Lindbergh Soars from New York: Transatlantic Race Begins

Charles Lindbergh climbed into the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis at Roosevelt Field, Long Island, on the morning of May 20, 1927, and pointed the nose of his single-engine monoplane toward Paris. The runway was muddy, the plane was overloaded with 450 gallons of fuel, and the telephone wires at the field's edge cleared his landing gear by twenty feet. Lindbergh, a twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot from Minnesota, was attempting what six men had already died trying: a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The Orteig Prize, $25,000 offered by New York hotelier Raymond Orteig, had attracted some of aviation's biggest names. French ace Rene Fonck had crashed on takeoff in September 1926, killing two crew members. Richard Byrd's heavily funded tri-motor had cracked up during a test flight. Clarence Chamberlin was grounded by a legal dispute with his aircraft's owner. Lindbergh, flying without a copilot, navigator, or radio, seemed the least likely to succeed. The flight lasted 33 hours and 30 minutes. Lindbergh fought exhaustion, ice buildup on the wings, and fog that forced him to fly just above the wave tops. He navigated by dead reckoning and occasional celestial observations, unable to see forward through the windshieldless cockpit except by leaning out the side window or using a periscope. When he spotted fishing boats off the Irish coast, he knew he was on course. He landed at Le Bourget Aerodrome outside Paris at 10:22 PM on May 21 to a crowd of 150,000 that nearly tore the plane apart in their frenzy. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous person on the planet overnight. Ticker-tape parades, congressional medals, and global celebrity followed. More importantly, the flight demonstrated that long-distance aviation was practical, triggering a boom in aircraft investment, airline formation, and airport construction. Passenger air travel, which had been regarded as a daredevil novelty, suddenly seemed like the future of transportation. Lindbergh's thirty-three hours over the Atlantic accelerated the aviation industry by a decade.