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Spirit of St. Louis
by unknown
Bad weather and the prospect that his transatlantic flight would be delayed for a number of days greeted Charles Lindbergh upon his arrival at Curtiss Field on Long Island, New York on 12 May, 1927. However, on May 19th, a favorable weather report predicted a break in the rain prompting Lindbergh to make his attempt the next day. He arrived at the airfield before dawn the next morning, prepared his plane for flight and began his historic journey.
Just after daybreak on May 20th, Lindbergh's plane was rolled from its hangar and towed to adjacent Roosevelt Field, which had a longer runway. A crowd, alerted by the action, gathered on the muddy, violet-dotted field. "It was a damp, blustery, uncomfortable morning,'' recalls Anne Condelli, 81, of Garden City, who was ten at the time of Lindbergh's flight. "There were people milling around, filling the plane with gas, wishing him well.''
Finally, with a last farewell, Lindbergh climbed into his plane to take off. Hundreds of spectators and news reporters watched in anticipation as the silvery airplane pushed its way down the muddy airstrip. With the engine roaring the Spirit of St. Louis began its take off roll. It picked up speed...lifted off the ground for a moment, then settled back into the mud as Lindbergh remained at the controls. Continuing to pick up speed, power lines loomed ahead as the pilot struggled to coax more speed out of the engine. The looming power lines seemed ready to grab the fragile airplane and bring the flight to a sudden and tragic end. Condelli's brother, Kenneth Van de Water, remembers the suspense as Lindbergh's plane lumbered down the runway. "He kept going and going and couldn't get off the ground,'' recalled Van de Water, 78, of Lexington, Va. "There were several times as he went down the runway that the plane bounced.''
Among the witnesses to the take off was Anthony Fokker, who was certain the Ryan would never make it over the telephone wires at the end of the field. He and Clarence Chamberlin stood at either end of the runway in case Lindbergh needed rescuing.
Lindbergh later described the event:
"About 7:40 a.m. the motor was started and at 7:52 I took off on the flight for Paris. The field was a little soft due to the rain during the night and the heavily loaded plane gathered speed very slowly. After passing the halfway mark, however, it was apparent that I would be able to clear the obstructions at the end. I passed over a tractor by about fifteen feet and a telephone line by about twenty, with a fair reserve of flying speed. I believe that the ship would have taken off from a hard field with at least five hundred pounds more weight. I turned slightly to the right to avoid some high trees on a hill directly ahead, but by the time I had gone a few hundred yards I had sufficient altitude to clear all obstructions and throttled the engine down to 1750 R.P.M. I took up a compass course at once and soon reached Long Island Sound where the Curtiss Oriole with its photographer, which had been escorting me, turned back."
The plane's landing gear had missed the telephone wires by a mere 20 feet. With that obstacle cleared, Lindbergh was on his way...the engine operated flawlessly for the next 33 ½ hours.
Aerial view from newsreel plane of Spirit of St. Louis taking off taken
On 21 May, 1927, Charles Augustus Lindbergh completed the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and the first ever nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Though Lindbergh had struggled to stay awake, sometimes forced to hold his eyelids open with his fingers, and had experienced hallucinations that ghosts were passing through the cockpit, amazingly he completed the 3,600 mile journey. He became an immediate international celebrity. The aviation age, launched by the Wright brothers, was now solidly in place.
On 14 December, 1927 the United States Congress authorized a special award of the Medal of Honor to Army Captain Charles A. Lindbergh. It was presented by President Coolidge and would remain perhaps the most controversial award of our Nation's highest military medal in its distinguished history. Despite that controversy, surfacing only in later years and for all the wrong reasons, Charles Lindbergh was indeed a hero. Only three Army Airmen to that date had earned Medals of Honor, all during World War I and all of them posthumously. (Eddie Rickenbacker's Medal of Honor was not presented until 1930.) Thus Charles Lindbergh became the first living airman to receive his Nation's highest honor.
Medal of Honor
2002 Wings Publishing
