I will strike Newfoundland; and as I strike Newfoundland, I will strike Europe! A pebbled beach looms ahead and Slim noses over, roaring across the dead weeds and breakers at a bare twenty feet. Flying down Mira Bay, four minutes later he passes the eastern point of Main-à-Dieu, and as Scatari Island disappears beneath the right wing Spirit again heads out to sea.

  FOUR

  DOORWAY TO THE ATLANTIC

  “YOU DON’T PLAN on making that flight alone, do you? I . . . I thought you’d need somebody to navigate and be relief pilot.”

  Don Hall, like everyone else, had been taken aback by Lindbergh’s insistence on flying solo across the Atlantic. After all, Nungesser, Byrd, and the others hadn’t even considered it; they all had a crew.

  “I’d rather have the extra gasoline than an extra man,” Slim had replied at the time, in February 1927, at the Ryan Airlines factory on the San Diego waterfront. He had been poring over design details in Don Hall’s drafting room and the subject of a navigator had inevitably arisen. But Slim was certain that flying alone was the right thing to do. With another set of eyes and hands in the cockpit there is a tendency to relax, to trust that if you miss something the other man will see it, to rely on another’s skill or knowledge. Maybe that was what got the Frenchmen. A pilot alone knows that it all rests on his shoulders and if he doesn’t do it, or does it wrong, he’ll never survive.

  Flying alone had sounded so logical in St. Louis, San Diego, and New York, but now? I’m beyond the stage where I need a bed, or even to lie down, Slim thinks, fighting the overwhelming urge to let his head droop. My eyes feel dry and hard as stones. It’s miserable; the lids scrape as you squeeze your eyes shut and thousands of white pinprick flashes shoot across the pink backdrop of your lids. The burning slowly subsides, like jumping into a cool pool on a hot day, and relief relaxes you a bit. You can feel the aircraft through the stick and rudder pedals. Your inner ear tells you the plane is banking slightly, and you hear the air rush over the cotton-covered fuselage. You must open your eyes, but it feels so good. Just another moment. Straining, the lids fight gravity and try to rise but . . .

  Open your eyes!

  Slim’s eyelids reluctantly lift and he shifts position, leaning forward more, then blinking rapidly he levels out and checks the instruments. His legs feel fine, as he knew they would after a few hours, but his back and shoulders ache. Not the sharp kind of pain that would help keep him awake, but the deep, clenching ache that remains no matter what position he chooses. Adding power, Slim pulls the stick back a few inches and Spirit climbs up several hundred feet above the cold, green ocean. He had been too close to the wavetops. A few seconds of dosing would put him into the water.

  Sleep is winning.

  And the sun is sinking.

  How can I get through the night? Slim wonders, to say nothing of the dawn, and another day. Another entire day! I must think about problems, he knows. Now more than ever Slim is glad the plane isn’t too easy to fly, that it constantly requires hands and feet on the controls. It’s easy to become complacent gliding along on a soft cushion of air with the engine’s consistent vibration, the propeller’s steady thrumming, and the near-floating sensation of simply flying. These are delightful on a clear day over land, but it all changes at night and especially over water. Flying ceases to be beautiful. Any variation in sound from the engine sends your heart into your throat. A tiny lurch or bounce might be a spar cracking, and the sky instantly becomes dangerous and life threatening, just as the sea is to a sailor. Both are natural obstacles that man has tried to tame, or at least temporarily overcome, but never without risk. Death is a constant companion for the sailor.

  And the pilot.

  FORTUNATELY FOR LINDBERGH, the Spirit of St. Louis always required a hand on the stick. Most aircraft could be “trimmed” to hold level flight by using small tabs built into the ailerons, horizontal tail, and rudder. This was usually done with a wheel, about the size of a saucer, in the cockpit that the pilot rotated. It would extend or retract a rectangular piece of the control surface, called a trim tab, which would lightly alter the airflow. It was possible, with a balanced, trimmed aircraft, to fly “hands-off.” A pilot could eat or drink, stretch, even change clothes. Splash some water on his face or just relax a bit. Flying alone, farther and longer than any aviator before him, Slim was rightfully concerned about becoming too comfortable, especially with no sleep in the past thirty hours or so.

  When Don Hall increased the wingspan to accommodate the extra fuel load, he had to extend Spirit’s empennage, or tail section, by two feet, which moved the plane’s center of gravity (CG) too far aft for stability. The CG, as it is known, is the theoretical point where an aircraft would balance if suspended, and is a fundamental aeronautical design consideration. Each design has longitudinal and lateral centers of gravity that indicate fore-and-aft and left-to-right stability, respectively. Stability means an aircraft can maintain a generally level flight, which is essential to controllability. Some degree of instability makes a plane more maneuverable, and this is desirable in designing a fighter, but not for ordinary aircraft.

  The Spirit of St. Louis, never intended to haul passengers, mail, or cargo, was definitely not a normal aircraft. It had a single purpose: to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In order to compensate for the new aft CG, Don Hall had lengthened the fuselage by eighteen inches so the 5,000-pound Wright engine could be mounted farther forward. This put the design stability within limits for flight, and Slim could fine-tune it by burning fuel in a certain order. More or less weight in certain tanks affected the Spirit’s balance, which was why he was systematically using up gas from the nose tan
k. This made the plane a bit tail heavy, but in the event of a forced landing it might keep it from flipping over.

  The main fuselage tank, directly in front of his instrument panel, had a design capacity of 200 gallons; there were 80 additional gallons in the nose, and 145 gallons split between three wing tanks. Somehow the Standard Oil folks had squeezed in an extra 25 gallons and he wasn’t sure where it all went. Slim suspected the tanks had been manufactured slightly oversized, so there was probably a bit of extra fuel in each.* The main tank’s interior looked like a big wine rack; its four levels joined through a series of twenty holes, or baffles, which reduced the sloshing that could alter the center of gravity.

  All the tanks were made from terneplate, thin sheets of steel dipped in zinc chloride, then a lead-and-tin alloy, and finally palm oil. Terne metal was as strong and malleable as steel, but unlike steel it was noncorrosive and easy to solder. Fuel was gravity fed by Lindbergh’s tank selection through his Lukenheimer manifold. The Wright engine utilized a Viking-type fuel pump, which had the great advantage of a bypass valve that enabled a pilot to hand-pump gasoline directly into the carburetor if needed.

  This hadn’t yet been necessary on this flight, but it was during the trip from San Diego to St. Louis. Slim had taken off during the afternoon of May 10 intending to fly all night to Lambert Field in St. Louis. It would be good practice, let him shake out the Spirit a bit, and demonstrate to his backers that Charles Lindbergh was quite capable of top-notch piloting. Five hours into his flight, in pitch blackness over northern Arizona, the engine began to splutter. From 8,000 feet in the moonlight he could just make out the earth’s contours and it was not good; he was over the Mogollon Rim, with nothing but mountains below and the Grand Canyon somewhere off his left wing. He would never forget that feeling: envisioning a forced landing, over mountains, at night without a single light visible on the surface.

  But as he spiraled down to several thousand feet above the jagged rocks his engine began to respond. Twenty minutes later, by skillfully working the mixture control and throttle, Lindbergh was able to maintain level flight. Climbing out slowly, he headed on to St. Louis and considered the problem. Slim concluded that the thin, cold air at high altitude had formed ice in the carburetor, and if he hadn’t been able to descend to warmer air the engine could have failed.

  Spirit’s Wright Whirlwind used a three-barreled Stromberg NA-T4 carburetor; each barrel feeding a correct fuel-air mix into three of the engine’s nine cylinders. Air, and liquid too, moves faster through a constricted space and in this case it was a Venturi tube. Slim used the cockpit mixture control lever to adjust fuel feeding to the carburetor, where it then combined with air regulated by the throttle. This metered fuel-air mix is fed into the cylinders for combustion, and the engine responds accordingly. The engine’s revolutions per minute, and the power generated from this both depend on the carburetor’s fuel-air mixture.

  But as fuel vaporizes it cools the surrounding air, and if that air is below freezing then whatever moisture remains can form into ice, with catastrophic effect. The cockpit throttle lever is physically linked to a plate in the carburetor that increases or reduces airflow depending on the throttle’s position. If ice forms here it can restrict the plate, or even freeze it shut, thus cutting off airflow into the engine. Ice can also build up on the carburetor’s inner walls and physically block fuel, or air, or both. Any of these situations will at least cause the engine to run rough and splutter, or quit altogether. After the Arizona incident, Slim decided to have a carburetor heater installed in New York and now, gazing ahead, he was glad of it.

  ICE.

  Slim hadn’t expected to see it so soon. He was barely 100 miles past Cape Breton Island, and the ocean’s surface shimmered brightly in the sun. Halfway to Newfoundland the Atlantic filled his horizon to the right; off his left wing the Cabot Strait, gateway to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, was stuffed with broken cakes of ice. This must have something to do with the Labrador Current meeting the Gulf Stream, Lindbergh realizes, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it during flight planning. I feel that I’m entering the Arctic, he thinks, staring at the black water peeping through the cracks. Those patches of snow on the bleak hillsides of Cape Breton Island had not prepared him for this. He flies down the southern edge of the field a quarter mile past the blocks and noses over toward the ocean. Nothing moves on the ice, no waves or birds, just the wavering shadow of the Spirit of St. Louis jumping from cake to cake.

  Nine hours.

  Back in New York it was dinnertime, and here . . . well, the ice was interesting and keeping him awake. Centering the earth inductor compass needle, Lindbergh throttles back to 1,600 revolutions, leans the mixture a half point, holds 95 miles per hour, and watches the blinding white sheet. Ice floats because it’s less dense than water, so how many billions of floating crystals had joined up down there to create those shifting pancakes? More important, what would I do now if my engine failed? How could a pilot land on such a surface? Well, God and gravity would take care that.

  Hopefully the top layer is softer than it looks, and he knows there is a word for the slushy part, but can’t think of it. Slim remembers that if ice has turned white then it has thickened, and might be sturdy enough to land on after all. How would that even work? Ice looks smooth, but down close the surface is a nightmare of ridges and cracks and it wouldn’t take much to completely wreck the Spirit. Certainly the landing gear would shear off immediately, though the fuselage might survive intact. It would slide, of course, but protected by the engine he might live through the impact.

  Under such conditions, could anything he carried save his life? Slim had been having that debate with himself since San Diego. Everything in his plan, in Hall’s design, had been dictated by weight. Safety versus load, which translated directly into fuel capacity. It was impossible to increase safety at one point without detracting from it at another and, after all, wasn’t his greatest insurance having enough fuel to turn back, divert, or alter his route?

  Yes, right up until the time the engine quit, or a spar broke, or ice forced him down. In the end, he’d decided that the bare minimum of survival equipment was justified just in case everything else went wrong. That was a consequence of being a pilot; you always had to plan for things going wrong despite your best efforts and skill. He had a ten-pound black rubber raft that he’d purchased in a San Diego sporting goods store. No rubberized cover sheet, though. Slim figured he could cut away a strip of doped fabric and that would work just as well. He could wrap up in it and hopefully survive until his clothes dried out. Lindbergh had worn wool, instead of cotton or leather, since it would still keep him warm when wet.

  Slim had a big, fixed-blade hunting knife, though he wasn’t sure how much use it would be with cold fingers. There was also a flashlight, a ball of string with a needle, matches, a ball of tough cord, and one hacksaw blade. He had a four-quart canteen of water and five cans of dubious, chocolate-like Army rations, most likely left over from the Great War. Slim had struggled to find suitable signal devices and finally had purchased red railroad emergency flares. Worried about their exposure to the elements, he’d cut a bicycle tire into four sections and sealed a flare in each one.

  Lindbergh knew that a quick rescue was very unlikely, and that highlighted the problem of drinking water. The canteen wouldn’t last long, and at eight pounds per gallon water was too heavy to bring extra. Slim had read about a man named C. W. Armbrust, who had invented a device for procuring fresh water for survival. The eight-inch by four-inch pouch was designed to be hung around the neck; the individual breathed directly into a rubber mouthpiece. The idea was to “recycle” moisture from breath into fresh water that was accessed through a port on the pouch’s bottom.* Slim purchased a handmade prototype for fifty dollars.

  But another half hour of flying right over the ice is enough, and his right hand aches. Gently climbing to 150 feet to lessen the ice’s glare, Slim adjusts the stabilizer trim a notch, and the stick ligh
tens immediately. For a few miles now he has been aware that the seemingly endless ice field is changing, veering off past the right wing south toward the Grand Banks. The water ahead is open again, and he notices a strong west wind is flattening the waves. This is good for him, however, as it adds a tailwind of maybe fifteen knots, pushing Spirit along that much faster. The clouds have all been blown away by the wind, so hopefully the weather is improving. Mist and blowing spray keep visibility to about ten miles, but it’s good enough to see the low, dark outline of a few islands directly ahead.

  Craning forward, Lindbergh peers at his chart then leans left, squinting again at brown coastlines blurred by surf. A harsh place to live, no doubt. The longer island looks like a dog bone . . . Miquelon, it’s called on his chart. Both islands belong to the French, he recalls, which seems a bit strange. Or maybe not. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland had always been prized fishing grounds for the Normans and Basques, and were still man’s biggest source of fish on earth. To his east lies the small island of St. Pierre, named for the patron saint of fishermen.* Squinting past the whirling propeller Slim knows there must be more land ahead. Yes! Along the horizon he can just barely see purple, rugged mountains rising from the sea.