Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  On the train home, he assessed the situation. Fokker, Wright, Travel Air, and Columbia had all turned him down; and a number of competitors for the Orteig Prize were cropping up. It appeared that Levine himself intended to make the flight to Paris with Chamberlin; Davis and Wooster were reportedly making progress; a new entrant, Chief of the Army Air Corps, Major General Mason M. Patrick, was reportedly buying a three-engined bomber from the Huff-Daland Company; Byrd was officially in the race in his $100,000 Fokker; and word had it that Sikorsky was building another biplane for Fonck. “I’m behind all my competitors,” Lindbergh thought, “—so far behind, in fact, that they don’t even consider me in the running. Most of them don’t know I exist.”

  Lindbergh saw only two options. He could go to San Diego and give the Ryan company the chance to make good on their offer; or, whether somebody else beat him to Paris or not, he could surprise the world by crossing the Pacific Ocean instead.

  It was sleeting that Monday when Lindbergh got off the train in St. Louis and went to see his backers. Harold Bixby spoke for all of them when he suggested they keep the cashier’s check in the bank and their sights on Paris. He urged Lindbergh to return to Union Station and board a train for California. He arrived in San Diego at noon on Thursday, February twenty-fifth—having spent $75 in fare (plus another $22.50 to sleep in a Pullman car, less than $1.50 for each of his meals, and the occasional dime for magazines and candy). Exiting the train, Lindbergh found palm trees gently swaying in the warm air.

  San Diego was at once the oldest and newest city in California, a sixteenth-century Spanish settlement whose population had doubled in just the previous decade to 100,000. Where fishing had been the area’s first important industry, several small aircraft manufacturers were among the area’s newest businesses. Lindbergh took a cab from the downtown Union Depot to Ryan Airlines, at the city’s harbor.

  Lindbergh’s dream factory turned out to be one dilapidated building—with “no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines warming up; and the unmistakable smell of dead fish from a near-by cannery [mixed] with the banana odor of dope from drying wings.” In an instant it all smelled right—an industrious, no-frills operation. Inside a small office he met the company’s top brass, chief engineer Donald Hall and Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, a young bond salesman from Pennsylvania who took some flying lessons at the Claude Ryan Flying School, then bought it and began building planes out of war surplus aircraft.

  After a Cook’s tour of the plant, Lindbergh sat with Mahoney to talk business. Ryan stood by its quoted price of $6,000 without engine; and Mahoney said he would provide the engine and extra equipment at cost, charging no commission for outfitting the plane. As the discussion turned to the machine’s performance, Mahoney left Lindbergh alone with Donald Hall. The engineer explained that Lindbergh’s needs made the standard Ryan fuselage impossible.

  None of the requirements in designing a new plane fazed Hall, but one startled him. He could not believe Lindbergh wanted one cockpit. Once Lindbergh explained that he would “rather have extra gasoline than an extra man,” Hall embraced the idea. Conceptually, it made for a more efficient machine—a re-allocation of some 350 pounds, which would mean another fifty gallons of fuel. Already he was sketching, darkening new lines over others as the slightest variation in one aspect of the design affected every other. An increase in the wing span to help the heavy-laden plane take off, for example, meant moving the tail surfaces, which involved replacing the engine.

  When Hall asked the exact distance from New York to Paris, and Lindbergh could provide but an approximation, they drove in Hall’s old Buick roadster to the public library. Standing before a globe, Lindbergh produced a piece of white string, which he pulled taut from New York up the east coast of North America, then again almost at a right angle across an ocean of blue to Europe. “It isn’t a very scientific way of finding the exact distance between two points on the earth’s surface,” Lindbergh was thinking at the time, but it sufficed for the initial calculation: 3,600 miles. Figuring on the back of an envelope, and adding for a ten percent reserve, Hall recommended four hundred gallons of gasoline.

  By the time they returned to the Ryan plant, Mahoney had completed his figures. His company would deliver one Special monoplane with a Wright J-5 motor within sixty days for $10,580. From the office, Lindbergh wired the details to Harry Knight in St. Louis. The next day Knight replied that Lindbergh should close the deal. The order was written up, including the specifics that the plane would have a gasoline capacity of four hundred gallons, a minimum cruising radius of 3,500 miles at 1,550 r.p.m., an oil gauge, temperature gauge, and altimeter. Putting $1,000 down—with a second payment of $6,580 due within the week and $3,000 due upon completion—Lindbergh signed the order on February 25, 1927.

  Never had parting with so much money been such a relief for Lindbergh. “I can turn my attention to the flight itself,” he thought, “—to the design and construction of the plane, to outfitting it with instruments and emergency equipment, to studying navigation and the weather conditions.”

  Except for the cost in time, Lindbergh saw only advantages in building a plane from scratch. He could inspect every detail of its structure and become intimate with its workings. The Ryan employees could literally build the plane around him—both his body and his experience—making the plane and its pilot one. And yet it was strange, observed Walter Balderston of the Pacific Scientific Company, who had been asked to install the plane’s instruments, that whenever Lindbergh spoke of getting from New York to Paris, he always used the first person plural. “I heard it many times before Lindbergh left San Diego, & particularly noticed his rather peculiar conversational use of it,” Balderston would later write in a short memoir. Before there was even a plane built, “He simply would not use the pronoun ‘I’ when speaking of the flight itself. In the back of his mind somewhere he may have been thinking of his financial backers, but many times he used it when by no stretch of the imagination could it have meant anything or anybody but himself.”

  Lindbergh moved into room 447 of the U. S. Grant Hotel, downtown San Diego ($2.50 per night); but as he found himself spending most of the next two months camped out at the Ryan factory, he relocated to the YMCA, which was cheaper, and flopped some nights at the San Diego apartment of A. J. Edwards, the Ryan sales manager.

  Lindbergh’s formula for each element of the plane was: “first consideration to efficiency in flight; second, to protection in a crack-up; third, to pilot comfort.” The initial application of that rule came in the placement of the plane’s cockpit. Lindbergh wanted it set back in the fuselage, behind the gas tank. When Hall protested because that would preclude any forward vision, Lindbergh replied that there was not much of it in normal flight anyway, what with the nose of the fuselage blocking the view, and that he did not like the idea of being sandwiched between the engine and the gas tank. (When a former submariner at Ryan suggested a periscope—a three-by-five panel in the instrument board through which a frontal view could be obtained—Lindbergh acceded, but only upon Hall’s assurance that it was of no “aerodynamical disadvantage.”) Night-flying equipment, even parachutes, were sacrificed for the sake of weight, as each saved pound translated into more fuel, which meant greater range. Within days Hall had completed his drawing of the wing and fuselage structure; within the week steel tubes were being cut and welded to form the trusses of the body.

  Time and the element of surprise remained of the essence, as the press was both catching and spreading “Atlantic fever.” In early March, the news wires reported that Fokker expected to have a new three-engine monoplane for Commander Byrd ready for a May flight; Sikorsky’s new plane for Fonck was meant to be built by then as well. Noel Davis’s biplane with three Wright Whirlwinds—“The American Legion”—was scheduled for a June crossing. And from Paris came news that two French war aces, Charles Nungesser and the one-eyed François Coli, would have a single-engine plane capable of carrying eight hundred gallons of gasoline
ready by summer. The name of Captain Lindbergh, “a St. Louis airmail pilot,” was creeping into the press, as San Diego reporters started poking around the Ryan factory. A few short articles drew visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the young “flying fool” who regarded all this as something other than a “suicidal venture.”

  “The St. Louis papers will naturally play up this flight for all the spectacular news they can obtain,” Lindbergh warned his mother, “so don’t pay any attention to their scare headlines. I have planned the flight carefully and with due consideration to single and multimotored ships.” He kept trimming his list of emergency landing equipment to the barest essentials—a small, black-rubber raft (ten pounds), a knife, some flares (stored in a bicycle innertube) and matches, a hacksaw blade, basic fishing equipment, chocolate-composition rations, and water. Then again, he reconsidered, water weighed too much; and he had recently heard about a man named Armbrust who had invented a cup that condensed moisture from one’s breath into potable liquid. (If Lindbergh could wait until June, replied C. W. Armbrust to his inquiry, the cup would be in production and available for $7.50; otherwise, he would have to pay fifty dollars for one of the handmade prototypes. Lindbergh sent a fifty-dollar check.) From A. G. Spalding & Bros. in New York, he ordered a waterproof cloth suit with sheep wool lining and one long zipper after he learned it would weigh but nine pounds. He faced a dilemma when a stamp collector offered him one thousand dollars to fly one pound of mail to Paris. Lindbergh knew he had to inform his backers of such an offer, which equalled any of their shares in the plane; and yet he felt he could not carry so superfluous a pound. “The plane is nearing completion,” he wrote his mother on March twenty-seventh, “and will be ready for test during the first week in April.”

  “I cannot remember one thing that you have ever done that has been to your discredit,” Evangeline wrote her son that March, as though convincing herself of his safety. “It is a wonderful record you have made, boy.” Even so, she effused, “the happiest day for me will be the day you return.” More than once she stopped herself from overemoting, as on April second, when she said “the last thing I wish to do is to burden you with sentiment or bother you in any way.” In another letter she did admit, however, “for the first time in my life I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”

  Alas, Columbus also had maritime experience, while Lindbergh had never flown over great expanses of water nor even for any long distance. Where Lindbergh had steered his course in the past according to visible landmarks below, he would have to navigate this trip by looking above, charting a course based on time traveled and the position of the stars. He thought of consulting with naval officers stationed in San Diego; but, he later admitted thinking, there was “enough skepticism about my flight now, without adding to it by showing how inexperienced I am in the technique of long-distance navigation.” Lindbergh decided to plot the course on his own, in private.

  He went to a ship chandler on the San Diego waterfront, but its only ocean charts were of the Pacific. On March seventh, Lindbergh borrowed a Ryan monoplane and flew to Los Angeles. In the harbor area of San Pedro he found a store that sold every chart he could imagine necessary for his Atlantic crossing—Mercator’s projections, a gnomonic projection, a time-zone chart of the world, a chart of magnetic variation, even a few maps showing prevailing winds over the Atlantic during the spring months. In order to get the Spirit of St. Louis from California to New York, Lindbergh decided to stand by the trusty guides he had always used, Rand McNally railroad maps available in drugstores for fifty cents per state.

  While the Ryan employees created a skeleton for the wings out of spruce and double piano wire, Lindbergh prepared his course. Over a drafting table in Donald Hall’s office he spread his charts and applied what he remembered from Army navigation class. He broke the great sweeping curve of his route into three dozen line segments—each representing one hundred miles, approximately one hour of flying time. “At each point,” he recalled, “I marked down the distance from New York and the magnetic course to the next change in angle.” He proceeded so quickly that he felt he should doublecheck his figures by working the route again, this time using trigonometry. After several days of tedious calculations that led to a virtual duplication of the first half of the course, he quit, extrapolating that the second half was just as correct. When he realized that his markings—“that curving, polygonic line, cutting fearlessly over thousands of miles of continent and ocean”—were enough to direct him to the final dot on the map labeled “Paris,” he crossed off his equipment list any radios or even a sextant for further navigation. That savings was worth another twenty-five gallons of gasoline.

  Donald Hall kept dashing off new drawings, while factory manager Hawley Bowlus often started work on parts of the plane without the final plans. The thirty-five Ryan employees labored day and night, seven days a week, sometimes round-the-clock, often voluntarily. A young mechanic named Douglas Corrigan, who was pulled from the field and put to work in the factory, remembered working several times past midnight, having to report back at eight the next morning. He said that “everyone was glad to do that as they all seemed to be inspired by the fellow the plane was being built for.” Before the final covering was put on the wing, each member of the Ryan crew signed the front spar.

  On April eighth, six weeks after Lindbergh had placed his order with Ryan, the motor arrived: Wright Whirlwind J-5C, serial number 7331—a nine-cylinder, air-cooled, radial engine operating on the four-stroke cycle. It weighed five hundred pounds, would normally operate at 1800 r.p.m., and harnessed the power of 223 horses. It was installed in the nose of the fuselage and housed in a cowling of aluminum that had “engine turning”—a circular jewel-like pattern in the burnished metal.

  Meantime, the Contest Committee of the National Aeronautic Association accepted the application for the Spirit of St. Louis. Because of the many changes made on this “experimental” plane, however, the sixty-day clock for its eligibility would be ticking until the end of May. The license was mailed from Washington—number N-X 211, N being the international designation for the United States, and X signifying that the plane was experimental. For ten dollars, “Gus the Sign Painter” in San Diego went to the factory to blazon in black the top of the right-hand wing and the bottom of the left with the license number. Fred Ayers, who supervised the covering and finishing of the plane, painted the number and RYAN NYP (which signified New York to Paris) on the rudder. In clear block printing, with a few curlicues on the word “Spirit,” he affixed the plane’s name on both sides of its “jeweled” nose.

  “FACTORY WORK COMPLETE TODAY,” Lindbergh wired Harry Knight on April twenty-fifth at almost two o’clock in the morning. The next step was to assemble the wing to the fuselage. That first meant getting the two pieces outside the building. Not until the workers removed the landing gear on one side of the plane could they pass the fuselage through the great door of the Ryan factory. The wing went less easily. In the constant revising of the plane’s design, it had grown ten feet longer than originally planned; and, short of knocking out part of the factory wall, there appeared no way of freeing it from the second-story loft where it had been built. Measuring down to a fraction of an inch, they at last realized that by tilting it, they could slide it out onto the top of an empty boxcar that could be pushed along a railroad siding next to the factory. From there the wing was lowered by contractor’s derrick onto a waiting truck. The landing gear was re-assembled, and the fuselage was hoisted up by its tail and attached to the back of Claude Ryan’s 1925 Studebaker roadster, then towed tail-first to Dutch Flats, the Ryan test field on the edge of the city.

  Over the course of the next few days and nights, in a hangar at Dutch Flats, the two great perpendicular pieces were attached. Every detail of the plane was checked and re-checked until it was unanimously agreed that it was ready to be pulled onto the dry, grassless field. After two months there stood this structure of wood and cloth and metal—held together by b
olts and glue—not quite ten feet high. It was considerably shorter than it was wide—twenty-seven feet, eight inches from spinner to rudder with a wingspan of forty-six feet. The propeller, purchased from the Standard Steel Propeller Company and made of duralumin, had two blades, pitched at 16.25 degrees, making a diameter of eight feet, nine inches. The tires of the landing gear were thirty inches high by five inches. With the exception of the engine cowling and propeller, practically every bit of the plane’s exterior—wing, fuselage, tail section, external struts (the wings’ supports), axles, and tail skid—was covered with grade A cotton fabric finished with cellulose acetate dope, in silver-gray. Even the wheels had what appeared to be hubcaps made of doped fabric laced to the tires, for the sake of streamlining.

  Despite the prodigious effort of the Ryan team, Lindbergh had just written his mother that it was “probable that two attempts at the N.Y.–Paris flight will be made before I am ready to go. Either or both may succeed altho in both cases there are reasons to throw doubt on the successful completion of the flight.” He assured Evangeline that “we are not taking off before everything is ready, and if someone makes the N.Y.–Paris hop we will probably try a Trans-Pacific flight via Honolulu to Australia which would be a still greater accomplishment.”

  April was a cruel month. On the sixteenth, Commander Byrd’s huge Fokker crash-landed on its first trial flight, injuring three crew members and damaging the plane enough to suggest that Byrd might have to forego his spring run for the Orteig Prize. Eight days later, Clarence Chamberlin in the coveted Bellanca, christened Columbia, almost met disaster when part of its landing gear tore loose during takeoff. And then on the twenty-sixth, just days before their scheduled departure for Paris, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, in the last of their test flights, crashed while taking off in the American Legion. They both died. Even before these three accidents, Lloyd’s of London was giving odds of ten to one against any successful flight across the Atlantic in 1927.