Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Even with the excitement of the new job, Lindbergh already foresaw its limitations. Although changes in the weather would provide challenges, flying the mail meant following the same route day after day. Before he had even charted its path, he wrote his mother that he was looking forward to the summer, when in order to “break the monotony … I expect to take a few weeks off … and fly wherever the wind blows again. Hope to make Alaska next year.” He intended to take part in the next “On to” competition—a popular long-distance race—whatever the destination.

  Lindbergh’s restlessness was natural, as it had become the most exciting age of exploration in four hundred years. In 1924, Captain Lowell H. Smith and five American Army lieutenants became the first to circumnavigate the globe in airplanes—27,553 miles in fifteen and one-half days; the Italian Marchesi de Pinedo flew from Rome to Japan by way of Australia and back, thirty-four thousand miles over six months; and Englishman Alan J. Cobham had just left London on what would prove in four months to be a successful journey to Cape Town. At the end of 1925, Lindbergh heard that United States Navy Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd was preparing to fly over the North Pole and was still in need of two pilots. Lindbergh applied to the Detroit Aviation Society for one of the seats in the cockpit. With over eleven hundred flying hours in thirty different types of planes—and, as he wrote, having “lived in northern Minnesota most of my life”—he thought he was highly qualified. But the personnel for the flight had already been selected.

  Lindbergh settled instead into his new routine. “For the first time since I’d entered aviation,” he recalled of that fall, “I had a permanent home.” Having little social life beyond the airfield, he joined the 110th Observation Squadron of the Thirty-fifth Division Air Service of the Missouri National Guard. Within weeks he was commissioned a First Lieutenant. The squadron, which consisted mostly of pilots from the war who had returned to civilian life, was stationed at Lambert Field. They met two nights a week for ground instruction and drill at a St. Louis armory, and they flew Jennies on Sundays. Lindbergh instructed in the latest techniques of flying and lectured on navigation, parachutes, and aerodynamics. “We’d schedule formation flights over St. Louis, practice acrobatics, and send photographic missions to nearby towns,” Lindbergh remembered. “With Army planes and parachutes, I could try maneuvers that were too dangerous for our civil aircraft. One afternoon, I climbed my jenny to 14,000 feet, and brought it down in fifty consecutive turns of a power spin.” In early December, he handwrote his first Last Will and Testament, bequeathing his entire estate—which was then a few hundred dollars and the Liberty Standard he had bought from Wray Vaughan—to his mother.

  After having shared a room with Bud Gurney in nearby Bridgeton, Lindbergh found more convenient digs at the start of 1926 right on the edge of Lambert Field, just west of the hangars. He rented a room and kitchen—without plumbing or electricity—from Clyde Brayton, an airplane mechanic who lived with his family on the ground floor. Although Charles wrote his mother that he cooked two meals a day there—breakfasts consisting of two eggs on a steak or pork chop, fried potatoes, three slices of buttered toast, two glasses of milk, fruit, and sometimes coffee—she hardly let a week pass without sending him candy, cheese, and nuts along with new handkerchiefs and magazines.

  Meantime Robertson Aircraft erected a new hangar as they readied their five mail planes, Army-salvage De Havilland observation planes. The wings of these biplanes were fabric and painted silver, the fuselages were plywood painted maroon, with “U. S. Air Mail” printed boldly in white. Their twelve-cylinder, 400 h.p. Liberty engines enabled them to cruise at ninety miles per hour. The pilot would sit in the rear cockpit, so that he could keep an eye on the mailbags up front. In the Army these planes had been called “flaming coffins,” an unfortunately deserved nickname. As chief pilot, Lindbergh insisted that each Robertson pilot be equipped with a new seat-type silk parachute—and “that no penalty would be laid against him if he used it.” Lindbergh made the most of his time getting the feel of his DH-4, using it to teach another nine students that January.

  The Robertsons gave Lindbergh the task of selecting the two pilots who would be sharing the route. By then, it seemed that Lindbergh had heard from every unemployed flier he had ever known, most of whom had either abandoned the business or were eking out livings barnstorming and crop-dusting. He selected two comrades from the Army Air Service: one was Thomas P. “Nellie” Nelson, who would be based in Chicago; the other was Philip R. “Red” Love, who had just recovered from a cotton-dusting plane crash, which knocked out six teeth, broke his cheekbone, nose, and palate, and injured his back and left ankle, leaving him with an eighteen-stitch scar across his face. Lindbergh offered to share his room and rent at the Brayton house with him.

  Although most of his friends were marrying, or at least dating, Slim remained overtly celibate. Off-duty, he seemed most at ease staging dog-fights in old Jennies with Love or loitering with other fliers around a lunch counter in a little shack at Lambert Field run by a local named Louie DeHatre. Many women offered themselves to the daring young men at Lambert, and Lindbergh received an occasional solicitation from a local matchmaker; but he never responded.

  Instead, he expended his nervous energy rough-housing with the boys, enjoying practical jokes more than ever. He bragged to his mother in March 1926 that he fed an arrogant loudmouth at the field some laxative tablets, passing them off as candy; and he exploded a stink bomb in the man’s glove. Lindbergh also delighted for decades in the time he got Bud Gurney to swallow two big gulps of kerosene, having led him to believe it was water.

  On April 15, 1926, Robertson Aircraft inaugurated its domestic airmail route with a formal dedication ceremony before two hundred citizens. Major Lambert’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Myrtle, strewed flowers on the wings of Lindbergh’s plane and said, “I christen you ‘St. Louis.’ May your wings never be clipped.” The crowd applauded and motion picture cameras clicked. City elders made speeches, including Major Lambert, who predicted that it would only be a few years before airmail service would stretch as far as South America. He added, “The development of the airplane toward safety and reliability is growing far beyond the belief of those who are not acquainted with the aircraft industry.”

  At 3:50, Lindbergh sat in his plane, Love in another, revving their Liberty engines. At 3:55, a brand-new mail truck drove onto the field, and three pouches carrying 5,600 pieces of mail were loaded into Love’s ship. At exactly four o’clock, Lindbergh took off into the northwest to pick up fifteen thousand letters at Springfield.

  In St. Louis, Lindbergh became the poster boy for the Air Mail. He appeared in advertisements; and he attended Chamber of Commerce luncheons, describing how even the smallest business could be enhanced by using the airmail. “Our route,” Lindbergh explained, “… operated on a schedule which saved one business day over train service to New York.” A reply could be mailed from New York in the evening and be delivered in St. Louis the following day. In banking, for example, that meant immediate advantages, cutting check-clearance time.

  Because airplane crashes were still common occurrences, many questioned the importance of saving a day, especially at the cost of an additional fifteen cents and the risk of the mail’s perishing. So, despite first-day indications, popular support for airmail was slow to take off. Robertson Aircraft had bid $2.53 a pound for their airmail contract, which meant that they would have to carry about 125 pounds daily, 2,500 pieces of mail, to break even.

  After six weeks, the company was carrying half that amount. “It is difficult for anyone who did not live through that period, to realize the problems which were encountered,” Lindbergh recalled years later to William H. Conkling, who had been the Springfield postmaster, “both in persuading people to use the service, and in carrying on an efficient operation with the facilities existing at the time.” Only in retrospect was Lindbergh able to laugh at how they used to regard the padlock on a bag of registered mail “as a decided a
sset to our pay-load,” as each extra pound contributed to their very subsistence. For months the St. Louis banks assisted Robertson Aircraft, picking up part of their shortfall. They felt they were investing in the future.

  CAM-2 was considered one of the most perilous runs in the country, because of the changeable weather. Navigation was rudimentary at best, with pilots relying on visual contact with the ground—following railroad tracks, rivers, or at night, the glow of a town below. “During the summer months most of our route was covered during daylight,” Lindbergh would write, “but as winter approached the hours of night flying increased until darkness set in a few minutes after we left the field at St. Louis.” DeHavilland planes had neither landing lights nor navigation lights. “Our total lighting equipment,” Lindbergh remembered, “consisted of a pocket flashlight (pilot furnished) and a compass light attached to a button on the end of the stick.” Lindbergh later recounted how he “arranged with the mail-truck driver to hang four kerosene lanterns on fence posts on the leeward side of the cow pasture we used as an airmail field at Springfield, as a precaution; and I once had to return and land by the light of the two of them that were still burning.” As a rule, Lindbergh recalled, “We went as far as we could, and if the visibility became too bad we landed and entrained the mail.”

  On September 16, 1926, Lindbergh took off from Lambert Field and made his scheduled stops at Springfield and Peoria, leaving at 5:55 P.M. “There was a light ground haze,” Lindbergh later wrote in an official report of the flight, “but the sky was practically clear with but scattered cumulus clouds.” Twenty-five miles northeast of Peoria, night fell and a low fog obliterated all view of the ground. He turned back, attempting to drop a flare and land, but it did not ignite. Lindbergh maintained his course until 7:15, at which time he saw several patches of light atop the dark, heavy blanket of fog. He recognized those glows as signs of the towns surrounding Maywood; and he later understood that down on the field the ground crew was directing searchlights skyward. But Lindbergh could not see his way clear to any destination. At 8:20 his engine quit, and he cut into his reserve tank, which held another twenty minutes of fuel. When that was exhausted, Lindbergh headed toward open country, nosing his plane up. “At 5,000 feet,” he wrote, “the engine sputtered and died. I stepped up on the cowling and out over the right side of the cockpit, pulling the rip cord after about a 100-foot fall.” He did not carry the mail with him, figuring his dry tanks negated the possibility of an explosion. His parachute functioned perfectly … but suddenly, in the distance, he heard the sound of his abandoned plane engine. Apparently, when the ship nosed down, residual gasoline drained into the carburetor. Gradually the paths of their descents diverged, and Lindbergh dropped into the fog—one thousand feet into nothingness. He crossed his legs to keep from hooking a branch or wire, and he guarded his face with his hands, and waited.

  He landed in a cornfield with stalks taller than he. There was enough ground visibility for him to gather his chute and head down one of the rows to a meadow, in which he saw wagon tracks that led to a farmyard. There some locals asked if he had heard an airplane crash. They found the ship two miles away, crushed into a ball, having caused no damage, then they took the mailbags to the Ottawa, Illinois, post office in time for the 3:30 A.M. train to Chicago. Some farmers let Lindbergh spend the rest of the night with them, for which he later thanked them, enclosing ten dollars for their hospitality.

  News of Lindbergh’s drop to safety crossed the country, bringing a flurry of personal mail his way. Springfield Postmaster Conkling wired, “We are all greatly rejoiced at the news of your safety which we watched for last night with great anxiety.” Even Lindbergh’s former Staff Sergeant August W. Thiemann from Kelly Field wrote to congratulate him, pointing out that he was the only man in the United States known to have saved his life by successfully jumping from a plane three times.

  Six weeks later, on November 3, 1926, he became the nation’s only four-time caterpillar. This time he had left Springfield for Peoria, with reports of satisfactory weather ahead. But only minutes out, both darkness and a four-hundred-foot ceiling appeared—layered into haze, then rain, and topped by snow. Again, when he faced no alternative, he directed the plane toward what he considered the least inhabited country around and dove over the left side of his ship. Through the clouds he floated, landing on a barbed wire fence, which broke his fall without ripping his flying suit. The next morning the plane was recovered. Two of the mail bags were partially full and completely undamaged; the full bag from St. Louis had split open, leaving some of the mail “oil-soaked” but deliverable. “I don’t know whether you possess any angelistic instinct,” Sergeant Thiemann wrote after this emergency jump hit the newspapers, “but it appears to me as though you are favored by the angels.”

  Lindbergh repeatedly displayed grace under pressure. There was, for example, another night when he lost his race against a storm and the dark on his way to Peoria. Fortunately, he had just persuaded the Robertsons to buy a used gyroscopic pitch-and-turn indicator, an instrument that indicated whether an airplane was remaining on its heading. Unfortunately, he had never tested it. Over the next few minutes, experimenting with stick and throttle—knowing he had but a fifty-fifty chance of surviving a crash in his “Flaming Coffin”—Lindbergh taught himself to fly by instruments, and he made Peoria.

  Amid the growing pains of commercial aviation were the most simple pleasures, including esprit de corps. Another early St. Louis flier recollected how they all used to delight in “the sweet smell of newly mowed grass mingling with the tangy, pungent odors of airplane dope, burnt oil and gasoline … the appetizing aroma of Louis DeHatre’s hamburgers … the roar of a Liberty motor as the C.A.M.2 air mail took off on its flight to Chicago …” And though the Robertston Aircraft pilots often found a telegram informing them that the mail between New York and Chicago was delayed somewhere over the Appalachians, Lindbergh and his team completed better than ninety-eight percent of their scheduled flights.

  As he had forecast, Lindbergh’s enthusiasm for delivering the mail abated. He took leave the entire month of August and flew passengers in and out of Springfield. Upon his return to work, he confessed to his mother, “I am getting tired of the monotony of flying around St. Louis and unless something new turns up I expect to leave here next May.” He wrote the National Geographic Society that October, asking if it was charting any expeditions in which airplanes would be used but was told there was none. Promoted to Captain in the National Guard, he hoped an opening in the regular Army Air Corps might present some new flying challenges.

  Two months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Lindbergh took his Army physical. Still a lean 160 pounds with a twenty-nine-inch waist, Slim’s hearing was perfect and his vision slightly better than that—20/15 in each eye. In the Psychic Examination portion of the medical report, under the category of Temperamental type, Flight Surgeon Maurice L. Green observed that Lindbergh was “optimum type—slow and purposeful, yet quick of reaction, alert, congenial, intelligent.” Under the category of dreams, Dr. Greene noted only that Lindbergh’s were “mild” and “vague.”

  If Dr. Greene was including daydreams, his evaluation was off by miles. Having spent hundreds of hours alone in the clouds, Lindbergh learned to escape the ennui by letting his mind spin, as he had since childhood. He would ask himself a question and roll it over until he could answer no more. During one such moment in the fall of 1926, while jouncing in his salvaged Army DeHavilland, he thought about the new Wright-Bellanca—from everything he had read, the most efficient plane ever built. It could cruise at least fifteen miles an hour faster than his DH, burning half the fuel and carrying twice the payload. “What a future aviation has when such planes can be built,” Lindbergh mused; “yet how few people realize it?”

  “If only I had the Bellanca,” Lindbergh told himself, “I’d show St. Louis businessmen what modern aircraft could do …” He would start by taking them to New York in eight or nine hours. Then he
wondered just how far a Bellanca could fly if it was carrying nothing but fuel and the engine were throttled down. “It could break the world’s endurance record, and the transcontinental,” Lindbergh thought, his mind spiraling, “and set a dozen marks for range and speed and weight.” And just possibly, he suddenly realized—startling himself with the very notion—“I could fly nonstop between New York and Paris.”

  LINDBERGH WAS HARDLY the first man to have this lofty thought. In fact, more than seventy people had already crossed the Atlantic by air—most in dirigibles, the rest making the journey in stages, all as members of flying teams. Ten years after Blériot captured the first big purse offered to an aviator, for crossing the English Channel, two Englishmen claimed another prize from the same benefactor—Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times of London and The Daily Mail—for crossing the Atlantic from any point in the United States or Canada to any point in Great Britain or Ireland in seventy-two continuous hours. Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur W. Brown flew almost two thousand miles in sixteen hours, from St. John’s to Clifden, Ireland. While technology advanced, fliers on both sides of the ocean dreamed of a new prize, one which proved for years beyond human attainment.

  Raymond Orteig, a French-born American, who owned Manhattan’s Lafayette and Brevoort hotels, had come to admire many fliers he had met during the war. Moved by the spirit of cooperation between the United States and France, he wrote the president of the Aero Club of America in a gesture of postwar jubilation. “As a stimulus to the courageous aviators,” he stated in May 1919, “I desire to offer … a prize of $25,000 to the first aviator of any Allied country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from Paris to New York or New York to Paris, all other details in your care.” The flight could be in a land- or sea-plane, but it had to be a “heavier than air” craft. The offer remained on the table for five years.