Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [108]
Furious, Lindbergh had just one option left: the tiny Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego, which had started out building planes from war-surplus aircraft parts. He went to California to discuss the plane he hoped they could build him. Ryan was based in the port area of San Diego and comprised one dilapidated building with “no flying field, no hangar, no sound of engines warming up; and the unmistakable smell of dead fish from a nearby cannery [mixed] with the banana odor of dope from drying wings,” but Lindbergh was immediately impressed by its workmanlike approach. With a Wright-Whirlwind engine and any extras included at cost price, Ryan would charge Lindbergh and his sponsors $10,580 to build the Spirit of St Louis.
While his plane was being built Lindbergh spent his days meticulously studying nautical charts, planning his route (using fifty-cent drugstore maps for his journey over American land) and writing endless “To do” lists. He worked closely with Ryan’s chief engineer, Donald Hall, to mold the plane around his needs, adapting everything to his long-distance flight plans and his own experience.
Flight efficiency was to be the primary consideration, then safety in case of a crash, and finally Lindbergh’s own comfort. Everything unnecessary—even night-flying equipment, a radio, a sextant and gauges on the gasoline tanks—was jettisoned for the sake of weight. Every pound saved meant the plane could travel further without refueling. Lindbergh turned down the idea of an additional cockpit because the space could be used to store more gasoline. “I’d rather have extra gasoline than an extra man.”
The empty plane, made of spruce and piano wire and covered in cotton finished with cellulose acetate dope in silver-grey, weighed 2150lb, of which five hundred pounds was the air-cooled, 223-hp radial Wright-Whirlwind propeller engine stored in the nose of the fuselage. “Nine delicate, fincovered cylinders of aluminum and steel,” mused Lindbergh. “On this intricate perfection I’m to trust my life across the Atlantic Ocean.”
The Spirit of St Louis stood just under ten feet tall. She was nearly twenty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of forty-six feet, and carried 450 gallons of gasoline and forty spare pounds of oil. She was a monoplane, because single wings could cope better with ice in the freezing nighttime conditions high above the North Atlantic. Lindbergh’s seat in the cockpit was made of lightweight wicker.
Her accident equipment was minimal: a small black rubber raft weighing ten pounds; a knife; some flares and matches stored in bicycle inner-tubes; basic fishing equipment; a hacksaw; some “awful” crumbly army-ration chocolate-like stuff. A parachute, weighing twenty pounds, was rejected—it meant losing twenty minutes’ worth of fuel. Even drinking water Lindbergh thought would weigh too much; he ordered the prototype of a newly invented cup that would convert moisture from his breath into water.
Lindbergh himself was the last item, six foot two tall and (clothed) weighing a slim 170 pounds. He planned to wear a zippered flying suit made of wool-lined waterproof cloth weighing nine pounds, specially chosen because it would keep him warm if he crashed, even when wet. Underneath the flying suit he would wear army breeches and boots, a shirt and light jacket and a red-and-blue-striped tie. His vulnerability on the flight, alone and out of all contact, would be intense. “For the first time in my life,” his mother Evangeline wrote to him, “I realize that Columbus also had a mother.”
Spirit was ready towards the end of April 1927. Inspired by Lindbergh’s quiet determination, knowing that other teams were preparing to make their own attempts at the flight, Ryan’s thirty-five men had worked for long hours, often without pay, to finish her