The Spirit of ST Louis (27 page)

Fog! I'm flying along dreamily when I see it—a narrow white band on the horizon to my right. There's fog on the Nova Scotian coast! It brings me to attention like ice water dashed in the face.

Fog -- the most dreaded of all enemies of flight. Will Cape Breton Island and Newfoundland be hidden by a sheet of blinding white? Has the clearing sky made me too confident of weather; or is this a vanishing remnant of the morning mists?

If fog will only hold off a few hours more, if I can only check my course over Newfoundland, it won't matter what happens after that. I'll ask for nothing more until I reach the other side of the ocean. The 1900 miles of water can be covered with fog -- I'll fly above it, or under it, or in it. Nothing else will matter if the coast of Newfoundland is clear.

But here I am, wishing for another favor. I got off with my overload of fuel; the mists of Long Island lifted; I struck the southwest coast of Nova Scotia close to course. The storm area is behind. Only high cirrus wisps are left to veil the sun. It's not likely that I can fly all the way to Europe without encountering fog. Why isn't this a good place to meet it, with my engine running perfectly and 3500 miles of fuel in the tanks?

I check the switch—no cylinders missing on the right magneto; none missing on the left. I open the throttle 50 r.p.m. and begin climbing, while my eyes search the ground

for some landmark that shows on my map. It's more important to know my exact position before venturing out over that sea of white.

I can find no check point on the ground. The best map of this country I could buy contains nothing but lightly tinted space and a few wriggling lines for rivers -- the kind of wriggles a cartographer makes with his pen when he's been informed vaguely that a river runs somewhere through the area. But as I near the coast, what seemed a great fog bank from the distance turns out to be only a long, narrow strip hovering above shore. The ocean beyond is sparkling blue in sunlight. Even the strip of fog ends before I strike Chedabucto Bay, where the ocean wedges in to pry Cape Breton Island away from the mainland of Canada. It seems today that every door is flung wide open when I knock.

Air is crystal clear along Cape Breton Island's coast. Like Nova Scotia, the country is spotted with lakes, and its streams are white with rapids. The hills on my left, snow-patched and bleak, mount up toward higher ridges. Over barren mountains inland, a new cloud bank is forming.

Shall I subtract a few degrees from my heading to angle back toward the great-circle route? But with clouds thickening in that direction, it seems wiser to remain near the sea. There'll be plenty of time to correct my heading before I reach Newfoundland.

The earth-inductor compass needle leans right. I press left rudder, and glance up to the instrument board mirror to check my heading with the liquid compass. Ninety-four degrees, the mirror shows with the white numerals it reflects. But in it I also see the interior of a wooden hangar on Curtiss Field. An instrument specialist is twisted around grotesquely in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, pointing up at the compass he's just installed. I'm leaning against the fuselage, looking in through a window.

"That's the best place I can find for it," he's saying, unhappily. "But you'll have to read it through a mirror." The compass is fastened to the top of the fuselage, too close to my head, and the unfamiliar figures on it are printed backward for mirror reading. "It will give you a more accurate Indication up there than any other place we can find. It will swing less in rough air -- You sure haven't any extra room in here."

"I don't mind reading it through a mirror," I reply. "The most important thing is to have it accurate and steady."

"Okay. There she stays then. Who's got a mirror around here?"

"There's one in the office."

"That's too big. It ought to be about two inches square."

"Will this do?" It's a woman's voice. Several people are standing outside the rope across the hangar door. Among them is a girl, not much more than college age, neatly dressed. Her handbag hangs open, and she's holding up the small, round mirror from her compact. It's just the right size. We thank her, and stick it with a piece of gum to the instrument board, above the earth-inductor compass dial. One of the mechanics lifts the rope so she can see into the cockpit.

After that the girl disappeared, and I never saw her again. How much chance did she think her mirror had of reaching Paris? She must have read the prophesies that I'd crash on take-off, or from exhaustion half way across the ocean. Certainly she had no technical knowledge of aircraft and their capabilities. Was she among the few who maintained unreasoned confidence in my success; or was hers a gesture of compassion toward a man about to die -- a man whose last hours could be brightened by the gift of a compact's mirror? Well, at least it's reflected my course successfully beyond Nova Scotian shores.

My eyes wander up to the taut, silvered wing outside my window. It's difficult to realize that the substantial element of air is rushing past that motionless surface at nearly a hundred miles an hour. One of the miracles of flying is that when you look out at your wings you see neither movement nor support. As you clasp your hand in the cockpit, there's nothing tangible to air -- nothing to carry a finger's weight. There seems no reason whatever to keep you from plummeting earthward like a rock. It's not until you put your arm outside, and press hard against the slipstream, that you sense the power and speed of flight. Then air takes on the quality of weight and substance; and you begin to understand the invisible element which makes it possible for man to fly.

Barely a tremor of turbulence is left. The engine's even vibration, shaking back through the fuselage's steel skeleton, gives life to cockpit and controls. Flowing up along the stick to my hand, it's the pulse beat of the plane. Let a cylinder miss once, and I'll feel it as clearly as though a human heart had skipped against my thumb.

I push my fingertips against quivering, drum-tight fabric of the cockpit wall. The plane's entire structure is carried by this frail covering of cloth. Thousands of pounds are lifted by these criss-crossed threads, yet singly they couldn't restrain the tugging of a bird. I understand how giant Gulliver was tied so firmly to the ground. As he was bound to earth, I am held in air -- by the strength of threads. Nine barrels of gasoline and oil, wrapped up in fabric; two hundred and twenty horsepower, harnessed by a layer of cloth - vulnerable to a pin prick, yet protecting an airplane and its pilot on a flight across an ocean, between the continents -- suspended at this moment five hundred feet above a frigid, northern land.

My cockpit is small, and its walls are thin; but inside this cocoon I feel secure, despite the speculations of my mind. It makes an efficient, tidy home, one so easy to keep in order that its very simplicity creates a sense of satisfaction and relief. It's a personal home, too—nobody has ever piloted the Spirit of St. Louis, but me. Flying in it is like living in a hermit's mountain cabin after being surrounded by the luxury and countless responsibilities of a city residence. Here, I'm conscious of all elements of weather, immersed in them, dependent on them. Here, the earth spreads out beyond my window, its expanse and beauty offered at the cost of a glance. Here, are no unnecessary extras, only the barest essentials of life and flight. There are no letters to get off in the next mail, no telephone bells to ring, no loose odds and ends to attend to in some adjoining room. The few furnishings are within arm's length, and all in order.

A cabin that flies through the air, that's what I live in; a bin higher than the mountains, a cabin in the clouds and y. After much travail, I've climbed up to it. Through months of planning, I've equipped it with utmost care. Now, I can relax in its solitary vantage point, and let the sun shine, and the west wind blow, and the blizzard come with the night.

I become minutely conscious of details in my cockpit -- of the instruments, the levers, the angles of construction. Each item takes on new values. I study weld marks on the tubing (frozen ripples of steel through which pass invisible hundred-weights of strain), a dot of radiolite paint on the altimeter's face (whose only mission is to show where the needle should ride when the Spirit of St. Louis is 2000 feet above the sea), the battery of fuel valves (my plane and my life depend on the slender stream of liquid flowing through them, like blood human veins) -- all such things, which I never considered much before, are now obvious and important. And there's plenty of time to notice them. I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I'm surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time. Thirty hours? How inadequate a measure! I've lived through thousands of periods thirty hours long, yet none of them like this.

Thirty hours to Paris! What a simple statement, when the entire ocean lies between; when there's a chasm of eternity to cross. Who could look at the sky, at the mountains, at the chart on my knees, at the motionless wings of my plane, and

think of time in hours? Here, in the Spirit of St. Louis, I live in a different frame of time and space.

How detached the intimate things around me seem from the great world down below. How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground -- seconds away -- thousands of miles away.
This
air, stirring mildly around me. That air, rushing by with the speed of a tornado, an inch beyond. These minute details in my cockpit. The grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.

THE NINTH HOUR
Over the Atlantic

TIME - 3:52 P.M.

Wind Velocity 25 m.p.h Visibility Unlimited

Wind Direction W Altitude 500 feet

True Course 64° Air Speed 94 m.p.h.

Variation 27° W Tachometer 1625 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 91° Oil Temp. 39°C

Deviation 0° Oil Pressure 58 lbs.

Compass Course 91° Fuel pressure 3.5 lbs.

Drift Angle 5° R Mixture 2

Compass heading 86° Fuel tank Fuselage

Ceiling Unlimited

The coast line stops wandering back and forth, and turns abruptly northwest -- the end of Cape Breton Island. Soon I'll be over sea again, the third stretch of salt water on my route to France. First, Long Island Sound; then that calming bay of the ocean between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia; now, two hundred miles to Newfoundland; and after that -- after that is the great body of the Atlantic.

've been flying over land for most of four hours. The sea is as welcome a change as the coast of Nova Scotia was, and as the coast of Newfoundland will be by the time I reach it. The sea is no longer a stranger. I've passed over its surface for hundreds of miles. I no longer feel that I leave security behind and enter danger the moment I fly across its breakers. As I struck Nova Scotia, I will strike Newfoundland; and as I strike Newfoundland, I will strike Europe, close to course.

I nose the Spirit of St. Louis down to meet the sea, down toward the tundra, down over the wild and lonely shore, down so low that I can see dead weeds along the tide line and wetness of the pebbles on the beach. I level out at twenty feet above the water -- above a rougher, greener, colder-looking ocean, with whitecaps breaking off to streaks of foam. Here, there's no need to push out my periscope. Here, there are no masts to break the solitude of a northern sea -- no marks of human life along the coast, not even a plank of wreckage rotting on the beach. My plane, surrounded by uninhabited land and water, seems a tiny speck, easily lost forever in such a wild expanse.

The cloud layer which was forming in the north remains behind with the peaks of Cape Breton Island. Only a few high cirrus wings sweep overhead. On each side, the sea's horizon presses knife-edged against the sky. Now, it's time to angle back onto my great-circle route. If I leave Newfoundland on my plotted course, accurate navigation will be simpler. Besides, I have a certain pride in holding to that course if I can.

I look down at the Mercator projection on my knees. Fifteen degrees subtracted from my heading would put me back on the great circle by the time I reach. Newfoundland's southern coast. Still, there may be clouds on the mountains, as there were on Cape Breton Island. Then I'd be better off to the eastward, where I could follow up Placentia Bay and cross over the narrow neck of land at its head into Trinity Bay, which opens to the ocean. That would be the safest route from the standpoint of weather—unless I detour far enough south to round Cape Race.

My flight plan argues against detours unless forced by weather that I can't fly above or through -- weather I actually see ahead. But to strike Placentia Bay would require so slight a change in my present heading that you could hardly call it a detour. You could hardly measure the mileage it would add; and there'd be plenty of time to get back onto the great circle during long hours of night and day over the ocean. Besides, if I set my course for Placentia Bay, and the mountains are clear, I can fly over the little city of St. John's. Someone there will surely send a message back, to say I have passed.

Those men back on the field at Long Island who worked all night long that I might start -- the mechanics who labored so faithfully over my plane -- the engineers who checked final installations -- they're probably all waiting for some word of my passing, some sign that I haven't crashed. I think of the tense faces staring at me before take-off. What relief a single line might bring to them: "Silver monoplane headed eastward sighted above St. John's at -- " Let's see -- three hundred miles to go -- an hour's difference in time -- it would be about 7:20 on Newfoundland clocks.

My partners in St. Louis have a right to know that when I start over the ocean all is well. They stood solidly behind me through discouraging days and nights. They're all waiting, back .there in Missouri, anxious to hear that I cross the coast of Newfoundland safely and on time.

The men at the factory in San Diego who built the Spirit of St. Louis in those two record-breaking months -- they're about starting the afternoon shift -- it's four hours earlier out there. By this time they have heard that I got off the field with full tanks. They, too, will want to know where I am at nightfall.

My mother, teaching in Detroit -- she's probably been at her laboratory desk all day, wondering and worrying, and trying unsuccessfully, with chemistry experiments, to curtain off in her mind a pilot and his plane. How well I remember the expression on her face that winter evening, five and a half years ago, when I told her I wanted to leave college and learn to fly. I was so anxious to get into aviation that I scarcely realized what parting meant to her. "All right," she said. "If you really want to fly, that's what you should do." "You must go," she told me later. "You must lead your own life. I mustn't hold you back. Only I can't see the time when we'll be together much again." Her prophecy came true. Hundreds of letters and packages have gone back and forth between us, but I haven't been home for more than a few days at a stretch since then. But we went barnstorming together in southern Minnesota in the summer; and she's flown back and forth between Chicago and St. Louis with me on the mail route, riding on the sacks. I know what a message of my welfare would mean to her tonight.

But the principles I laid down for this flight involve no waste, no luxuries, no following of shore lines. All extras must be held in reserve for adverse winds, or large areas of storm, or fog over Europe. I've already drawn enough of my reserves by detouring Nova Scotian squalls and leaving windows out. Misdirected sentiment could result in death. A message back from Newfoundland tonight is less important than to land in France tomorrow. Suppose I encounter head winds over the ocean. Suppose I miss the tip of Ireland and strike some European shore line after dark. Suppose the sky is overcast, screening of the moonlight so I can't see enough on the ground to locate my position. Suppose I have to fly all through a second night. I'll need each drop of fuel I can save. No, every decision must be made with one object, and one object only in view -- to reach Paris. It will be little satisfaction for my friends to know that I left Newfoundland on schedule if passing hours bring no word that I am over France.

But suppose I have a forced landing on the ocean. There'd e an advantage in people knowing that I went down some here east of St. John's. It would add to my over-all safety as much as the rations and the rubber boat. If I can't charge gallon of fuel to sentiment, I can charge it to safety. Not at there'd be much chance of rescue from those isolated northern waters; but no one would waste time searching for me along the coast as they searched for Nungesser and Coli. And at least they'd know that my flight was not a failure at the start, as so many predicted it would be. If it's definitely established that I've passed St. John's, then perhaps if any ships do happen up that way, they'll keep a sharper watch for red flare by night or a silver wing by day.

I reset the heading on my compass, and turn the Spirit of t. Louis slightly toward the south.