The Airplane - Jay Spenser [80]
“This fellow will never make it,” he told himself, fearing the worst. “He’s doomed.”3
But Lindbergh did make it, and the world went crazy. Overnight, it seemed, Americans were passionate about flight, which claimed center stage in the cultural mainstream. Aviators became the nation’s heroes and flight its future. Reflecting this euphoria, Wall Street opened the floodgates to indiscriminate investment in companies building or operating airplanes.
Lindbergh did look Harry Guggenheim up on his return, and the two became fast friends. The philanthropist generously opened his mansion to the youth, granting him solitude from his sudden celebrity, and sent him to his tailor for a tuxedo, tails, and everything else that Lindbergh’s sudden rise to prominence demanded.
Charles Lindbergh’s flight evoked tantalizing visions of commercial air travel. In one day, the possibility of intercontinental air travel went from wildly fanciful to probable. Crowning the Roaring Twenties—a frenetic era of jazz, flappers, Art Deco design, social upheaval, and burgeoning industry—this newfound human mobility was nothing short of intoxicating.
All the technological pieces were now in place for this dream to come true. All, that is, but one. The inability of airplanes to operate in darkness or bad weather meant that air travelers were held hostage by the elements, their flights frequently delayed or canceled. So long as this limitation existed, regularly scheduled air services would be a chimera. The military too chafed under the constraints of bad weather, which prevented its ablest machines and most capable pilots from completing assigned missions.
Harry Guggenheim knew all about it. When he began flight training early in 1917, his instructor pointed to his Curtiss flying boat’s sparse panel. “See those instruments?” the man said. “Pay no attention to them. In the first place, they are not accurate and I want you to get the feel of the ship regardless of instruments.”4
Back then most aviators felt they could trust their instincts. Guggenheim was doing just that when he emerged from broken overcast above Long Island Sound not long afterward. He wrote later at being “amazed on coming out of the cloud to see a ferryboat below apparently tipped at an angle of about forty-five degrees and rapidly turning around in short circles.”5
In fact, it was he who was tilted and circling despite an utter conviction of continued straight-and-level flight during his foray into the clouds. That sobering memory drove him now to address the problem of blind flying. At that time, many countries were working on it, but those efforts were getting nowhere. To succeed, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics needed to assemble the best possible team. But who should lead it?
Guggenheim put this question to Captain Emory Land, a naval officer serving as his second in command on the fund’s board. Risking the ire of his own military service, Land enthusiastically recommended Army first lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle.
Doolittle had won the 1925 Schneider Trophy Race—an international competition for float planes—ahead of two U.S. Navy fliers, making better water landings to boot. More to the point, this Army flier had earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in aeronautical science in 1924 and 1925, respectively, from MIT. No one else combined his skills in the air with such solid academic credentials. If anyone could solve blind flight’s baffling challenges and banish its demons, it was Doolittle.
Harry Guggenheim agreed. Setting the wheels in motion in 1928, he collaborated with all interested parties to establish the Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field. At his request, the Air Corps detached Doolittle to the Guggenheim Fund to serve as the laboratory’s director. In addition to an expert