One Summer: America, 1927 (2 page)

Then the war ended, and planes and aviators both were suddenly, largely worthless. America terminated $100 million of aircraft orders at a stroke and essentially lost all official interest in flying. Other nations scaled back nearly as severely. For aviators who wished to remain airborne, the options were stark and few. Many, lacking anything better to do, engaged in stunts. In Paris, the Galeries Lafayette department store, in a moment of unconsidered folly, offered a prize of 25,000 francs to anyone who could land a plane on its roof. A more foolhardy challenge could hardly be imagined: the roof was just thirty yards long and bounded by a three-foot-high balustrade, which added several perilous degrees of steepness to any landing on it. A former war ace named Jules Védrines decided nonetheless to have a try. Védrines placed men on the roof to grab the wings of his plane as it came in. The men succeeded
in keeping the plane from tumbling off the roof and onto the festive throngs in the Place de l’Opéra below, but only at the cost of directing it into a brick shed housing the store’s elevator mechanisms. The plane was smashed to splinters, but Védrines stepped from the wreckage unscathed, like a magician from an amazing trick. Such luck, however, couldn’t hold. Three months later he died in a crash while trying to fly, more conventionally, from Paris to Rome.

Védrines’s death in a French field illustrated two awkward facts about airplanes: for all their improvements in speed and maneuverability, they were still dangerous devices and not much good for distances. Just a month after Védrines’s crash, the U.S. Navy unwittingly underscored the point when it sent three Curtiss flying boats on a hair-raisingly ill-conceived trip from Newfoundland to Portugal via the Azores. In readiness, the navy positioned sixty-six ships along the route to steam to the aid of any plane that got into trouble, which suggests that its own confidence in the exercise was perhaps less than total. It was as well that it took precautions. One of the planes ditched in the sea and had to be rescued before it even got to Newfoundland. The other two planes splashed down prematurely during the race itself and had to be towed to the Azores; one of those sank en route. Of the three planes that set out, only one made it to Portugal, and that took eleven days. Had the purpose of the exercise been to show how unready for ocean flights airplanes were, it could not have been more successful.

Crossing the ocean in a single leap seemed a wholly unachievable ambition. So when two British airmen did just that, in the summer of 1919, it was quite a surprise to everyone, including, it seems, the airmen. Their names were Jack Alcock and Arthur Whitten “Teddy” Brown, and they deserve to be a good deal more famous. Theirs was one of the most daring flights in history, but it is sadly forgotten now. It wasn’t particularly well noted at the time either.

Alcock, twenty-six, was the pilot, and Brown, thirty-three, the navigator. Both men had grown up in Manchester, England, though Brown was the child of American parents. His father had been sent to Britain in the early 1900s to build a factory for Westinghouse, and the family had
stayed on. Though Brown had never lived in America, he spoke with an American accent and only recently had given up his American citizenship. He and Alcock barely knew each other and had flown together only three times when they squeezed into the open cockpit of a frail and boxy Vickers Vimy airplane in June 1919 at St. John’s in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and headed out over the forbidding gray void of the Atlantic.

Perhaps never have fliers braved greater perils in a less substantial craft. The Vickers Vimy was little more than a box kite with a motor. For hours Alcock and Brown flew through the wildest weather—through rain and hail and driving snow. Lightning lit the clouds around them, and winds tossed them violently in all directions. An exhaust pipe split and sent flames licking along the plane’s fabric covering, to their understandable alarm. Six times Brown had to crawl out onto the wings to clear air intakes of ice with his bare hands. Much of the rest of the time he spent wiping Alcock’s goggles since Alcock couldn’t for a moment relax his grip on the controls. Flying through cloud and fog, they lost all orientation. Emerging into clear air at one point, they were astounded to find that they were just sixty feet above the water and flying
sideways
, at a 90-degree angle to the surface. In one of the few spells that Brown was able to navigate, he discovered that they had somehow turned around and were heading back to Canada. There really has never been a more seat-of-the-pants flight.

After sixteen hours of bouncing disorder, Ireland miraculously appeared beneath them, and Alcock crash-landed in a boggy field. They had flown 1,890 miles, only slightly more than half the distance from New York to Paris, but it was still an astounding achievement. They emerged unhurt from their mangled plane but struggled to get anyone to grasp quite what they had just done. Word of their departure from Newfoundland had been delayed, so no one in Ireland was expecting their arrival, removing all sense of excitement and anticipation. The telegraph girl in Clifden, the nearest town, was not terribly good at her job, it seems, and could only manage to transmit short, mildly befuddled messages, adding to the confusion.

When Alcock and Brown managed to get back to England, they were given heroes’ welcomes—medals were bestowed, the king gave them knighthoods—but they quickly returned to their quiet previous lives and the world forgot all about them. Six months later, Alcock died in a flying accident in France when he crashed into a tree in fog. Brown never flew again. By 1927, when flying the Atlantic Ocean became an earnest dream, their names were hardly remembered.
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Entirely coincidentally, at almost exactly the same time that Alcock and Brown were making their milestone flight, a businessman in New York who had no connection to aviation at all—he just liked planes—made an offer that transformed the world of flying and created what became known as the Great Atlantic Air Derby. The man’s name was Raymond Orteig. He was from France originally but was now a successful hotelier in New York. Inspired by the exploits of World War I aviators, Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to the first person or persons who could fly nonstop from New York to Paris, or vice versa, in the next five years. It was a generous offer but an entirely safe one since it was patently beyond the scope of any airplane to cover such a span in a single flight. As Alcock and Brown had painfully proved, just flying half that distance was at the very bounds of technology and good fortune.

No one took up Orteig’s offer, but in 1924 he renewed it, and now it was beginning to seem actually possible. The development of air-cooled engines—America’s one outstanding contribution to aviation technology in the period—gave planes greater range and reliability. The world also had an abundance of talented, often brilliant, nearly always severely underemployed aeronautic engineers and designers who were eager to show what they could do. For many, the Orteig Prize wasn’t merely the best challenge around, it was the only one.

The first to try was France’s greatest war ace, René Fonck, in partnership with the Russian émigré designer Igor Sikorsky. No one needed the
success more than Sikorsky did. He had been a leading airplane designer in Europe, but in 1917 he had lost everything in the Russian Revolution and fled to America. Now, in 1926, at the age of thirty-seven, he supported himself by teaching chemistry and physics to fellow immigrants and by building planes when he could.

Sikorsky loved a well-appointed airplane—one of his prewar models included a washroom and a “promenade deck” (a somewhat generous description, it must be said)—and the plane he now built for the Atlantic flight was the plushest of all. It had leather fittings, a sofa and chairs, cooking facilities, even a bed—everything that a crew of four could possibly want in the way of comfort and elegance. The idea was to show that the Atlantic could not simply be crossed but crossed in style. Sikorsky was supported by a syndicate of investors who called themselves the Argonauts.

For a pilot they chose Fonck, who had shot down 75 German planes—he claimed it was over 120—an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he had flown only for the last two years of the war, having spent the first two digging ditches before persuading the French air service to give him a chance at flight school. Fonck was adroit at knocking down enemy planes but even more skilled at eluding damage himself. In all his battles, Fonck’s own plane was struck by an enemy bullet just once. Unfortunately, the skills and temperament needed for combat are not necessarily the ones required to fly an airplane successfully across a large and empty sea.

Fonck now showed no common sense in regard to preparations. First, to Sikorsky’s despair, he insisted on going before the plane was adequately tested. Next, and even worse, he grossly overloaded it. He packed extra fuel, an abundance of emergency equipment, two kinds of radios, spare clothes, presents for friends and supporters, and lots to eat and drink, including wine and champagne. He even packed a dinner of terrapin, turkey, and duck to be prepared and eaten after reaching Paris, as if France could not be counted on to feed them. Altogether the plane when loaded weighed twenty-eight thousand pounds, far more than it was designed, or probably able, to lift.

On September 20 came news that two Frenchmen, Major Pierre
Weiss and a Lieutenant Challé, had flown in a single leap from Paris to Bandar Abbas in Persia (now Iran), a distance of 3,230 miles, almost as far as from New York to Paris. Elated at this demonstration of the innate superiority of French aviators, Fonck insisted on immediate preparation for departure.

The following morning, before a large crowd, the Sikorsky airplane—which, such was the rush, hadn’t even been given a name—was rolled into position and its three mighty silver engines started. Almost from the moment it began lumbering down the runway things didn’t look right. Airfields in the 1920s were essentially just that—fields—and Roosevelt Field was no better than most. Because the plane needed an especially long run, it had to cross two dirt service roads, neither of which had been rolled smooth—a painful reminder of how imprudently over-hasty the entire operation was. As the Sikorsky jounced at speed over the second of the tracks, a section of landing gear fell off, damaging the left rudder, and a detached wheel went bouncing off into oblivion. Fonck pressed on nonetheless, opening the throttle and continually gaining speed until he was almost going fast enough to get airborne. Alas, almost was not good enough. Thousands of hands went to mouths as the plane reached the runway’s end, never having left the ground even fractionally, and tumbled clumsily over a twenty-foot embankment, vanishing from view.

For some moments, the watching crowds stood in a stunned and eerie silence—birdsong could be heard, giving an air of peacefulness obviously at odds with the catastrophe just witnessed—and then awful normality reasserted itself with an enormous gaseous explosion as 2,850 gallons of aviation fuel combusted, throwing a fireball fifty feet into the air. Fonck and his navigator, Lawrence Curtin, somehow managed to scramble free, but the other two crew members were incinerated in their seats. The incident horrified the flying fraternity. The rest of the world was horrified, too—but at the same time morbidly eager for more.

For Sikorsky, the blow was economic as well as emotional. The plane had cost more than $100,000 to build, but his backers had so far paid only a fraction of that, and now, the plane gone, they declined
to pay the rest. Sikorsky would eventually find a new career building helicopters, but for now he and Fonck, their plane, and their dreams were finished.

With regard to the Orteig Prize, it was too late for other ocean fliers as well. Weather patterns meant that flights over the North Atlantic were safely possible for only a few months each year. Everyone would have to wait until the following spring.

Spring came. America had three teams in the running, all with excellent planes and experienced crews. The names of the planes alone—
Columbia, America, American Legion
—showed how much this had become a matter of national pride. The initial front-runner was the
Columbia
, the monoplane in which Chamberlin and Acosta had set their endurance record just before Easter. But two days after that milestone flight, an even more impressive and vastly more expensive plane was wheeled out of its factory at Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. This was the
America
, which carried three powerful, roaring engines and had space for a crew of four. The leader of the
America
team was thirty-seven-year-old naval commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, a man seemingly born to be a hero. Suave and handsome, he came from one of America’s oldest and most distinguished families. The Byrds had been dominant in Virginia since the time of George Washington. Byrd’s brother Harry was governor of the state. In 1927, Richard Byrd himself was already a celebrated adventurer. The previous spring, with the pilot Floyd Bennett, he had made the first flight in an airplane over the North Pole (though in fact, as we will see, there have long been doubts that he actually did so).

Byrd’s present expedition was also by far the best funded and most self-proclaimedly patriotic, thanks to Rodman Wanamaker, owner of department stores in Philadelphia and New York, who had put up $500,000 of his own money and gathered additional, unspecified funding from other leading businessmen. Through Wanamaker, Byrd now controlled the leasehold on Roosevelt Field, the only airfield in New York with a runway long enough to accommodate any plane built to fly the
Atlantic. Without Byrd’s permission, no one else could even consider going for the Orteig Prize.

Wanamaker insisted that the operation be all-American. This was a little ironic because the plane’s designer, a strong-willed and difficult fellow named Anthony Fokker, was Dutch and the plane itself had been partly built in Holland. Even worse, though rarely mentioned, was that Fokker had spent the war years in Germany building planes for the Germans. He had even taken out German citizenship. As part of his commitment to German air superiority, he had invented the synchronized machine gun, which enabled bullets to pass between the spinning blades of a propeller. Before this, amazingly, all that aircraft manufacturers could do was wrap armor plating around the propellers and hope that any bullets that struck the blades weren’t deflected backward. The only alternative was to mount the guns away from the propeller, but that meant pilots couldn’t reload them or clear jams, which were frequent. Fokker’s gun gave German pilots a deadly advantage for some time, making him probably responsible for more Allied deaths than any other individual. Now, however, he insisted that he had never actually been on Germany’s side. “My own country remained neutral throughout the entire course of the great conflict, and in a definite sense, so did I,” he wrote in his postwar autobiography,
Flying Dutchman
. He never explained in what sense he thought himself neutral, no doubt because there wasn’t any sense in which he was.