The Spirit of ST Louis (24 page)

feeling before. It begins after about three hours of flying, and ends at about seven. After the seventh hour, my muscles will cease complaining of their restrictions and accept the mission they've been given to fulfill. I wish the desire for sleep could adapt itself to a long-distance flight as easily.

It would be pleasant to doze off for a few seconds. But I mustn't feel sleepy at this stage of the trip! Why, I'm less than a tenth of the way to Paris; it's not yet noon of the first day. There's still the rest of today and all of tonight, and tomorrow, and part—maybe all—of tomorrow night. After that I can think about being tired, not before. The Spirit of St. Louis is doing its job. I've got to do mine. I must stay alert, and match quality of plane and engine with quality of piloting and navigation. I'd be ashamed to have anyone know I feel tired when I'm just starting.

I sip some water from the quart canteen hanging at my side. Below it, wedged between seat and fuselage, are five sandwiches in their brown paper bag; but I'm not hungry. It's probably wise not to eat, anyway -- easier to stay awake on an empty stomach.

I'll climb up two or three hundred feet and stop looking ahead for boats. There's not much danger of hitting one, but the idea is a mental hazard, and watching the periscope mirror is an added strain. Also, the concentration required in flying close to the rollers is too much effort. It no longer clears my mind as it did an hour ago. I want to sit quietly and rest. I must replace some of the energy I've expended. The lack of sleep I feel now, at eleven o'clock in the morning, is a grain of sand compared to the mountain that will tower over me when dawn breaks tomorrow. Past dawns I've flown through come forward in memory to warn me what torture the desire for sleep can be.

To the night pilot, dawn should be a harbor of safety, an experience of beauty. Each ray of light in the eastern sky brings out new contours on the ground -- the smoothness of a sloping hillside where his plane might land; the danger of a stump-studded valley. A cloud flames for him like a lighted torch. Barns, fields, and fence lines spring from darkness. But when a pilot is fatigued, dawn may become as painful and dulling to his senses as an infected wound. Beauty is unseen; safety, unappreciated. He wishes only for the sun to rise and bring wakefulness and strength. I think of dawns on the mail route, after a late flight the night before. They brought moments when I almost felt that flying was not worth while -- moments when only pride kept me from landing in some pasture, cutting my engine, and slumping back in my cockpit to sleep. But those moments were always at dawn. I awoke with the sunrise. This is different. It's much more serious. I want to sleep in broad daylight, before noon of the first day.

In glancing from compass to water and out to the horizon where land should soon appear, my eyes fasten on a band of mud sticking to the right wing's lower surface—brown and clumpy. One of the wheels threw it up during take-off. I want to reach out, scrape it off, and polish the fabric; but it's an arm's length too far away. Now, I'll have to look at it helplessly during all the rest of the flight—a step from my cockpit, on the ground -- distant as Paris. What inadequate standards of measurement man uses -- so many feet and inches to the engineer -- a stride to the mechanic with a sponge -- let's see, it's almost thirty-three hundred miles to that mud for me, the pilot in this cockpit. Why should I have to carry its extra weight and resistance all the way across the ocean? Why tear leaves from a notebook to save weight, and then be weighted down with mud?

There's another band of mud on the left wing. I remind myself that at most it's only a few ounces, that its roughness can't slow the plane down more than a fraction of a mile an hour, and that mudguards to protect against it would cost more in weight and resistance than the mud itself. But when one is tired, small items draw undue attention -- If it takes thirty-three hours to get to Paris, it will take thirty-three hours to get that mud off the wings -- Thirty-three hundred miles to Paris -- "Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other " -- an indisputable law, one learns in school -- There's something wrong about these "laws" packed up in nutshells -- they only work near the shell. If one tries to use them too far away from it -- well, it certainly isn't thirty-three hundred miles to that mud -- but six feet doesn't fit the distance either.

I'm half asleep! I cup my hand into the slipstream and &fleet fresh air against my face. Check the instruments -- that will help. The periscope's still out. I slide it back into the cockpit. There's been no ship for many miles, and I'm too high to strike a mast anyway. I can at least save its resistance.

The air-speed indicator shows no difference with the periscope retracted; but on such a long flight that should save a gallon or two of fuel. Possibly it will compensate for the mud. A pound of resistance saved is worth several pounds of weight. Besides, there's the principle involved. From the start, I've planned this flight on the basis that nothing can be wasted, that no detail is too small to be considered. I've made my own flying boots out of light material. I've bought small flashlights for my pocket, so that two would weigh no more than one of ordinary size. I've cut unneeded areas from my charts to gain some extra ounces.

There's an intangible value in striving for perfection -- a value that can't be measured on such material standards as pounds of weight or resistance. When I was a child in grade school, I learned a verse which comes to mind when logic says I'm spending too much time on details:

"In the elder days of Art,

Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

For the Gods see everywhere."

THE FIFTH HOUR
Over Nova Scotia

TIME --11: 52 A.M.

Wind Velocity 15 m.p.h Visibility Unlimited

Wind Direction NW Altitude 200 feet

True Course 58° Air Speed 103 m.p.h.

Variation 20° W Tachometer 1725 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 78° Oil Temp. 42°C

Deviation 0° Oil Pressure 57 lbs.

Compass Course 78° Fuel pressure 3.5 lbs.

Drift Angle 5° R Mixture 1.5

Compass heading 68° Fuel tank L. Wing

Ceiling Unlimited

It's noon of the first day. Four hundred miles from New York. Three thousand two hundred miles to Paris.

Land ahead! A huge green mass extends back to a hilly horizon. While I've been dreaming along in warm sunlight, with eyes on instruments and nearby sea, Nova Scotia has crept in unobserved. I glance at the clock -- eight minutes after twelve. Time has leapt a quarter hour in a moment.

Nova Scotia! That strange northern country of school-day geographies. What an out-of-the-way place it had seemed, hanging there precariously on the eastern edge of Canada, green and cold against the pink tint of New Brunswick. I could never fully realize that it lay no farther north than Maine. I thought of it as a semi-arctic land. And here it is, Nova Scotia itself -- no longer an outline on the page of a thumb-marked book. The low, grassy coast, curving in under my right wing, is backed by growths of spruce and pine. The scarcity of farms and stump land marks a rugged, frontier country of the north, a country where terrain, climate, and forest are still battling hard against man's axe and plow.

I forget about being tired. Here's a vital point in the flight. How accurately have I held my course? I climb higher, approaching the tidal flats. Altitude will help to locate my exact position. When you fly low, you see only the individuality of landmarks—a single village, the mouth of a river, a rocky cape jutting out to sea. You gain intimacy but lose perspective. You may read the signs on store fronts, wave at children in back yards, see birds startled from tree branches, and guess the size of the lighthouse keeper's family from the washing on his line; but there are probably a dozen river mouths, capes, and villages on your map, and when you don't know your position, no single one is likely to give the secret away. On the other hand, flying high you see the entire geographical community. The village takes it place between the river and the cape, and nowhere else on your map will there be a relationship quite the same. If any doubt remains in your mind, a bend in the river two or three miles upstream -- an eighth-inch on the map -- will take all uncertainty away.

From a thousand feet, it's not difficult to find lines on my chart corresponding to those formed by the shore below—a peninsula on my left, a cape on my right, a tongue of the sea stretching inland far ahead. I've made my landfall at the mouth of St. Mary Bay, about six miles southeast of course. I've covered 440 miles in four hours and nineteen minutes. That's an average of 102 miles an hour.

Laying out charts at San Diego, I'd decided that an error of 5 degrees would mark reasonably good navigation. Now, I've held within 2 degrees of the great circle on my chart -- less than half the error I allowed for. Six miles off, at Nova Scotia, equals less than 50 miles at Ireland. I'll be well satisfied if I can hold that close to route.

This first test makes me feel in my bones what before I've based only on theory and the experience of others -- that the swinging card of a compass can actually lead me safely across an ocean to the shores of a foreign country beyond, and that lines and figures on a chart, if properly translated, will turn into the substance of real earth below.

Striking Nova Scotia has another significance. When I was planning this flight to Paris, I established three dividing lines in my mind before which I would, under certain circumstances, turn back; but beyond which rd continue, "burning bridges behind me." The first of these lines lay across the runway on Roosevelt Field. When my wheels finally left the ground, that bridge was burned. Then, it was too late to pull the throttle back and stop.

Now, I've set fire to the second bridge. It spanned the Nova Scotian coast. I decided that if Nova Scotia were covered with fog, so that I could find no landmark on the ground with which to check my course, I'd turn back to Long Island. But if the Nova Scotian coast were clear, and my compasses proved well swung -- if I had held reasonably close to course during the first 440 miles of flight -- then I'd go on, even if all the rest of North America and the Atlantic Ocean were blanketed with fog.

The third dividing line lies about halfway across the ocean -- depending on both wind and weather. Before I reach it, if mechanical trouble develops -- if engine roughens or oil pressure drops or a fuel tank springs a leak -- I'll turn back, hoping to reach an American shore and find some place to land without too bad a crash. But after I pass that line, regardless of what may happen, I'll continue on toward Europe.

The country under my plane is spotted with forests, lakes, and marshes. Gray boulders wart up everywhere -- in woods, on hilltops -- one sees them even under water where it's shallow. The lakes are smooth as glass -- not a breath of air blowing across them. It won't make any difference which way I land if the engine fails.

A forced landing! Years of barnstorming with rebuilt Army planes and engines have trained me to keep that possibility always in mind. You never know, with such equipment, when an engine will stop running. Unconsciously my eyes are always searching for the place I'd choose to land should failure come at this particular moment.

I study the ground. It's certainly bad country for a forced landing. There's not a farmer's field in sight. It would be best to stall down into a lake. The Spirit of St. Louis would sink, of course, but there wouldn't be a fire. A swamp might not be too bad, and there are a lot of them.

I landed in a swamp in Minnesota, four years ago, with my old Jenny. A local storm had covered the city of Shakopee, for which I was headed. I'd tried to fly in underneath it, but the rain was too heavy -- a real cloudburst. So I circled over country nearby, flying under a thick cloud layer, close to the ground, waiting for the storm to blow past. The visibility in places was less than half a mile. I flew into a heavy shower before I saw it through the mist. One cylinder cut out. I banked toward a clover field. Two more cylinders stopped firing. I had to land at once, either in a woods or in a swamp. I was less than 200 feet high, and there was nothing else within gliding range. I chose the swamp, and stalled down onto it. The wheels slithered along about thirty feet and sank to the spreader-bar. The cockpit jumped. My belt jerked tight. I found myself hanging upside down, looking at several tall blades of grass.

It's not easy to get out of an open cockpit when you're hanging upside down. You don't just unsnap the safety belt. Pilots have broken their necks doing that. It's one thing to fall a yard or two onto your feet, and quite another to fall that distance onto your head. You have to support your weight by hanging onto something with one hand while you release your safety belt with the other. My quick-release mechanism had jammed that day, and it resisted my single-handed attempt to open it. So I hung suspended until I loosened the buckles which held one end of the belt to the pilot's seat. Even then it required some acrobatics to get straightened out with the world again.

My plane wasn't damaged much. It was well splashed over with black mud, but all I needed to put it back in flying condition was a new propeller and a little cord and dope to bind up a crack in the spreader-bar. But that Jenny had only a little over ten gallons of gasoline in its tank when I landed. The Spirit of St. Louis has -- let's see -- I'm four and half hours- out -- almost 400 gallons. My tanks would surely burst today if I stalled down onto a swamp. I'd be lucky if I didn't have a fire.

Well, there's no swamp or lake within gliding range now. If the engine cut out I'd land in that patch of young pines; their supple trunks and thick green boughs would break the shock of impact. I know of several pilots who landed on treetops without getting hurt badly.

Sitting comfortably at my drafting board in San Diego a few weeks ago, I decided that a forced landing was a possibility I'd prepare for and then forget. But old habits aren't so easily thrust aside. After hours of flying, a pilot's mind wanders along uncharted courses of its own fantasy, rushing back at intervals to check instruments, to make resolutions, to decide some pressing detail of his flight; and then, duty over, it slips unobtrusively off again, to be found in the most unexpected places. A forced landing is the thing I wish above all else to avoid; but my mind takes fiendish pleasure in planning one -- on hills, in marshes, in tree clumps, it visualizes the best technique to use, carrying me along in its excursions until my ears can almost hear the motor cough, and my body feel the tearing impact of the wheels and wings.