Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (42 page)

The meeting took place in the offices of Interstate Flying Services. Tall, dark, dapper Charles Ulm, when he arrived, proved to be a Mosman man, much the same age as Kingsford Smith and Anderson, and just like them, was a war veteran who had been trying to make a go of it by launching various aviation companies, with only mixed success. One or two ventures had worked, and lots hadn’t. As a matter of fact, though Charles Ulm wasn’t a man much given to witticisms, his experience in recent times justified him uttering one of the defining and oft-repeated lines of those difficult times: ‘The greatest risk to life in modern aviation is starvation.’
¹⁰

Nevertheless, Ulm felt that by joining forces, he and Interstate Flying Services could make a serious go of winning the tender for the Adelaide–Perth postal route, which was shortly going to be on offer. Certainly, one Norman Brearley, with his West Australian Airways, would have the inside running on it, but Ulm was confident they could beat him.

Kingsford Smith was keen from the first, as he liked both Ulm’s upfront way of going about things and the possibility of getting one up on Major Brearley. Keith Anderson was less so. He simply wasn’t sure whether he liked the cut of Ulm’s jib in the first place, and it seemed to him unlikely that Interstate Flying Services really would be able to beat their old employer for such a big tender. Still, it was obvious to both partners that Ulm had what they both lacked, which was a keen commercial brain. While Kingsford Smith was happy to be in the ‘aviation business’, the business part of it interested him only insofar as it allowed him to continue his true passion, which was aviation. Keith Anderson felt much the same.

Maybe under this new arrangement Ulm could take care of all the numbers, making them black rather than red, and Kingsford Smith and Anderson could get on with the flying. And if they could win the tender to fly between Adelaide and Perth, they would have it made. Have it
made
!

Therefore on the following morning, when Ulm returned to hear their answer, they did the deal, shook hands and all started to steer by the same star.

A small parenthesis here. One other key thing Ulm and the two partners of Interstate Flying Services had in common, though none of them knew it, was that they were all broke. Smithy had been quite impressed with Ulm’s suit and briefcase, but was unaware that that was basically all Ulm owned, and that in recent times he had been reduced to working by the hour in a billiard saloon, playing against people who needed an opponent. For his part, Ulm was impressed with the salubrious offices of Interstate Flying Services but was unaware that the company had only £49 in the bank and was over £700 in the red. Close parenthesis.

In the northern hemisphere at this time, great attention was focusing on the continuing attempts to win the Orteig Prize for being the first to fly the distance between New York and Paris in either direction. On 8 May 1927, none other than Captain Charles Nungesser made ready to leave Paris’s Le Bourget airfield, with his navigator, Captain François Coli, and fly to New York. ‘I am attempting the flight,’ Nungesser had announced grandly, ‘to bring honour to French aviation.’
¹¹

The greatest French hero to beat them all, Nungesser had finished the war with forty-five confirmed kills, and had more or less prospered since, being celebrated everywhere he went and showered with decorations, money and whatever else took his fine fancy. His marriage to an American in 1923 had only temporarily slowed his nocturnal conquests of some of the most beautiful women in France, before divorce had allowed him totally free rein once more. But could he achieve something in peacetime that was the equivalent of his wartime feats, and actually fly all the way from Paris to New York? He was convinced he could, as was much of the French press, who turned up, in the company of thousands of Parisians, to record his departure.

Nungesser’s plane carried no radio and no life rafts. When Coli had complained about this to Nungesser, the famous pilot gave him short shrift. ‘The idea,
mon cher
Coli, is to reach America by flying over the water, not swimming to New York. You’ve been in the navy too long,
mon pauvre.
‘
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And there he was! The crowd swooned as Nungesser himself came out onto the tarmac in a garish yellow flying suit, trailed by a rather hangdog-looking Coli. Nungesser paused to kiss two beautiful women, share a couple of jokes with his great friends the singer Maurice Chevalier and the boxer Georges Carpentier, and then, with a cheery wave to the adoring spectators, climbed up into his cockpit.

And with that the plane, a Levasseur PL-8 biplane named
L’oiseau blanc
—painted with Nungesser’s Great War insignia of a black heart, two burning candles, a coffin and skull and crossbones—staggered down the runway and, after
just
managing to take off, headed out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Tragically, after being briefly spotted over Ireland some six hours later, Nungesser and Coli were never seen again.

Things had been nearly as grim on the American side of the Atlantic. All the crews attempting to cross from New York had failed to achieve their objectives through a variety of crashes, equipment malfunction and simple failure to leave the ground. Six men had been killed in the process. Some of the surviving crews had repaired and reconfigured their aircraft, and were now readying to take off once more, but there remained one lone entrant, still readying for his first attempt—Charles Augustus Lindbergh—in his plane, the
Spirit of St Louis.
When this unknown, with his tiny single-engined plane, had first announced his intention to fly solo, the papers had dubbed him the ‘Flying Fool’.
¹³

This, in spite of the fact that another aviator, a Russian by the name of Ivan Federov, announced an even grander intention. A member of the All Inventors Vegetarian Club of Interplanetary Cosmopolitans, Federov announced that in the coming September he was going to fly all the way to the
moon.
He would be going in a 30-metre-long rocket that was half aeroplane and half giant projectile. His co-pilot would be a man by the name of Max Valier, whom he described as a ‘German moon fan’.
¹⁴

But back to Lindbergh, the
real
Flying Fool…

It had been a long haul just to get to this point, but Lindbergh did not lack confidence. Indeed, that quiet, unassuming confidence that things would work out come what may—mixed with a very strong work ethic to do everything possible to make sure that they really did—was his most defining characteristic.

He woke on the morning of 19 May 1927 and worked with his team on his plane out at Roosevelt Field, just as he had been doing for the previous few days, and waited for a report that would tell him the weather over the Atlantic was all clear. This did not seem likely, as reports had been uniformly bad, and during the day drizzle over New York did not cease. That evening he was relaxed enough to go and see a performance of the hit Broadway musical
Rio Rita
, and it was while he was returning from that that his world suddenly changed…

On a whim, one of his companions, the chief engineer for Wright Aeronautical, which manufactured the Whirlwind engine his plane was using, decided it would be a good idea to check the latest weather reports for over the Atlantic. They pulled over on 42nd Street so that another Wright man, Dick Blythe, could make the call from an office he had access to. And suddenly he came running back with the news—the weather over the Atlantic had unexpectedly cleared!
¹⁵
Ask not
for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee
…Lindbergh knew immediately that his hour had come.

Returning to the Garden City Hotel where he was staying to snatch a few hours’ sleep, Lindbergh first had to fight off the journalists waiting in the foyer, each of whom wanted just one more quote—something,
anything
, please!—before at last getting back to his room. Outside his door he was pleased to see George Stumpf, a burly National Guardsman from St Louis who had been sent there by Lindbergh’s backers as something of a security guard. Stumpf’s sole job was to keep the corridor quiet and intruders away from his door. Lindbergh uttered a quick goodnight to Stumpf, told him he would soon be on his way to Paris, and within minutes was in his bed right on the edge of blessed sleep when…
tap-tap-tap
…when…
tap-tap-tap
…when…
tap-tap-tap
…it seemed someone was knocking on his door.

It was the security guard. ‘Slim,’ Stumpf said, using Lindbergh’s St Louis nickname. ‘What am I going to do when you’re gone?’
¹⁶

Lindbergh, a moderate man by nature, did not at this point leap out of his bed and strangle Stumpf dead. Though aggrieved, he merely said, ‘I don’t know. There are plenty of other problems to solve before we have to think about that one.’

And then he tried to get back to sleep. Alas, he soon knew it was hopeless. So what else could he do? He decided to head straight to the airport to make his preparations. The plane itself was already packed, and he knew down to the last tiny item what was on board and where. In terms of keeping the weight to a bare minimum, Lindbergh had been
so
disciplined that he had declined to accept $1000 from a rich New York stamp-collector businessman who had simply wanted him to carry a pound of mail to a friend in Paris. He also declined to take a parachute, on the grounds it weighed too much. No sextant—a simple compass would suffice—and beyond that he would steer by dead reckoning alone. After all, although he had minutely tracked his route and intended to stay exactly on it, the large landmass to his east meant that even allowing for catastrophic miscalculation he was bound to cross a coast somewhere between Northern Europe to the west coast of Africa! A radio? Why bother, when by leaving its weight behind he could get another 25 gallons of fuel on the plane? Lindbergh’s intense focus on weight extended to cutting the corners off his maps, making his own boots out of the lightest material he could find and ripping unnecessary pages from his notebook.

As to supplies, if he succeeded he would be flying for two days, but he took supplies enough for just one—two ham sandwiches, two roast beef sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg sandwich and a quart of water. ‘If I get to Paris I won’t need anymore,’ Lindbergh smilingly replied when asked, ‘and if I don’t get to Paris I won’t need anymore either.’
¹⁷

(This central idea of stripping down to all bar the
bare
essentials had a long and noble history in aviation. It is a matter of recorded fact that on 7 January 1785 two intrepid adventurers, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries, set off from Dover to cross the English Channel in a hot air balloon. When they got into trouble, they began ditching everything not nailed down, including their clothes, in an effort to stay aloft. When that
still
wouldn’t do it, both men performed their ablutions over the side of the basket and did indeed make the French coast!)

At 7.51 am on the morning of 20 May 1927 Lindbergh sat in his Ryan monoplane, put on his goggles, adjusted his flight helmet, and poked his head out the cockpit window to talk to his two mechanics on the ground: ‘What do you say—let’s try it.’
¹⁸

They nodded and removed the chocks from in front of the wheels. As Lindbergh began to gun the engine, the purple-blue violets that so flourished on the airstrip that they threatened to engulf it, now leaned back in horror at the shattering noise. A mangled propeller in a large blackened circle in that field of flowers—right beside where the
Spirit of St Louis
stood—marked the spot where René Fonck’s last attempt to fly the Atlantic had ended.
¹⁹
Lindbergh resolutely refused to look at it, but kept staring straight forward to where
his
destiny lay.

And now…

As the
Spirit of St Louis
cleaved the misty morning and hurtled drunkenly down the muddy runway, heading in the direction of Paris if it got off the ground and a carefully positioned ambulance from the Nassau County Hospital if it didn’t, the 500-strong crowd gathered for the occasion leaned forward in nervous anticipation. Many in that crowd were simply neighbours to the field who had been attracted by the early morning noise and excitement, and were stunned that such a tiny plane was really going to attempt to fly such a vast ocean. Others, like Anthony Fokker—one of the most respected figures in aviation manufacturing, and one of the last people to chat with the pilot before take-off—were of the aviation community and knew only too well the risk Lindbergh was taking.

It was known that this was Lindbergh’s first attempt to take off with the plane completely full, loaded with 451 gallons of fuel—145 gallons more than it had ever held before
²⁰
—meaning that it now weighed two and a half tons. Would he…? Could he…?

He could! He did! Nearing the end of the runway’s allotted 5000 feet the plane lifted off, cleared the telephone wires at the end of the field by just 20 feet, and brought a great cry of exultation from the crowd—as nearby trees swayed and shook in the trailing air swirls. Lindbergh quickly disappeared into the low-lying haze. Just like that, he was gone! On his way!

Myriad reporters ran for their telephones to get the words to their newspapers, and shortly it was the people of America and France, and indeed much of the world, who held their breath. In Lindbergh’s home town of Little Falls, Minnesota, the phone lines were soon buzzing with the news, rousing the good burghers from their slumber: ‘The “kid”, Lindbergh, is on his way, can you believe it?’
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