This May marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of Charles A. Lindbergh's solo, nonstop flight from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget, near Paris. Those 33.5 hours that the 25-year-old Lindbergh spent crossing the Atlantic on May 20 and 21, 1927, catapulted him from obscurity into the ranks of the heroic. The success of that flight was due to the sturdy little Ryan Airlines, Inc., NYP airframe; a faithful nine-cylinder, 220-horsepower Wright Whirlwind J-5C radial engine; the skill of a superb aviator; and, the crucial factor, incredible good luck.
The genius in Lindbergh's analysis of what it would take to make a successful nonstop ocean crossing was his simple, stubborn conviction that the most essential elements were fuel, fuel, and more fuel. That sounds like stating the obvious, but most of the other competitors for the $25,000 Orteig prize for being the first to fly New York to Paris nonstop had selected a multiengine airplane. Lindbergh reasoned that a big twin or three-engined Fokker, Sikorsky, or Bellanca would be too burdened with fuel weight, especially on takeoff. He also believed that the perceived advantages of an extra engine or two — safety and a chance at completing the flight even if an engine failed — were a smokescreen. Multiple engines meant more complexity, more chances for something to go wrong. And a heavy, fuel-laden airplane could not maintain altitude with one engine out, so extra engines were in fact a liability. No, the answer was a small single, and everything not absolutely essential to the completion of the flight, including communications and navigation radios and even a parachute, would be left behind to save weight.
He was right, of course. When N-X211 touched down on the sod at Le Bourget, 85 gallons of the takeoff load of 450 gallons of Amoco gasoline re- mained in the tanks. That was sufficient for another 1,040 miles of no-wind range.
Lindbergh was a deeply private, introspective man who feared crowds (rightly so, it seems; the engine and navigation logs from the transatlantic flight were stolen from the Spirit of St. Louis by someone in the crowd that swarmed the airplane at Le Bourget) and distrusted a boisterous and sensa- tionalist press corps. We might never have known much about Lindbergh the man except that, along with his other talents — a clarity of vision, an analytical mind, and, of course, a natural ability as a pilot — he also was a gifted writer. His 1953 book, The Spirit of St. Louis, in which he describes his introduction to aviation, the events that led to his decision to attempt to fly the Atlantic solo in a single-engine airplane, and the flight itself, won for Lindbergh the Pulitzer Prize. His earlier book about the flight, We, was hurriedly written in 1927 at the insistence of others, according to Lindbergh.
Though it surely was not part of Lindbergh's motivation to attempt the adventure, his book makes clear that the successful flight was as much an affirmation of the power of the human spirit as it was an engineering and planning triumph.
In the book, Lindbergh makes observations about flying in the 1920s that, when read in the context of the 1990s, take on an ironic twist. Some things have changed, some haven't. Some examples:
"What a future aviation has when such planes can be built," Lindbergh writes of the new, light, and fast Wright-Bellanca, which he covets in place of the war-surplus, Liberty-engined de Havilland he flies on the St. Louis-to- Chicago mail route. "Yet how few people realize it. Businessmen think of aviation in terms of barnstorming, flying circuses, crashes, and high costs per flying hours."
And, "Aviation will never amount to much unless we learn to free ourselves from the mist. The gyroscopic turn indicator is a step in the right direction, but it will take much more than that — better instruments, and radio, and possibly some way of dissipating fog above an airport ... What I really need is a pair of spectacles to see through the fog."
Finally, there are Lindbergh observations about the dangers of flight:
"I've never chosen the safer branches of aviation," he is quoted in the biography, The Last Hero, by Walter S. Ross. "I have followed adventure, not safety. I've flown for the love of flying, done the things I most wanted to do. Why should man want to fly at all? What justifies the risk of life? I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead."
From the perspective of 65 years, Lindbergh's achievement appears every bit as courageous as the world perceived it in 1927. What has changed is society's expectations. Lindbergh's views on trading risk for rewards would be considered anathema in today's America where a risk-free existence is considered a birthright.
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