But one day, while the whole world seemed to hold its breath and to offer up a little prayer for him, a lone eagle soared out over the broad Atlantic and, after thirty-three hours, let down through the murk over Le Bourget, outside Paris. And after taxiing toward a milling throng so dense he had to cut his engine to avoid injuring someone with his propeller, he remarked, “I am Charles A. Lindbergh.”
Perhaps one measure of the character of this performance is the fact that, to this day, in spite of all the strides in airplane development, no person has sought to duplicate a solo flight from New York to Paris.
The impact of Lindbergh’s flight on the progress of American aviation is well known; it started an upsurge that carried aviation over a dead center and started it spinning on its way. What is not so well known is the underlying character of the man himself and its influence on American air power. For, just as a community or an enterprise mirrors the character of its pioneers, so has aviation taken on some of the personalities of its immortals.
In BUAERO we were at first inclined to look at this last stunt as more or less a lucky break, until Guy Vaughan came down to tell us about the night take-off. Since Lindbergh was flying a Wright Whirlwind engine, Guy had invited him to dinner. And while he and his wife, Helen, sat talking with Lindbergh, word came from Dr. Kimball, the weather wizard, that things were clearing over the Atlantic. The party drove out to the flying field and when the men had pushed their way into the hangar to look for the Spirit of St. Louis, the tiny ship was lighted by a single, dim carbon-filament bulb—“so dim,” according to Guy Vaughan, “you had to strike a match to see if it was burning.”
Outside the hangar, Dick Byrd, aided by his ample staff, had also been making preparations. But Guy Vaughan and Charles Lindbergh, using their own hands, topped off the fuel tanks of the Spirit of St. Louis and started her rolling out onto the ramp. Guy ascribed Lindbergh’s achievement to three things: he was the best pilot in the world, he trusted nothing to anyone but himself, and he took no unintelligent chances.
Admiral Moffett hailed Lindbergh’s accomplishment, but feared the Army might make capital of it by persuading Lindbergh, an Army Reserve officer, to say that his feat had obsoleted all navies. Jerry Land, now our assistant chief, got a big kick out of the whole thing; Lindbergh was his nephew. And then, as the flight proved to be far more than just a seven days’ wonder and Lindbergh’s popularity increased rather than diminished with the passage of time, all sorts of people began getting into the act. When the word was passed around that Lindbergh was coming home on the cruiser Memphis and that he was writing a book to be called We, the Navy began to take him very seriously. The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Curtis D. Wilbur, radioed Lindbergh on the Memphis, offering to assign a naval officer as his technical advisor in the preparation of the book. Lindbergh accepted the offer with alacrity, and I found myself assigned to the detail. My job was to see that his book didn’t sink the Navy with a fragmentation bomb.
On the day of Lindbergh’s arrival at the Navy Yard in Washington, all the naval aviators in the vicinity were tolled off to act as a guard of honor for him. I walked through the part, but was so little interested that I neglected to attend the ceremonies at the foot of the Washington Monument, and went home as usual for lunch. But after Lindbergh’s tour of the provinces, we began to take notice; not only did his popularity increase, but he developed a knack of being exactly on time for all ceremonies. I had noted, during the time the Spirit of St. Louis had been in the hangar at Anacostia, that Lindbergh himself had never failed to check every detail of her preparations. Now his incredible on-time performance, under trying conditions, seemed to bear out Guy Vaughan’s estimate; he trusted no one but himself and was the best pilot in the country. Then came the day when Charles Lindbergh returned to Washington.
Jerry Land sent for me to tell me that Secretary Wilbur had placed his yacht Sylph at Lindbergh’s disposal for a cruise down the Potomac as far as Mount Vernon. A number of dignitaries, including Bill McCracken, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Air; F. Trubee Davison, Assistant Secretary of War for Air; Ed Warner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air; and a number of Slim Lindbergh’s St. Louis backers, were to make the trip. The idea was to give Lindbergh a lot of good advice on his future conduct and afterward we would all adjourn to the house of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover on S Street, where we would meet an agent of George Palmer Putnam, prospective publisher of the book We. I was to go along on the Sylph and then do my duty at the Hoover house.
On the junket down the river that day, I sat well out toward the rail, watching Glenn Martin’s first T4M torpedoplane overhead with its new Pratt and Whitney Hornet going through its one-hour, full-throttle endurance trial. It was oppressively hot and I was nervous about that engine; we thought Glenn had cowled it too close, trying to get speed at the cost of cooling. Lindbergh sat inboard near a cabin skylight, surrounded by important personages and looking very boyish. And while I watched the T4M, listening to every engine throb, I found myself beginning to take notice of the conversation in which I had expected to find no interest.
The older, more experienced men agreed that Lindbergh had done a swell job so far, but they reminded him that fame was fleeting; if he expected to capitalize on his achievement, he must strike while the iron was hot. Of course he shouldn’t try anything dizzy; his job was to prove how safe aviation is. It seemed likely that he might do a good motion picture, a sort of educational movie. He could act out the early history of the flight: the meeting with his backers, the days spent building his plane with Claude Ryan in San Diego, his trials and tribulations, and finally the take-off and landing at Le Bourget. It could be conservative and refined.