The Spirit of ST Louis (29 page)

THE TENTH HOUR
Over the Atlantic

TIME - 4:52 P.M.

Wind Velocity 25 m.p.h Visibility Unlimited

Wind Direction WSW Altitude 150 feet

True Course 73° Air Speed 95 m.p.h.

Variation 29° W Tachometer 1600 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 102° Oil Temp. 38°C

Deviation 0° Oil Pressure 59 lbs.

Compass Course 102° Fuel pressure 3.5 lbs.

Drift Angle 0° Mixture 2.5

Compass heading 102° Fuel tank Nose

Ceiling Unlimited

Nine hours of fuel burned. That means about 800 pounds less load. The plane feels lighter and more buoyant too, and the stick is vibrant with power, responding to the slightest pressure from my hand, bringing me closer to the ice, climbing farther from it, following as though with pleasure my slightest whim. I pull the throttle back to 1600, lean the mixture out another half point, and resume my study of the ice cakes. Here is a land where no man has ever been before, which no human eyes but mine will ever see—solid, like earth -- impermanent, like cloud -- so close, -- so far away -- so strange –

I've always been fascinated by stories of the Arctic seas. Just over a year ago I tried to join Wilkins' polar expedition. He planned on basing his airplanes in Alaska, and exploring the great, unknown area north of the northern, ice-packed coast.

I nose down, catching up to the shadow of my plane, which has been gliding fleetly on ahead. The largest cakes are fifty or sixty feet across. I could bounce my wheels on them with a half-inch movement of the stick. At moments I forget I'm in a plane. It's as though the wings and thinly covered framework no longer suspend me in air or separate me from the ice I skim across. I feel I could reach down and plunge my hand into freezing water, or close my fingers on a chunk of ground-up ice. I'm conscious only of the desolate solitude, as though I were standing alone and isolated on one of those cakes.

What would I do now if my engine failed? How could a pilot land on such a surface? Well, God and gravity would take care of that. If an essential part of my engine broke, I'd be down in thirty seconds. I'd have only time to bank left into wind, cut the switch, pull my stick back, and pancake onto ice. The landing gear would be wiped off the moment it hit a cake's edge. But possibly the fuselage would skid along without smashing up too badly and, with real good luck, end up on ice instead of water.

What then? There'd certainly be no rescue ships steaming through an ice field. I might use fabric and framework from the plane to erect a shelter, if the wind didn't blow too hard. Ribs, engine oil, and spar splinters would make a good fire. But staying with the wreckage would mean only a few more days of life. I'd have to start traveling as soon as my clothes were dry.

I'd cut a strip of covering from the wing to wrap up in at night. I'd cut a second strip to catch rain or snow for extra drinking water. I'd lash my equipment on my back, and hold the raft in front of me so I could fall on top of it if footing gave way. My eyes pick out the best routes to follow as I imagine walking over the ice field. There's a quarter-mile stretch where cakes are jammed together without a crack of water in between. By traveling straight north I should strike the coast of Newfoundland within a hundred miles. For sustenance, I have with me five quarts of water, lacking a few swallows, five sandwiches, and five eight-ounce cans of Army rations. Possibly I could make ten miles a day on foot, using the rubber raft to cross patches of water.

But I'd have to ration food so carefully that each day would find me weaker. Suppose I reached the edge of the ice still many miles from land. There's little likelihood that a boat would pass and see my signal. No, I can't count on outside assistance. I've never planned on that. I'd launch my rubber raft, rig up a sail from the wing coverings, and hope for a wind toward shore. At least then I could sit quietly, and I'd need less food.

But the wet and cold at night, without enough to eat --And suppose a storm came up and ground the cakes of ice together -- Well, suppose the motor had cut out during take-off. It didn't. Every pilot knows the chance he takes at times; that's part of aviation. Ours is not a nation built on too much caution. I concluded that this flight over the Atlantic would be no more dangerous than flying mail for a single winter -- Still, the idea that he would as likely have crashed in an Illinois forest wouldn't give much comfort to a man crawling across those ice cakes.

A winter on the mail, or a flight across the ocean -- which involves the greater danger? From October through March -- those are the worst months -- each pilot makes about a hundred and twenty flights between St. Louis and Chicago. That totals close to thirty thousand miles, or about ten times the distance from New York to Paris. Well, I'd rather fly ten miles over Missouri and Illinois than one mile over this ice pack -- or would I? How about that storm northeast of Peoria, last December?

There had been plenty of ceiling when I took my DH off from the mail field. The lights of the city formed a horizon as soon as I cleared the trees' dark masses. But a half hour's flight left me skimming two hundred feet over the ground, brushing the bottom of clouds with my wings, searching through thickening snow for lights of the next village. I'd held on to the last dim glow behind until I could see another on ahead. Then, I found myself circling the center of a small city, my lower wing tips less than a hundred feet above its street lamps. The blizzard had shut off all trace of lights beyond. I can still see the path I followed in my bank. There's the corner drug store, with a flat-fronted restaurant three doors away. Two cars are parked against the curb, hazed by snowflakes. There's the church, below me, with its black steeple merging into night. There's the vaguely outlined street, lined with yarded houses. There, the filling station. Again, the drug store and restaurant. A dozen men and boys have run out onto the sidewalk to look up, hands shielding their eyes against the snow.

I was like a moth circling its flame—blinded to more distant objects, unable to break away. Suppose my engine had stopped then, over those stores and houses -- Yes, I'd as soon land on the ice pack.

I'd found my way through to Chicago that night. The heavy snow blew over enough for me to break away from my circle of the city, and pick up farmhouse lights. I'd held my course partly by instrument, partly by glowing windows, partly by lines of street lamps, until I saw the Maywood beacon flash.

On our mail route, the pilots expect forced landings. We don't average a hundred hours between them. There was the time my throttle controls vibrated apart, a few miles north of Springfield -- engine running perfectly one moment, barely turning over the next. I was no higher than I am now. Fortunately there was a clover field ahead which I could reach with a shallow bank I sideslipped in over trees, and stalled down onto rain-soaked ground. The wheels plowed ruts ten inches deep in places; but the tail was heavy enough to keep my plane from nosing over.

On another flight, the metal tip of my propeller ripped off from its wooden blade. I'd been daydreaming along at 1100 feet. Daydreaming -- good Lord, that's what I'm

doing now! I'm almost 10 degrees off course. I shake myself vigorously, skid the Spirit of St. Louis back into position, and rub circulation through my cheeks. There's a big gap below in the ice field. As I stare at it, my mind wanders back to the mail route. All of a sudden, the DH's engine had started vibrating so violently that I thought it would jerk itself out of the plane before I could cut my switches. I avoided a crackup that time by stalling into a twelve-acre field and ground looping just short of the fence corner.

Every month included incidents such as these. Yes, a winter on the air mail holds fully as much danger as a flight across the ocean. Whirlwind engines aren’t like our old Liberties. They average thousands of hours between failures. The controls in the Spirit of St. Louis are new and carefully designed. There'll be no breakage of a throttle rod. And my propeller blades are made of metal, not of wood. They have no screwed-on tips to throw.

But I didn't start on this flight to Paris because of its relative safety. I used that argument only to bolster my decision, and to convince people that the hazard wasn't too great. I'm not bound to carry the night mail. I'm not bound to be in aviation at all. I'm here only because I love the sky and flying more than anything else on earth. Of course there's danger; but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life. I don't believe in taking foolish chances; but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.

When I was a child on our Minnesota farm, I spent hours lying on my back in high timothy and redtop, hidden from passers-by, watching white cumulus clouds drift overhead, staring into the sky. It was a different world up there. You had to be flat on your back, screened in by grass stalks, to live in it. Those clouds, how far away were they? Nearer than the neighbor's house, untouchable as the moon -- unless you had an airplane. How wonderful it would be, I'd thought, if I had an airplane -- wings with which I could fly up to the clouds and explore their caves and canyons -- wings like that hawk circling above me. Then, I would ride on the wind and be part of the sky, and acorns and bits of twigs would stop pressing into my skin. The question of danger didn't enter my dreams.

One day I was playing upstairs in our house on the riverbank. The sound of a distant engine drifted in through an open window. Automobiles had been going past on the road quite often that summer. I noticed it vaguely, and went on sorting the stones my mother and I had collected from the creek bed. None of them compared to the heart-shaped agate I'd found at the edge of a pool the week before -- purple crystals outlined by stripes of red and white. Suddenly I sat up straight and listened. No automobile engine made that noise. It was approaching too fast. It was on the wrong side of the house! Stones scattered over the floor. I ran to the window and climbed out onto the tarry roof. It was an airplane!

Flying upriver below higher branches of trees, a biplane was less than two hundred yards away—a frail, complicated structure, with the pilot sitting out in front between struts and wires. I watched it fly quickly out of sight, and then rushed downstairs to tell my mother.

There had been a notice in the
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, my mother said, about an aviator who had come to our town. She'd forgotten to tell me about it. He was carrying passengers from a field over on the east side of the river. But rides were unbelievably expensive. He charged a dollar for every minute in the air! And anyone who went up took his life in his hands -- suppose the engine stopped, or a wing fell off, or something else went wrong.

I was so greatly impressed by the cost and danger that I pushed aside my desire to go up in a plane. But I used to imagine myself with wings on which I could swoop down off our roof into the valley, soaring through air from one river bank to the other, over stones of the rapids, above log jams, above the tops of trees and fences. I thought often of men who really flew. From grown-up conversations, I heard and remembered the names of the Wright brothers, and Glen Curtiss, and Lincoln Beachey -- they'd found a way to fly in spite of cost and danger.

As I grew older, I learned that danger was a part of life not always to be shunned. It often surrounded the things you liked most to do. It was dangerous to climb a tree, to swim down rapids in the river, to go hunting with a gun, to ride a horse, to drive my father's automobile. You could be killed as quickly on a farm as in an airplane. I had felt death brush past several times on our farm, and it was not as terrifying as I at first imagined.

I never felt safer, and never came closer to being killed than when a gangplow turned over behind my tractor. It was on one of those May days "when leaves on the oak trees are as big as squirrels' ears," and it was "time to plant corn." I was behind with plowing on the western forty, and working late into evening to catch up. It was an old field, with only a few stones left to hook a plowshare. The furrow lay straight behind, seven inches deep. I had just tripped the plow-lift and started to turn at the field's end when bright steel flashed by my head and thudded heavily on ground. The lift mechanism had jammed, upsetting the entire gangplow. If I hadn't turned my tractor at the moment I pulled the trip-lever, I would have been crushed on the seat. As it was, the share missed my head by less than six inches.

No, farm life isn't as safe as it's cracked up to be.

I center the earth-inductor compass needle, and drop down closer to the ice field
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When I was eleven years old, I learned to drive my father's Ford car, and at twelve I chauffeured him around the country. That car had seemed terribly dangerous at first. You could get your arm broken cranking the engine. You could skid off an embankment. You might collide with someone at any intersection. The Minneapolis paper carried stories about auto accidents each day. But as my driving experience advanced from a hundred miles to a thousand, and from one thousand to several, my confidence increased. There were foils against danger -- judgment and skill. If you clasped your thumb and finger on the same side of the crank handle, a backfiring engine wouldn't break your bones. If you adjusted speed to road conditions, skids and collisions could be avoided. Twenty miles an hour had seemed an excessive speed when I started driving. A decade later, sixty was safe enough on a clear stretch of pavement. I learned that danger is relative, and that inexperience can be a magnifying glass.