The Spirit of ST Louis (2 page)

Leaving the engine idling, we walk over to inspect the fieldlighting equipment which has been improvised for the night landings of winter. Since the Robertson Aircraft Corporation keeps no mechanics at intermediate stops between St. Louis and Chicago, all the assistance we have comes from the mail truck drivers. They help us with refueling and starting, keep the wind sock untangled, and hold on to a wing when taxiing is difficult. For whatever the pilot can't do alone, he has to call upon them. It's not part of their work; they get nothing for it, but they're always ready to give us a hand. Now we'll have to depend on them to arrange the lights for our night landings.

Electric floodlights cost too much, so our Corporation bought flares instead. The first shipment has just arrived. The driver unlocks a plank box near the gasoline barrels and takes out a long, cylindrical flare. On one end there's a spike that can be stuck into the ground to hold it upright, like a piece of Fourth-of-July fireworks. We selected a type that would burn for nearly two minutes—long enough if lighted at the right moment, and much less expensive than the larger ones.

I show the driver where it should be placed with different directions of wind—always on the leeward end of the landing strip, with a curved sheet of tin behind it for a reflector and to keep the intense light from blinding the pilot as he glides down. A flare is not to be set off, I tell him, unless he sees the plane's navigation lights blink several times. On moonlit nights we can economize by not using one at all.

I’m an hour and ten minutes behind schedule, taking off. The trees at the far end of the field have merged into a solid clump in thickening dusk, have lost their individual identity. The moon, just past full, is rising in the east. I didn't notice it before I landed, but now it seems to be competing with me for domination of the sky—just the two of us, climbing, and all the world beneath.

I welcome the approach of night as twilight fades into brilliant moonlight. The day has been crystal clear and almost cloudless; perfect for flying. It's been almost too perfect for flying the mail, for there's no ability required in holding your course over familiar country with a sharp horizon in every quarter. You simply sit, touching stick and rudder lightly, dreaming of the earth below, of experiences past, of adventures that may come. There's nothing else to do, nothing to match yourself against. There hasn't been even an occasional cloud near enough to burrow through. Skill is no asset. The spirit of conquest is gone from the air. On such an evening you might better be training students. It's an evening for beginners, not for pilots of the mail—no tricks of wind, no false horizons. Its hours were shaped for beauty, not for contest.

The last tint of pink disappears from the western sky, leaving to the moon complete mastery of night. Its light floods through woods and fields; reflects up from bends of rivers; shines on the silver wings of my biplane, turning them a greenish hue. It makes the earth seem more like a planet; and me a part of the heavens above it, as though I too had a right to an orbit in the sky. I look down toward the ground, at the faintly lighted farmhouse windows and the distant glow of cities, wondering what acts of life are covered by the weird semidarkness in which only outlines can be seen. Around those points of light are homes and men—family gatherings, parties, doctors at births and deathbeds, hope and despair, youth and age. That line of six glowing dots—is it a barroom, church, or dance hall? And all those myriad lights, all the turmoil and works of men, seem to hang so precariously on the great sphere hurtling through the heavens, a phosphorescent moss on its surface, vulnerable to the brush of a hand. I feel aloof and unattached, in the solitude of space. Why return to that moss; why submerge myself in brick-walled human problems when all the crystal universe is mine? Like the moon, I can fly on forever through space, past the mail field at Chicago, beyond the state of Illinois, over mountains, over oceans, independent of the world below.

Suppose I really could stay up here and keep on flying; suppose gasoline didn't weigh so much and I could put enough in the tanks to last for days. Suppose, like the man on the magic carpet, I could fly anywhere I wanted to—anywhere in the world—to the North Pole or to China or to some jungle island if I wished. How much fuel could a plane carry if its fuselage were filled with tanks? But Fonck tried that out in his big Sikorsky biplane, only a few days ago, and crashed—crashed into flames on a New York field, taking off for a nonstop flight to Paris. Why does fuel have to be so heavy? If gasoline weighed only a pound per gallon instead of six, there'd be no limit to the places one could fly—if the engine kept on running.

If the engine kept on running! The schooled habit of periodic instrument readings brings me back to the mechanics of human flight. One can't be following a satellite's orbit and watching these dials at the same time. I return abruptly to earthly problems of temperature, oil pressure, and r.p.m. I contended for a moment, but the moon has won. Independent of the world? Only as long as the engine runs smoothly and the fuel holds out. I have fuel enough for another two hours at most. But long before that I'll have to be down at Chicago; my DH safely in the hangar; the mail sorted, resacked, and most of it in the cockpit of an eastbound transcontinental plane, headed for the Alleghenies and New York City.

I'm annoyed at the thought of landing. It's a roundabout method anyway, this flying the mail to Chicago to get it east. Why shouldn't we carry it direct to New York from St. Louis? True, there aren't enough letters in that wilted sack to pay for a direct service, but the mail will grow in volume as aircraft improve and people learn to use them. The more time we save, the more letters we'll get. If we flew direct, we could wait until the business day closed before collecting St. Louis mail, and still land at New York City before offices opened the next morning. Such a service would really be worth the cost of extra postage. We might even be able to fly from St. Louis to New York nonstop, eventually. Not with these salvaged Army DHs—they can't reach Chicago against a headwind without refueling—but with new planes and new engines – – –

The lights of a small city emerge behind my right wing—Streator. Ottawa is ahead and a few miles to the left. I make a mental note of my position, glance at the instruments, and let the plane bore its way on toward Chicago.

Those new Lairds the Northwest pilots are flying, for instance—they have only half the power of our DHs, but they're faster and they carry a bigger load. And there's that Wright-Bellanca. It has taken off with an incredible weight on some of its test flights. With three planes like the Bellanca we could easily carry the mail nonstop between St. Louis and New York, and on clear nights possibly two or three passengers besides.

But the cost—it would take ten or fifteen thousand dollars to buy just one Wright-Bellanca. Who could afford to invest so much money in a single airplane, to say nothing of the three that would be needed for a mail route? Our Corporation has a hard enough time to keep going with the DHs, and they cost only a few hundred dollars apiece.

I grow conscious of the limits of my biplane, of the inefficiency of its wings, struts, and wires. They bind me to earth and to the field ahead at Chicago. A Bellanca would cruise at least fifteen miles an hour faster, burn only half the amount of gasoline, and carry double the pay load of a DH. What a future aviation has when such planes can be built; yet how few people realize it! Businessmen think of aviation in terms of barnstorming, flying circuses, crashes, and high costs per flying hour. Somehow they must be made to understand the possibilities of flight. If they could see the real picture, it wouldn't be difficult to finance an airline between St. Louis and New York, even at the price of three Bellancas. Then commercial pilots wouldn't have-to fly old army warplanes or make night landings with flares instead of floodlights.

If only I had the Bellanca, I'd show St. Louis businessmen what modern aircraft could do; I'd take them to New York in eight or nine hours. They'd see how swiftly and safely passengers could fly. There are all kinds of records I could break for demonstration—distance, altitude with load, nonstop flights across the country. In a Bellanca filled with fuel tanks I could fly on all night, like the moon. How far could it go if it carried nothing but gasoline? With the engine throttled down it could stay aloft for days. It's fast, too. Judging from the accounts I've read, it's the most efficient plane every built. It could break the world's endurance record, and the transcontinental, and set a dozen marks for range and speed and weight. Possibly—my mind is startled at its thought—I could fly nonstop between New York and Paris.

New York to Paris—it sounds like a dream. And yet—if one could carry fuel enough (and the Bellanca might)—if the engine didn't stop (and those new Wright Whirlwinds seldom do stop; they aren't like our old Liberties)—if one just held to the right course long enough, one should arrive in hit-one. The flying couldn't be more dangerous or the weather worse than the night mail in winter. With fuel enough, a pilot would never have to land in fog; if he got caught, he could simply keep on going until he found clear weather. Navigation?—over the Atlantic and at night, boring through dark and unknown skies, toward a continent I've never seen? The very thought makes me rise to contend again with the moon—sweeping over oceans and continents, looking down on farms and cities, letting the planet turn below.

Why shouldn't I fly from New York to Paris? I'm almost twenty-five. I have more than four years of aviation behind me, and close to two thousand hours in the air. I've barnstormed over half of the forty-eight states. I've flown my mail through the worst of nights. I know, the wind currents of the Rocky Mountains and the storms of the Mississippi Valley as few pilots know them. During my year at Brooks and Kelly as a flying cadet, I learned the basic elements of navigation. I'm a Captain in the 110th Observation Squadron of Missouri's National Guard. Why am I not qualified for such a flight?

Not so long ago, when I was a student in college, just flying an airplane seemed a dream. But that dream turned into reality. Then, as a two-hundred-hour pilot barnstorming through the country for a living, the wings of the Army Air Service seemed almost beyond reach. But I won them. Finally, to be a pilot of the night mail appeared the summit of ambition for a flyer; yet here I am, in the cockpit of a mail plane boring through the night. Why wouldn't a flight across the ocean prove as possible as all these things have been? As I attempted them, I can – – – I will attempt that too. I'll organize a flight to Paris!

I sit contemplating my decision. The magnitude of the undertaking overwhelms me for a time. This idea which has come upon me, this vision born of a night and altitude and moonlight, how am I to translate it into an actual airplane flying over the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and to France?

The important thing is to start; to lay a plan, and then follow it step by step no matter how small or large each one by itself may seem. I haven't enough money to buy a Wright-Bellanca. Could any other plane make the flight—the Fokker, or the new Travel Air? They might not cost as much. Maybe I could raise the money in St. Louis. I can put up some myself. Other people might be willing to take part when they realize all the things that could be done with a Bellanca. Then there's the Orteig prize of $25,000 for the first man to fly from New York to Paris nonstop—that’s more than enough to pay for a plane and all the expenses of the flight. And the plane would still be almost as good as new after I landed in Europe. In fact, a successful trip to Paris wouldn't cost anything at all. It might even end up a profitable venture.

There must be men of means with enough vision to take the risk involved. The problem is to find them, and to get them to listen to my plan. Maybe the Wright Aeronautical Corporation itself would back the project. What could be a better advertisement for their plane and engine than a nonstop flight across the ocean? New York to Paris nonstop! If airplanes can do that, there's no limit to aviation's future.

The Chicago beacon flashes in the distance. In ten minutes I must land.

2

It's too late to think more about ocean flights tonight. I crawl into bed, angle cornerwise for room, and kick the blanket underneath my toes – – – But can a plane really carry enough gasoline to fly nonstop between New York and Paris? What made Captain Fonck's Sikorsky crash? Had he demanded too much of wings on air; was the frail structure simply overloaded; or did he make an error in piloting technique, as expert witnesses suggested?

From gallant start to tragic ending, all kinds of things went wrong. The tail skid slipped off the dolly, according to newspaper reports, while the big machine was being moved, before dawn, from its hangar to the runway's end. That damaged the center rudder, which had to be repaired. The press columns stated that not long afterward, in swinging the plane around, some auxiliary landing structure was bent and had to be straightened out again. After the take-off was started, about halfway down the runway, one of the auxiliary landing gears came loose and dragged up a cloud of dust. The plane swerved, straightened—engines still wide open. It reached the end of the runway without gaining speed enough to fly, and crashed—in flames. Fonck and his copilot, Lawrence Curtin, escaped from the wreckage almost uninjured, but Jacob Islamoff, the navigator-mechanic, and Charles Clavier, the radio operator, lost their lives.

"Fonck should have stopped the take-off." "It was too late to stop." "He should have lifted the tail up sooner." "The plane was too heavily overloaded." "Someone released the auxiliary landing gear too soon." Newspaper accounts are so conflicting that it's hard to judge the causes of the crash. All one can be sure of is that the flight ended in failure, quarreling, and death. In fact, quarreling blighted the project for weeks before its end. How many pilots were to be carried? Who was "in" at the beginning? Who had the right to go along? Accusations alternated with threats to withdraw, to remove financial support. A contract was argued back and forth. Members of the crew were quickly changed.

Think of the weight those wings were asked to lift—more than 28,000 pounds. But the big Sikorsky had taken off beautifully on its lighter load tests. There was good reason to believe it could carry enough fuel for the Paris flight. Probably the auxiliary landing gear dragging was what held it on the ground. I should think Fonck would have cut his switches the moment the gear broke loose. But who am I to judge his crisis-action while I lie snugly here in bed? Fonck had to decide in seconds what his critics have had days to talk about. And what pilot is immune to errors? We all commit them, as every honest man will say. Usually our errors don't end in a crash. But when a man is unlucky, does that make him more to blame?

There's another thing I don't understand about the Fonck project. A plane that's got to break the world's record for nonstop flying should be stripped of every excess ounce of weight. But descriptions of the great biplane said that its cabin had been luxuriously finished in red leather, and that it even contained a bed. There were long-wave and short-wave radio sets, and special bags for flotation in case of a landing at sea. Four men were in the crew. It certainly doesn't take four men to fly a plane across the ocean. The newspapers said-that presents were being carried for friends in Europe, and a hot dinner to be eaten in celebration after the landing in Paris. One of the last things to be placed on board before the attempted take-off was a gift of buns—French croissants.