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Tingmissartoq
by unknown
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh inspect their newly completed Lockheed Sirius prior to taking to the air on their flight to the Orient in 1931.
Three years after her marriage to Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh left her infant son with her mother and a nanny in North Haven, Maine, strapped herself into the open cockpit of a Sirius floatplane, and flew with her husband to the Orient, following the Northwest Passage through arctic Canada and Alaska that her husband was surveying for the airlines. The Lindberghs flew to the Orient in this Lockheed Sirius - the first aircraft to reach the Far East by way of the "great circle route." Lindbergh described their trip as a vacation, with "no start or finish, no diplomatic or commercial significance, and no records to be sought." In 1933, while Lindbergh was technical advisor for Pan American Airways, the couple used the same Sirius to cross the Atlantic, researching flight paths for Pan American Airways. In Godthaab, Greenland, an Eskimo boy named the aircraft Tingmissartoq, meaning "one who flies like a bird."
The Lindbergh's Sirius was a low-wing monoplane, powered by a 680-hp Wright Cyclone. The Sirius had been designed in 1929 by John K. Northrop and Gerard Vultee, and this model was specially fitted with Edo floats, since most of the Lindberghs flight was to be over water.
Charles Lindbergh with the Lockheed Sirius in Lisbon, Portugal in 1933
In 1935, Anne Morrow Lindbergh published an account of their 1931 flight in a book titled: North to the Orient. The book offers a fascinating account of a survey flight she made with her husband. They flew from New York over the great circle route to the Far East, reaching both Japan and China. It may be hard for a reader to appreciate what a risky adventure this was in the age before radar, when aviation was in its infancy. Anne Lindbergh was only twenty-four at the time and, although she admittedly had little technical or mechanical aptitude, she trained hard so that she could be the radio operator on the flight.
Anne wrote North to the Orient partly to rescue herself from the isolation and despair of the kidnapping of their infant a year after their return from the 1931 flight. The memoir went on to win the National Book Award and launch a celebrated career.
Anne Lindbergh in the cockpit of the Sirius
2002 Wings Publishing
