Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [106]
He used to imagine himself with wings, “soaring through the air from one river bank to the other, over the stones of the rapids, above log jams, above the tops of trees and fences.” But the reality of flight was even more thrilling than he had hoped. In the air, he wrote later, “I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.” From the first second of that lift-off he knew that he had found his path in life. Just ten years of flying, he believed, “would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”
Flying became for him an almost mystical experience. Lindbergh described flying by moonlight as times of transcendence. “Its light floods through woods and fields; reflects up from bends of rivers; shines on the silver wings of my biplane, turning them a greenish hue. It makes the earth seem more of a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had the right to an orbit in the sky.”
In 1924 Lindbergh enrolled in the army’s new Air Service from which, two years later, he graduated first in his class. An army doctor who examined him during this period noted his perfect hearing and sight, describing him as an “optimum type—slow and purposeful, yet quick of reaction, alert, congenial, [and] intelligent.” Lindbergh set himself the highest of standards for his conduct as well as his physical achievements, listing fifty-nine qualities towards which he strove including Diligence, Manliness, Zeal, Reserve, Concentration and Balance.
As he perfected his craft during the early 1920s Lindbergh notched up his hours working as a stunt pilot, barnstorming through the country offering rides to anyone with $5 or performing tricks under the name “Daredevil Lindbergh.”
Parachute-jumping and wing-walking were both regarded as suicidal—especially when the plane was looping the loop—but the fearless Lindbergh insisted that with careful preparation and precautions the risks were minimal. At college, he and a friend had amused themselves by shooting coins out of each other’s fingers at fifty feet; being wired up to a wing at a hundred miles an hour, even if it was upside down, was hardly a frightening prospect by comparison.
When the St. Louis air-mail service opened in April 1926 Lindbergh was chosen as the route’s chief pilot. He and two other aviators flew five round trips a week between Chicago and St. Louis for the handsome salary of $400 a month. Their planes were army-salvage de Havilland observation bi-planes with single engines, fondly known as Flaming Coffins because so few pilots survived crashing them.
Two hundred people came to St. Louis’s Lambert airfield to watch the dedication ceremony before Lindbergh took off on the city’s first official mail flight. He and his fellow pilots, postal clerks and executives “felt we were taking part in an event which pointed the way toward a new and marvelous era.” But to Lindbergh’s disappointment, popular interest declined after that first burst of enthusiasm. For him, flight combined “science, freedom, beauty [and] adventure” and he was evangelical about the future of aviation, taking immense pride in being part of “man’s conquest of the air.” To ordinary people, though, an air-mail letter or even a flight in an airplane at a county fair were diverting gimmicks rather than heralds of a dazzling new future.
Lindbergh and his team were the explorers of the age, flying long distances in uncertain conditions in insecure planes. To begin with, they flew without night-flying equipment, carrying only a pocket torch (“pilot furnished,” Lindbergh wryly noted) and an emergency flare, although eventually