Made In America - Bill Bryson [211]
Never before in modern history had anyone generated such instant and total adulation as Lindbergh. When he returned to America, the parade in his honour produced more confetti than had been thrown to greet the returning troops after World War I. New York City gave him the largest dinner that had ever been put on for a private citizen. The New York Stock Exchange even closed for the day. Such was the hysteria that attached itself to Lindbergh that when his mother went to have her hair done in Washington, it took twenty-five policemen to control the mobs.9
The immense excitement and sense of possibility that Lindbergh’s solo flight generated helped to usher in the age of passenger travel. Within two years most of the airmail lines were carrying passengers, and others, like American Airways (later Airlines), National Airlines Taxi Service, and Northwest Airways Company, were rushing to join the market. Lindbergh himself helped to found what is generally credited as the first true passenger airline. Formed in 1929, it was called Transcontinental Air Transport, or TAT, but was commonly known as the Lindbergh Line. In July of that year, using Ford Tri-Motor planes, TAT began the first longdistance passenger services across America, and in so doing introduced concepts that are still with us: flight attendants (only men were employed at first), lavatories, meals on board, and individual reading lights. Three months later the first in-flight movies were introduced. It also took the very bold – at the time almost unthinkable – decision not to carry parachutes.
Because of a paucity of suitable airports and certain vexing limitations of the Ford Tri-Motors, not least an inability to clear any but the smallest mountains, passengers flew only about two-thirds of the total distance. Westward-bound travellers began with an overnight train ride from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Columbus, Ohio. There, safely past the Alleghenies, they boarded the first plane. It flew at about 2,500 feet and at a top speed of 100 m.p.h., stopping in Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers boarded yet another train to carry them past the Rockies to Clovis, New Mexico, where a plane was waiting to take them on to Los Angeles via Albuquerque, and Winslow and Kingman, Arizona. The whole undertaking was, by modern standards, drafty, uncomfortable and slow. Altogether the trip took forty-eight hours – though that was twenty-four hours faster than the fastest train. As a reward for their bravery, and for paying an extravagant $351.94 for a one-way ticket, every passenger was given a solid-gold fountain-pen from Tiffany’s.10
Planes were unpressurized and unventilated. For many passengers, breathing at the higher altitudes was difficult. Often the rides were so rough that ‘as many as three-quarters of the passengers became airsick (another new word of the age). Even the celebrated aviator Amelia Earhart was seen diving for the airbag (yet another). For pilots there were additional difficulties. The Ford Tri-Motor, called with wary affection the Tin Goose by airline crews, was a challenging plane to fly. One of its more notable design quirks was that the instruments were mounted outside the cockpit, on one of the wing struts, and frequently became fogged once airborne.11
Almost from the start TAT was dogged with misfortune. Six weeks after services began, a Los Angeles-bound plane crashed in bad weather in New Mexico, killing all eight passengers. Four months later, a second plane crashed in California, killing sixteen. People began to joke that TAT stood for ‘Take a Train’. In between these two crashes came another – that of Wall Street, when shares plummeted on Black Monday, 29 October, marking the start of