"We"

by Charles A. Lindbergh

I tied the corners of this hammock to the upper strut fittings and crawled into the three blankets inside which were sewn up to form a bag. Thus I spent a comfortable night.

When I arrived over Lincoln the next day I circled over the Lincoln Standard factory, and after landing on the old flying field south of town, waited for the car which was sent out to bring in visiting airmen.

The remainder of the day was spent in “ground flying” with my friends in the factory. We had not been together for seven months and the usual exchange of experiences was necessary.

I soon learned that Bud Gurney had made a parachute for himself and was intending to test it by the simple method of going up to an altitude of fifteen hundred or two thousand feet and cutting loose from the plane. If the chute opened it was successful.

After a great deal of persuasion I prevailed upon him to let me take him up in my ship while we made the first test with a sand bag.

The tanks had just been filled with fuel but I had unlimited confidence in my Jenny and we lashed the parachute and a sandbag on the right wing. Bud, who weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds himself, climbed into the front cockpit and we started to take-off with a total load of about six hundred pounds, to say nothing of the resistance of the parachute and sandbag which were directly in the slipstream from the propeller.

Even with this load we cleared the nearest obstacle by a safe margin and finally attained an altitude of about two hundred feet. Then we were caught by a descending current of air which carried the plane down to within ten feet of the ground, and try as I would I could not get any higher. A wooded hill was directly in front, and to avoid striking the trees I turned down wind. A railroad tressle was then in front of us and we stalled over it by inches. For five minutes we dodged hills, trees, and houses. I signaled Bud to cut the sandbag, but when he started to climb out of the cockpit to reach it, the added resistance brought the plane down still lower. Then in front of us appeared a row of trees, much higher than the rest, which I knew it would not be possible to get over. We were then passing over a grain field and I cut the gun and landed down wind. The grain was high enough to keep the ship from rolling far and we unloaded the handbag before taking off again. With the weight of the bag and its resistance gone, we had no trouble in getting out of the grain and back to the flying field.

A week later Bud carried out his original intention of testing the chute. It was successful.

Before continuing the flight to Minnesota, Bud and I made a short barnstorming trip through eastern Nebraska. That territory had been fairly well covered by other barnstormers, however, and we did very little business.

At one place where we landed we were overtaken by a violent thunderstorm combined with a strong wind. It came up so suddenly that we had only time enough to tail the ship into the wind and lash the stick to keep the ailerons from whipping before the wind struck us. We were both holding on to the tail trying to keep the plane from blowing away. Following the wind was a heavy rain which covered the ground with water and at each flash of lightning the electricity on the wires of the ship would pass to the ground through our bodies with the intensity of a booster magnet.