Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [107]
Several times, in poor weather, Lindbergh was forced to make crash landings on to Midwestern cornfields and cow pastures. He became known as the only pilot to have successfully saved his own life four times by parachuting out of his failing plane. His former Staff Sergeant wrote to congratulate him on his escapes: “It appears to me as though you are favored by the angels.”
Although Lindbergh loved the camaraderie and pioneering spirit of mail-route life, he was soon made restless by its monotony. As he flew along the same route day after day he dreamed up new challenges for himself, the most persistent of which was the idea of flying the Atlantic. In 1919 two English pilots, John Alcock and Arthur Brown, had flown the 2,000 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland. In the same year Raymond Orteig, a French-born hotelier living in New York, had focused pilots’ attention on the 3,600-mile New York-Paris route by offering a prize of $25,000 for the first non-stop flight in either direction.
By 1926 several failed attempts at the Orteig prize had been made. Lindbergh thought he knew why: the planes were too heavy, carrying too many engines and too many pilots and crew members. One French team of four had set off in a magnificent triple-engine bi-plane upholstered with red leather and equipped with a bed and a batch of croissants; only the two pilots had survived the crash at take-off. Lindbergh reckoned that the more weight and engines a plane had, the greater the possibility of failure. What he wanted was simple: “one set of wings, one engine, one pilot.”
Money was his first objective. His own savings of $2,000 wouldn’t cover an aircraft engine, let alone an entire plane. Emphasizing the as-yet-untapped commercial possibilities of air travel and its benefits to St. Louis in particular if it were to become an “aviation city,” Lindbergh persuaded a consortium headed by two businessmen he had taught to fly and his former commanding officer, and supported by the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, to guarantee him the $15,000 he estimated he would need. His successful crossing would, he promised, “promote nationwide interest in aeronautics, demonstrate [the] perfection of modern equipment” and help make America “first in the air.”
Finding a plane was more difficult. Lindbergh was well known in Midwestern and military flying circles, but on the East Coast, where the major aeronautical companies were based, he was a nobody. Fokker turned his request down flat. They told him he would need at least $90,000 to buy and outfit one of their specially made planes, but even if he could afford their fee they would reserve the right to veto any pilot attempting an Atlantic flight. And only a fool, they implied, would attempt the flight with fewer than three engines.
Lindbergh deliberately set up his appointment with the Wright Aeronautical Corporation using a five-dollar long-distance telephone call from St. Louis to ensure that he would “get past the girl at the desk.” He invested in a tailor-made suit and a new blue overcoat and suitcase for his trip to New Jersey where the company was based. But his efforts to impress came to nothing. The Wright executive was friendly but told him that the plane in which he was interested, the Wright-Bellanca, was only a prototype. He suggested Lindbergh speak to its designer, Guiseppe Bellanca, and arranged a meeting between them for the following evening. Bellanca was encouraging but, lacking his own production facilities, could only offer Lindbergh the chance to buy a plane in an existing three-motored design for $29,000, double Lindbergh’s entire budget.
Several months later Bellanca got in touch with Lindbergh again. The aggressive young owner of the prototype in which Lindbergh had been interested was willing to sell it for $15,000. Although Lindbergh