Made In America - Bill Bryson [210]
Early planes were dangerous. In 1921 the average pilot had a life expectancy of 900 flying hours.7 For airmail pilots, flying mostly at night without any proper navigational aids, it was even worse. While an airmail pilot on the St Louis-Chicago run, Charles Lindbergh staked his life on a farm boy in Illinois remembering to put on a 100-watt bulb in his backyard each night before he went to bed. It is little wonder that of the first forty pilots hired to carry air mail for the government thirty-one died in crashes. Lindbergh himself crashed three planes in a year.
Largely because of the danger, flying took on a romance and excitement that are difficult to imagine now. By May 1927, when Lindbergh touched down at Curtiss Field on Long Island for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the world had become seized with a kind of mania about flying and was ready for a hero. Lindbergh was just the person.
In recent months, six aviators had died attempting to cross the Atlantic, and several other groups of pilots at or around Curtiss Field were preparing to risk their lives in pursuit of fame and a $25,000 payoff called the Oteig Prize. All the other enterprises involved teams of at least two men, and muscular, well-provisioned, three-engined planes. And now here was someone who had flown in from out of nowhere (and had incidentally set a coast-to-coast speed record in the process) who was aiming to fly the ocean alone in a frail, single-engined mosquito of a plane. That he had lanky boyish good looks and an air of innocence made him ideal, and within days America and the world were gripped by a Lindy hysteria. On the Sunday after his arrival, 30,000 people showed up at Curtiss Field hoping to get a glimpse of this untried twenty-five-year-old hero.
That Lindbergh was a one-man operation worked in his favour. Where others were fussing over logistics and stocking up with survival rations, he bought a bag of sandwiches at a nearby lunch counter, filled up his fuel tank and quietly took off in the little plane named the Spirit of St Louis (so called because his backers were from there). He departed at 7.52 a.m. on 20 May 1927, and was so loaded down with fuel that he flew most of the distance to Nova Scotia just fifty feet above the ocean.8 Because a spare fuel tank had been bolted on to the nose, Lindbergh had no forward visibility. To see where he was going, he had to put his head out the side window. Thirty-four hours later, at 10.22 at night, he landed at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris. One hundred thousand people were there to greet him.
To the French he was Le Boy. To the rest of the world he was Lucky Lindy – and he was lucky indeed. Though he did not know it, the night before he had taken possession of the plane, one of the workmen fuelling it had lost a piece of hose in the tank. Since a piece of hose could easily foul the fuel lines, there was no option but to take it out. The workman had cut a six-inch hole in the tank, retrieved the hose and surreptitiously patched the hole with solder. It was a miracle that it held throughout the turbulent Atlantic crossing.
Lindbergh was by no means the first person to cross the Atlantic by air. In May 1919, eight years earlier, a US Navy plane had crossed from Newfoundland to Lisbon, though it had stopped in the Azores en route. A little less than a month after that, John Alcock and Arthur Brown of Great Britain flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first non-stop flight. Lindbergh flew 1,500 miles further, and he did it alone, and that was enough for most people. Indeed,