Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  One hour and one hundred miles out of Roosevelt Field, the curtain of mist over Long Island Sound rose. Thirty-five miles obliquely across the Sound to the mouth of the Connecticut River—the most water he had ever flown over—set the stage for what lay ahead—“the trackless wastes, the great solitude, the desertlike beauty of the ocean.” Alone in the cockpit, Lindbergh had been at work constantly since his departure. Every fifteen minutes, he had manipulated the system of petcocks regulating gasoline flow, so that a little fuel was used from each tank. He started his second hour by switching to the fuselage fuel tank, off which the plane would feed for an hour. For the duration of the flight he would change tanks every hour, marking a score on his instrument panel at each change-over. He also entered hourly notations in pencil on a white-paper log-sheet he had drawn up in black India ink—a grid in which he would fill in data pulled from each of the dials on the panel before him. At the start of his third hour, he had no more use for his fourth state map—New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts lay behind him, unlimited visibility ahead.

  Over the Atlantic Ocean, Lindbergh faced his “first real test” of navigation—250 miles without a landmark, just water in every direction. Not until he approached Nova Scotia would he be able to determine how accurate his chart-work back in San Diego had been. He had told himself before commencing the flight that if Nova Scotia were too obscured by fog for him to measure his position, he would turn back to New York. If, on the other hand, he had proceeded accurately enough to compensate for any errors made thus far, he would proceed to the next checkpoint.

  With the late-morning sun beating through the Spirit’s plastic skylight, Lindbergh felt uncomfortable in his thick flying suit. It occurred to him that it had been more than twenty-four hours since he had actually slept. His helmet and goggles long since removed, he unzipped the suit to cool himself and took a swig of water from his quart canteen. Then he began a discussion with himself insisting that he “must stay alert, and match quality of plane and engine with quality of piloting and navigation. I’d be ashamed to have anyone know I feel tired when I’m just starting.”

  At noon Nova Scotia appeared. He was slightly dismayed that the large, hilly island had “crept in unobserved” in a quarter of an hour for which he could not account; but he was heartened when he realized that he was only six miles off his mark, a scant two degrees. Over the next four hours he traversed the province. Although he had not eaten in six hours, he forewent lunch, limiting himself to another drink of water. “Mustn’t take too much,” he told himself, “… suppose I’m forced down at sea!” And though the plane was carrying two plastic windows which could be easily inserted, he felt they would adversely curtail the ventilation within the cockpit. He preferred to sacrifice comfort for “the crystal clarity of communion with water, land, and sky.”

  As the Nova Scotia countryside grew more rugged, the wind kicked up, dark clouds formed, and the air got choppy. Lindbergh made a few short detours but just as happily flew right through some squalls, finding the cold, wet air bracing. By the time he had reached Cape Breton Island, there were clear skies ahead and another two hundred miles of water until Newfoundland.

  This was the last jump before making the great leap of faith across the Atlantic. The water was a welcome sight—until he began flying over it again. The virtually constant image of the waves took on a hypnotic monotony. With only eight hours behind him, Lindbergh’s eyes were feeling “dry and hard as stones.” He was already forcing himself to keep them open, then squeezing them closed as tightly as possible.

  The blur below was suddenly sharpened by the appearance of an ice field—huge white cakes reflecting the sun setting behind him. The bright glare against the black sea jolted him to alertness. He realized that he could not rely on natural phenomenon to keep awake; he would have to devise his own means of keeping his senses keen—updating his log, occasionally sipping water. From Placentia Bay to Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, he flew toward the approaching night; and at twilight—7:15 by his clock, 8:15 local time—he deviated slightly from his great circle route so that he could fly low over the small city of St. John’s, neatly tucked into its deep harbor. It would be his last contact with land until Ireland, and he wanted people to know that he had traveled at least that far. One St. John’s merchant was almost close enough to the plane to read its serial number painted underwing; and a member of Newfoundland’s cabinet out motoring spotted the plane and followed it along the road as far as he could until … the Spirit of St. Louis had cleared the wharves below and reached the wide open sea.

  In the final moments of dusk, Lindbergh was startled by the sight of an iceberg below. The one soon gave way to many—streaked in gray wisps. And in a moment Lindbergh faced a scrim of fog, followed by the curtain of night.

  The second act of Lindbergh’s transatlantic journey began in complete darkness—a moonless black night above, a darker ocean below. He would still have a few hours in which to turn back. But while reachable land lay behind him, daylight did not.

  For the next fifteen hours, there would be a complete blackout on news from the Spirit of St. Louis. Except for the minute chance of a ship at sea spotting him the next day, he was completely detached from the world—bound to the planet only by the gravity which he and his machine would have to resist for another twenty-four hours. While Lindbergh later wrote that no man before him had commanded such freedom of movement over earth, he failed to note that no man before him had ever been so much alone in the cosmos.

  In that moment, when Lindbergh lost all contact with earth and climbed above the fog to ten thousand feet, he was also ascending in the public consciousness to Olympian heights. His success would reflect well on the entire human race, placing him in the unique position of overshadowing every other living hero. Indeed, the world had long been host to a succession of athletes, actors, artists, scientists, political and religious leaders, even kings, to whom people looked up; but such admiration was a matter of taste and beliefs. Everybody had a stake in Lindbergh. On May 20,1927—as night fell—modern man realized nobody had ever subjected himself to so extreme a test of human courage and capability as Lindbergh. Not even Columbus sailed alone.

  Practically everybody who lived in America through Lindbergh’s flight would remember his or her precise feelings that first night. Forty years later, one housewife recalled how as “a little unattractive fat girl” who had lost most of her family, she had prayed for his safety, thus taking part in his endeavor. Countless millions did the same.

  In Indiana, Pennsylvania, the nineteen-year-old son of the local hardware store owner had been laid low with scarlet fever that third week of May. He carved a wooden model of the Spirit of St. Louis, then asked his father for a large piece of beaverboard on which he drew a map of the North Atlantic. To the left he crayoned a silhouette of New York’s Woolworth Building, and to the right, the Eiffel Tower. Then he warped the board to show the curvature of the earth and tacked on his model of the plane. Young Jimmy displayed the diorama in the front window of J. M. Stewart & Company, inching the plane along with each radio update. “I don’t think I got any more sleep than Lindbergh did,” James Stewart would recount many years later. “Lindbergh’s problem was staying awake; mine was staying asleep that Friday night while he was unreported over the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland.”

  America’s most popular observer of the American scene, humorist Will Rogers, filed his nationally syndicated newspaper column that afternoon from Concord, New Hampshire. “No attempt at jokes today,” he wrote uncharacteristically. “A … slim, tall bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of Supreme Being that had a following. If he is lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.”

  That night, forty thousand boxing fans made their way to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to see a fight between heavyweight favorite Ji
m Maloney and his rival from Boston, Jack Sharkey. The crowd included such prominent figures as banker Mortimer Schiff, publishing magnates Herbert and Ralph Pulitzer and Condé Nast, Averell Harriman and his tycoon father, industrialist Walter Chrysler, Frank Hague, the powerful Mayor of Jersey City, and John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the former Mayor of Boston. The conversation inside and outside the stadium was all about Lindbergh. Instead of peddling the latest tabloid headlines about the quarter-million-dollar fight about to commence, the newboys sold out their “Extra” editions that night shouting about “Lindy,” the sobriquet headline writers used because of its marquee appeal. “Forty thousand persons put Lindbergh first and Sharkey and Maloney second last night,” reported the staid New York Times, “and forty thousand persons can’t be wrong, whether Frenchmen or Americans. The remarkable thing about last night’s fight crowd was that they were all wondering how the transatlantic flight would come out and not who would be knocked out.”

  Sharkey was the upset winner, with a kayo in the fifth round; but the most stirring moment occurred before the fight even began. Announcer Joe Humphries told the crowd that Lindbergh was at sea and by all reports all was well. His update was based on nothing more than hopeful speculation, but the fans went wild, refusing to be silenced. When his waving motions finally settled them down, a lone, loud voice from the crowd shouted, “He’s the greatest fighter of them all.” Another round of cheering followed, as Humphries beseeched the spectators for silence. Then he asked the forty thousand to offer a silent prayer that Lindbergh might land safely in France. The entire crowd rose as one, all heads bared.

  Similar scenes played out across the country that night. At the Hotel Commodore in Manhattan, twelve hundred industrialists gathered for the American Iron and Steel Institute’s annual banquet. Before the chairman of United States Steel delivered the evening’s main address, another company head offered an impromptu benediction: “I am proud to live under that flag,” he said, pointing to a small star-spangled banner on the table. “I am thinking of a young American boy who left this morning for Paris with a sandwich in his pocket. May God deliver him there safely.” And the men in black tie cheered.

  Anxiously, the world awakened Saturday to old news. In a three-line banner, The New York Times could but report that Lindbergh was speeding across the Atlantic and was last sighted over Newfoundland. A pencil portrait of the delicately featured young man, which made him look even younger than his years, accompanied the lead article. The “skyline” on page one promised a full page of photographs of the aviator, which the paper delivered on page five. Editorial cartoonists across America that day drew variations on the same theme—a picture of a turbulent sea covered by an even more ominous sky, with a tiny plane flying eastward through the clouds. Editorials offered praise and prayers. Thousands of requests streamed in for reprints of the editorial in the New York Sun, written by Harold M. Anderson, called “Lindbergh Flies Alone.” It became one of the most famous newspaper pieces of its era:

  Alone?

  Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave when Adventure leads the way and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company with him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise?

  True, the fragile bodies of his fellows do not weigh down his plane; true, the fretful minds of weaker men are lacking from his crowded cabin; but as his airship keeps her course he holds communion with those rarer spirits that inspire to intrepidity and by their sustaining potency give strength to arm, resource to mind, content to soul.

  Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?

  Into the foggy night, Lindbergh sought companionship with the stars. Feeling the tailwinds and deciding that he could afford to expend some gasoline on altitude, he climbed to five thousand feet. “As long as I can hold on to them,” he thought, seeing the stars blink through the haze, “I’ll be safe.” Sleep remained his worst enemy.

  Entering the fourteenth hour, cruising at ten thousand feet, the Spirit of St. Louis flew through a range of clouds Himalayan in height. With no hope of rising above them, Lindbergh became aware of how cold it was in the cockpit. He removed a leather mitten and put his arm out the window, only to have it stung by cold needles. He aimed his flashlight toward a strut of the plane, on which he saw ice.

  He was aware of the danger, as it was already affecting his plane’s aerodynamics. “As far north as Newfoundland and in the cold of night,” Lindbergh analyzed, “icing conditions probably extend down to the waves themselves”; and if he descended and ice clogged his instruments, he would never be able to climb again. He thought of changing his course and flying south, around the storm; but he had to consider how much gasoline that would cost.

  For the next few minutes, as the wind pulled his plane every which way, he followed the clearest path that presented itself, heading south whenever that option existed. At one point he found himself turned completely around, in quest of safe passage. Soon the coating of ice thinned. He observed that both his earth-inductor compass and his liquid compass overhead were malfunctioning. His only hope for getting across the watery abyss lay in the hairline needles of those compasses pointing the way. Lindbergh could only deduce that he was entering a magnetic storm, which he would have to ride out navigating by instinct.

  Just then, heavenly assistance arrived. Not only did the expanses between the great thunderheads of the storm widen, but moonlight appeared. Its unexpected illumination disoriented Lindbergh at first, because in shortening the night—racing with the earth’s rotation—he had not correctly reckoned when it would show up. Taking off from Roosevelt Field in the early morning had assured Lindbergh the maximum of daylight hours; as it was, he faced but two hours of solid darkness. Entering his thousandth minute in the air, his plane ventured “where man has never been.” The last of the ice disappeared from his plane as Lindbergh crossed the halfway mark in his flight. “Now,” he thought, “I’ve burned the last bridge behind me.”

  After seventeen hours in the air—almost forty since he had last slept—Lindbergh felt disembodied. He seemed able to see without his eyes, and he became numb to both hunger and the cold. He had drunk less than a pint of water. With the first break of light, Lindbergh realized that he had lost control of his eyelids. “My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart,” he wrote of his physical condition. “It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out—and sleep.”

  Lindbergh’s body abdicated control to a “separate mind,” a kind of automatic pilot that took responsibility for putting his muscles through the motions of flying the plane. The Spirit of St. Louis was not a “stable” plane—a machine that might restore its own equilibrium when disturbed by some outside force; and that deficiency proved to be its saving grace. That instability continued to jerk Lindbergh into wakefulness.

  During the next three hours of increasing daylight, fog appeared. Into one opening Lindbergh flew within one hundred feet of the ocean. When the ceiling lowered to zero, Lindbergh flew for two hours completely blind at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. He found it difficult for his mind to function on any level but instinctive survival. He abandoned his log, choosing only to score the switching of gas tanks every hour, and sometimes arriving late to the task.

  Into his twenty-second hour, Lindbergh realized that he was drifting into sleep. When the fog periodically dissipated, Lindbergh took his plane close enough to the ocean for the spray off the whitecaps to slap his face. Other times, he let light rain splash into the cockpit. Then, without warning, came another intrusion.

  It would be almost three decades before Lindbergh would discuss it publicly, but after almost twenty-four hours of his ordeal—at around five o’clock in the morning by his clock—the fuselage behind him filled with phantoms—“vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving,
riding weightless with me in the plane.” He later recorded that these ghosts were benign, vaporous presences. They permeated the fabric walls of the plane, coming and going at will. With human voices they spoke to him above the noise of the engine, advising him on his flight and giving him “messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.” They were human in shape but devoid of real form. With years of hindsight, Lindbergh would grant that these visions would normally have startled him; “but on this fantastic flight,” he would recall of the close encounter, “I’m so far separated from the earthly life I know that I accept whatever circumstance may come.”

  In the next hour, he entertained another vision. Under his left wing, only five miles to the north, Lindbergh saw a coastline, complete with hills and trees and cliffs and islands. The very thought of land that close baffled him, for his calculations put Ireland almost a thousand miles away. Even considering that he had completely lost his bearings, he could not figure out what the land could possibly be—Greenland? Labrador? He shook his head and looked again, assuring himself that he was awake and that he still saw the shore ahead. He finally realized that they were mirages—“fog islands sprung up along my route; here for an hour only to disappear, mushrooms of the sea.” He approached one of the islands, only to have it vanish into thick air. Lindbergh wondered how he would ever be able to recognize Europe when he actually reached its shores.

  Over the next hour, the fog evanesced. Although there were occasional showers, Lindbergh was able to fly below two hundred feet, often within ten feet of the waves. He felt reconnected to the planet, but he was not sure where he was. He continued to fight sleep and to follow his chart, but mental fatigue made simple computation an exhausting challenge. It was impossible to establish his location because too many variables had entered the equation—his detours over St. John’s and around the earlier thunderheads as well as the magnetic storm. He also could not calculate the velocity and direction of the wind for the past twelve hours.