by Dan Hampton
The sun is bright, the sky is clear, and he figures the wind is dead astern at about 30 miles per hour. Now is the time to figure out where the Spirit actually is, or as close as he can anyway. Slim believes he’s far off course to the south. Backtracking to avoid the thunderheads didn’t help, and he figures the cumulative effect of all those 10- and 20-degree deviations probably added up to, what, 50 miles? Slim has also been using the stars, when they are visible, and because in this hemisphere they rotate counterclockwise around the pole this naturally draws a navigator south. How far south? Maybe 20 miles? What about the heading? Departing St. John’s he’d offset 5 degrees north to correct back to the plotted course, but that should have happened a thousand miles later.
Spirit left Newfoundland more than twelve hours ago, and if he had updated his course as planned then Ireland should be 600 to 700 miles ahead. Yet he hadn’t flown the plotted course, nor had there been any navigation updates for at least seven hours, so is Spirit too far north? Several degrees every hour would add up to . . . 50 miles north? Wouldn’t that pretty well offset the errors to the south caused by his flying?
The real wild card is the wind.
If it had remained off his left quarter all night the Spirit would have been pushed to the right, or southeast, and he would still be south of course. But suppose it had been from the other side of the tail and was blowing him north? Combined with his northeast heading the Spirit might be hundreds of miles off to the north. Or vice versa: he could be hundreds of miles south and miss Ireland or England altogether. Certainly, though, a tailwind had pushed him along through the night, so at least Spirit was that much closer to land.
But which land?
Supposing that at 10,000 feet, the wind had been stronger and more constant than he’d anticipated? Working his mind again felt good, so with the engine set for 1,575 revolutions and the compass steady on 120 degrees he is free to concentrate. The airspeed has remained fairly constant at 90 miles per hour, but that is indicated airspeed, displayed on his cockpit gauge, not his actual speed over the water. The pitot tube on the left wing’s leading edge measures ram air pressure, which is just as it sounds: air ramming itself into the tube. So as the plane’s speed through the air increases the pressure also increases, and this difference is shown on the airspeed indicator.
Ground speed is the aircraft’s horizontal speed over the earth, corrected mainly for wind. A tailwind, as the name suggests, is any wind meeting a plane between the tail and the wing. If this was 180 degrees behind the Spirit then the number could theoretically be added directly to his airspeed. This means a 50 mph tailwind would give a 100 mph aircraft a 150 mph ground speed. Conversely, a headwind of the same velocity would give the aircraft only 50 miles per hour over the ground. Of course, unless the wind was hitting precisely on the nose or tail the actual amount added or subtracted would be a vector sum of the total. This is all guesswork anyway since he has no idea of the exact direction or velocity.
Like any pilot, Slim is well aware that wind can make or break a flight in terms of fuel consumption and time elapsed. Navigation is also impacted as wind rarely strikes at convenient, calculable angles. A good pilot can recognize and admit his or her errors in flight, then compensate accordingly. And strong intuition, which Slim has, transforms a fine pilot into an exceptional one. At dawn the wind was off his left shoulder so he’ll assume it had been that way all night. He’d give himself a component of 30 out of a 50 mph velocity so a fair ground speed estimate is 120 miles per hour. After twelve hours, including the deviations, he would be 1,440 miles from St. John’s.*
Walking off the distances with his fingers on the Mercator chart, he fixes his position about 420 miles to the west of the Irish coast. At this point the updated magnetic course is 120 degrees; subtracting a 5-degree correction left into the wind gives him a 115-degree heading. Switching the stick to his left hand, Slim reaches down to set the earth inductor compass by his right leg. But that’s almost exactly the heading I’ve been following! Hope again floods through him like the sunlight. If he is too far south then he’ll surely see ships, and if too far north then it ought to get much colder. In any event, Slim figures he should see land by sunset and that is reason enough to relax a bit.
Running an eye over the instruments he realizes that he could fly a little faster. He has plenty of gas and each minute brings him closer to land, so why not? Easing the throttle forward to hold 1,650 revolutions, he moves the elevator trim a notch and feels it click into place as the airspeed settles on 100 miles per hour. The extra 7 miles per hour for the seven hours till sunset would get him 50 miles farther east. How satisfying it is, Slim thinks, to sit still and fly eastward toward Europe. Everything seems resolved; the gnawing concern over navigation has been somewhat resolved, the Whirlwind is throbbing away as if it will never stop, and the weather is gorgeous. Whatever may come later, these sun-filled hours are mine.
Time for a reward.
Little things can be vital to a pilot’s mental state: a cool drink, a photograph, the luxury of a dry handkerchief to wipe a sweaty face. Something clean that doesn’t smell like gas, metal, or stale man. Reaching down Slim unsnaps the flying suit’s right leg pocket and pushes his hand inside. Pencils and his knife . . . but what’s this? Something thin attached to a chain. Pulling it out, he cups the hard, round coin in his palm and blinks. A medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers and sailors. Bachelors, too, so it’s fitting all around. He wonders how it got in there: a mechanic maybe, or someone in the crowd. A person who asked for no thanks, who cared for no credit. It was sent with me like a silent prayer, he realizes, deeply touched, and carefully replaces the medal in his pocket. Shifting on the cushion for a better position, Slim automatically checks the instruments, then looks outside. What . . .
He freezes.
Movement. There is something below on the waves. A shadow? Spirit’s shadow? No, it’s too small for that and this is moving through the water, not skimming along the surface. From 1,000 feet he can see it clearly behind the struts! It’s a porpoise, the first living thing I’ve seen since Newfoundland. After all those lonely, solitary hours Slim’s tense muscles relax, and suddenly everything feels different. I feel that I’ve safely crossed the bridge to life. He sits back and enjoys the moment.
When a pilot is uncertain, or worried, everything seems hostile: a twitch of the stick or tiny change in the sound of the motor. But now, why do I find such joy, such encouragement, in the sight of a porpoise? It is contact with something that lives as he does, breathing air, using muscles, and entering, if briefly, the world above the waves. A companion, and unlike a shadow, this is life! This ocean, Slim reflects, which for me marks the borderland of death, is filled with life . . . life which welcomes me back from the universe of spirits and makes me part of the earth again.
Being a pilot is a transitory, contradictory existence. You live in the sky, flying a piece of man-made machinery through the air—these are foreign experiences. The bird is intended to fly, but humans are not; they overcome this handicap through the skills of engineers, builders, and themselves. Slim knows that there is no better evidence of man’s innovative capacity than mastery of the air. Well, perhaps not mastery, but at least to tame it for temporary use. Is it real, this mastery, or an illusion? Against the immeasurable emptiness below him, the sense of control feels illusory. For if man is the master, why does a pilot naturally retreat into the safe, familiar confines of the cockpit, the dials and gauges that measure his life? The smells, too. The tang of gasoline and metal is preferred over salt air or the freshness of rain simply because they are of the earth, not the sky.
Surrounded by danger and uncertainty, Slim takes comfort by focusing on the manufactured details around him: heel marks from his boots, stitching in the fabric along the fuselage, the shining glass of his gauges and especially of the clock. By now it is 10:22 A.M. in New York—three or four hours later here depending on exactly where he is. Sleep is still catching up,
but not fast and sharp like before. Now it creeps under his lids, slowly and irresistibly. Leaning forward, Slim sticks his face into the wind stream, blinking fast and breathing deep. Pulling back into the cockpit he shifts hands on the stick, noticing that his left hand feels numb as it drops to the side of his wicker seat. Almost by itself, his hand wanders into the chart bag and shifts through the contents: pencils, maps, first-aid kid.
Sunglasses.
Given to him by a Long Island doctor, he’d completely forgotten the sunglasses. Still using his left hand, Slim opens the tan case and holds the glasses up. The thick, circular dark green lenses were in a silver frame, with an unpadded, fixed bridge and wraparound earpieces. Tilting his head sideways, Lindbergh hooks the curved metal around both ears and stares out at the ocean. With the tint of the glasses, the sky again looks overcast, and that brings back bad memories. He’s too happy to see the sun and the glasses are too comfortable. They make it seem like evening, he thinks, and sleep. Sleep.
There’s a constant burning deep behind his eyes and no position is comfortable for his neck. Slim’s head droops, then rises, almost involuntarily, pulling his frozen shoulder muscles with it. He’s well past the stage where anything physical seems to help and he is afraid he’s reaching the end of his reserves. Got to do something, he realizes, and removes the glasses. Fumbling in the chart bag again, he pulls out the shiny red first-aid kit. Balancing it on his left leg Slim snaps the metal case open. Smelling salts. Silk-wrapped ammonium carbonate capsules used to revive athletes and fainting women. They ought to be a weapon against sleep for an exhausted pilot, he decides, crushing one between his thumb and forefinger. Flying with his right hand, Lindbergh lifts the silk mush to his nose and cautiously sniffs.
Nothing.
No burning eyes and no stinging nostrils. Slim tosses the capsule from the window and realizes how detached his senses must have become to be so unaffected. Focusing on problems has helped thus far, as have the sheer mechanics of flight. It’s easy to get more complacent at higher altitudes since there is less of a sensation of speed, and more time to recover from mistakes. But it’s different down low. Flexing his right forearm slightly, Lindbergh lowers the nose and drops down toward the ocean surface. Leveling just ten feet over the water, he nudges the throttle back a bit and leaves the mixture as it was.
Spirit glides, comfortably riding on a cushion of air just above the dappled waves. Called “ground effect,” this phenomenon occurs when a plane is very low to the surface, usually within one wingspan. The deflection of wingtip and airfoil vortices against the nearby surface mean the disturbed air has no place to disperse, creating extra pressure beneath the wings and generating greater lift. Ground effect reduces drag so less power is needed to hold the same forward airspeed. It can be very effective in saving fuel, but the trade-offs are physical stress from low-altitude flying, little margin for error, and turbulence.
But flying low is nothing new for Lindbergh.
Barnstorming pilots did it all the time, skimming over fields and towns to attract attention for shows. One time, he’d flown the last forty miles between Colorado Springs and Burlington, Colorado, at a scant two feet above the ground.
After the Lincoln Flying School was sold in 1922, he’d found himself with eight hours of cockpit time to his name but not the solo flight that marked a true pilot. Erold Bahl, who had purchased the school’s Tourabout biplane, went barnstorming through Nebraska and took Lindbergh along to clean the aircraft. Slim figured they could draw bigger crowds if he stood on the wing, and so for a month or so he was a wing walker until returning to Lincoln.
By then Ray Page, who’d sold the Lincoln Flying School to Bahl, had created his own “Aerial Pageant.” He had hired a parachutist named Charles Hardin, who delighted crowds by tumbling from planes and then floating gently to the ground. Deciding another skill could only help further his plans, Slim asked Hardin to show him the ropes. Lindbergh’s first drop was a “double,” designed to give the audience a thrill by mimicking a parachute malfunction. Slim opened one parachute, then released it and fell again before opening a second chute. The “Aerial Daredevil Lindbergh,” as he was billed, spent the summer falling out of aircraft throughout Colorado, Kansas, and Montana.
Barnstorming ended each October due to weather, so Slim went to be with his father for a few months during the winter of 1922. Spring found the young pilot in Americus, Georgia, scouting out war surplus aircraft owned by an entrepreneur named John Wyche. Wyche had purchased 116 Great War relics at $16 per plane, a rock-bottom price, then spent a few hundred dollars fixing each one up to resell them for $1,000 each. Slim managed to bargain him down to $500 for a reconditioned JN-4D, the redoubtable “Jenny,” and finally soloed in early May 1923. Lindbergh, feeling like a pilot at last, kept the Jenny until the fall. He’d applied to the Army Air Service and received a letter ordering him to Chanute Field, Illinois, in January 1924 for the flying cadet examinations.
Those were good days.
Sticking his face outside again, Slim fills his lungs with heavy salt air and flies formation with Spirit’s darting, shifting shadow. Watching the elusive, dark shape with one eye, he lets his peripheral vision take in the huge rollers, the feathery whitecaps, and the distant horizon. Anticipating the shadow’s crests and dips, Slim twitches the stick forward, sideways, then back to follow it. Boots against the pedals, he presses left and right as needed, feeling the rudder bite into the ocean breeze as the plane skids along on the wavetops. It’s exhilarating and it is certainly waking him up.
But it is also extremely perilous.
A freak wave could rise up in an instant, or a gust of wind could slam him down into a trough. No, he tells himself, I won’t clip the top of a whitecap here, hundreds of miles from shore. There are enough unpreventable disasters that might befall him; a cracked fuel line, a broken rocker arm, or a stuck valve could all bring the plane down quickly. He won’t add another, especially when it can be avoided by flying slightly higher. Pulling the stick back, Lindbergh brings the Spirit up to a safer 50-foot height, then slumps back into the wicker seat. His eyes, now long accustomed to the cockpit scan pattern, touch each gauge on the instrument panel. Oil, one of his principal concerns, is stable; pressure is 59 pounds and the temperature a cool 35 degrees. Altitude is fine, low enough to keep him alert but not so close to the whitecaps for concern. Nearly twenty-seven hours into the flight at 12 gallons per hour would mean 324 gallons consumed, two-thirds of Spirit’s total fuel load, and he would burn a little over 100 gallons to fly another nine hours.
Good. Everything feels and looks well, except for a layer of clouds forming off to the northeast. Another storm maybe, but after last night no daytime threat seems so bad. Weather had always been a problem when Slim flew the mail. Bill Hopson, one of the early U.S. Post Office Department Air Mail Service pilots, famously wrote, “The best system of flying in bad weather is not so much to go rip roaring through nasty weather, but to use your head for something else besides a hat-rack, and fly where bad weather aint [sic].”
Airmail wasn’t a new idea. The British had implemented the first regularly scheduled system in September 1911 between London and the city of Windsor. Two weeks later, on September 23, American pilot Earle L. Ovington flew 1,280 postcards and 640 letters between the Aero Club of New York, in Garden City, Long Island, and the Mineola post office, six miles away. Despite the promising start, Congress failed to appropriate the $50,000 required to fund the program and American airmail languished until after the Great War.
Lindbergh, like all boys fascinated with aviation, had enthusiastically followed the establishment of the U.S. Air Mail Service in May 1918. This time Congress appropriated $100,000 to get the program started correctly. Six military Air Service “Jenny” biplanes under the command of an army major began flights from the Washington, D.C., Polo Grounds, through Philadelphia, to Long Island’s Belmont Park. Domestic transcontinental air carriers, working in conjunction with trains, initially ope
rated eight planes per day, and for twenty-four cents could get a letter to its destination 22 hours faster than by the existing rail service. In 1924, a letter leaving New York traveled through a series of fourteen airmail relay stops to arrive in San Francisco less than 35 hours later.
By the time Slim, or “Old Swede” Lindbergh as he was known in Army flight school, signed on with the Robertson Aircraft Corporation (RAC) in October 1925, the fledgling Air Mail Service was expanding rapidly. For seven years after the program’s 1918 inception, government pilots had flown the mail in government aircraft. But in February 1925, Congress passed a piece of legislation labeled H.R. 7064, or the Contract Air Bill. Also known as the Kelly Act, this was intended to “encourage commercial aviation and authorized the Postmaster General to contract for Air Mail service.”
Based on a bid of $2.53 per pound, Robertson Aircraft was awarded Contract Air Mail (CAM) Route 2, flying five round-trips per week from Chicago to St. Louis. Company president Major Bill Robertson, who also commanded the Missouri National Guard’s 35th Division Aviation Section, appointed one of his young, bright lieutenants as his new chief pilot: Charles Lindbergh.
Those days seemed a lifetime away from this lonely patch of the North Atlantic. It was no exaggeration, though, that Slim had discovered himself during that year spent in San Antonio. He’d arrived on March 15, 1924, along with 103 other flying cadets. With more than three hundred flight hours logged already, Slim wasn’t overly concerned about the flying, but his university failure made him leery of academics. Ignoring the drinking and girl chasing that are a normal part of flight school, Lindbergh buckled down and studied the required aerodynamics, meteorology, and navigation harder than he’d believed possible. What made the difference was the purpose behind it all. Unlike college, this time he was emotionally involved with his subject in a way not possible before. He loved flying and truly believed it was his best future, a future he had decided wholeheartedly to undertake.