The Spirit of ST Louis (33 page)

THE ELEVENTH HOUR
Over Placentia Bay
TIME - 5:52 P.M.

Wind Velocity 20 m.p.h Visibility Unlimited

Wind Direction W Altitude 300 feet

True Course 70° Air Speed 92 m.p.h.

Variation 30° W Tachometer 1600 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 100° Oil Temp. 37°C

Deviation 0° Oil Pressure 59 lbs.

Compass Course 100° Fuel pressure 3.5 lbs.

Drift Angle 7° R Mixture 2.5

Compass heading 93° Fuel tank Fuselage

Ceiling Unlimited

Only six o'clock in New York. It must be seven for the people at St. John's -- or don't they go by daylight saving time? I've flown more than an hour eastward by the sun. Think of man competing with the speed of the earth's rotation! Think of covering an hour's sun travel since this morning. Why, if I flew a little farther north, the Spirit of St. Louis could move around the world as fast as the sun itself!

The rugged coast line fades northeastward. The time is 6:15. In the Mississippi Valley, our air-mail plane must be somewhere between St. Louis and Springfield. I wonder whether Love or Nelson has the run, and what the weather's like. Is the pilot dreaming along under an open sky, or might the tail end of that Nova Scotian storm extend westward to Missouri?

St. Louis! How far away it is from Placentia Bay in Newfoundland—a range of mountains lowering behind me; another, shouldering the sky ahead—yet how closely tied to my presence here at this moment. If it weren't for St. Louis, I'd probably still be barnstorming from some Midwestern pasture, or piloting an army plane as a lieutenant in the Air Corps.

What an amazing series of coincidences preceded this flight across the ocean. When I look back, the chance of their taking place seems impossibly remote, like flipping a coin a hundred times and having it always turn up heads. It was chance that took me to St. Louis in the first place. That was in 1923, the year of my solo flight. After a summer's barnstorming in Minnesota, I'd started following the season southward with my 0X-5-powered Jenny. Circling above one town and then another, landing where I found good fields nearby, staying or leaving according to the crowds I drew, my route had wandered into the rich farm lands of southern Wisconsin. Passenger business wasn't good; the days were getting so chilly that people didn't like to ride in an open cockpit. Besides, some pilot had flown all through that section of the country during the summer, carrying passengers for half the standard rate of five dollars. I always gave a good ride, but I never cut the price. That lost me a lot of passengers in Wisconsin. After a few days of meager income, I pointed my plane toward Illinois

I was in the air when I decided to fly to St. Louis. The earth below was cold, soft, and wet; good barnstorming pastures were getting hard to find. I was flying along daydreaming. In my hotel the night before, I'd been glancing through the local paper. It carried an article about the International Air Races. They were being held that very week at Lambert Field.

Barnstorming, one seldom met other flyers, and never saw modern airplanes. A visit to an organized airport was a special event in a barnstorming pilot's life, and there I was, only a few hours' flight from the races. There'd be dozens of pilots, and the newest planes, and racers that could attain the incredible speed of over 200 miles an hour. What fun it would be to land on Lambert Field with my Jenny and view the show as an insider -- as a pilot in my own right. There'd be much to see and learn.

For a day or two after my arrival over Lambert Field, I almost wished I hadn't come. Instead of gliding down onto a welcoming airport, I found one of the races under way. Large military planes were banking steeply around a brightly painted pylon in front of the crowd. Obviously, the airport was closed to common traffic. I had circled, high in the air, until I saw several other barnstorming planes -- Standards, and Jennies like my own -- sitting awkwardly on a hillside a mile or so away. I landed in the weeds beside them, and learned from their pilots that special hours were set aside for visiting aircraft to arrive at the races. Rules were strict in this respect, they said.

In late afternoon, I flew my Jenny over to Lambert and staked it down at the end of a long row of civilian planes. Wherever I'd been before, a pilot was accorded great prestige. Cars speeded out from town with offers of help and transportation; people assembled from nearby farms; often schools were let out so children could watch the flying. That, I soon realized, was because at a small town or county fair any airplane formed a center of attraction—even an old Jenny. Where there were dozens of planes and star performers, the ordinary pilot was not far ahead, in standing, of the layman in the crowd.

I bought a lunch of hamburgers, and wandered about the field alone, studying different types of aircraft, and growing more conscious of my unshined boots and unpressed clothes in contrast to the neatly tailored uniforms of military pilots. The small amount of baggage he can carry makes it difficult for a barnstorming pilot to keep a neat appearance, living in daily contact with oil, dust, and weather. When darkness came, I began looking for a place to spend the night; but every available room in the nearby towns of Anglum and Bridgeton had been rented. So with my bundle under one arm (I couldn't afford the weight or stiff-cornered bulk of a suitcase in my Jenny) I walked half a mile to the tracks, and boarded a streetcar for St. Louis.

The next day, I became completely absorbed in aircraft and flying -- types I had never heard of, maneuvers I had never seen. I spent hours looking up into the sky, and walking from one plane to the next. I'd study first the streamlined wires of a Curtiss biplane, then the thick wing butt of a Fokker monoplane, trying to decide which kind of structure I liked best. I would have given my summer's barnstorming profits gladly for authority to fly a few of the newer types. I was so fascinated by it all that I felt I must take my Jenny into air when the field was thrown open to visiting pilots at the end of the day's program; not for any good reason, but just to be in the same sky with the others. I couldn't stay on the ground any longer and watch all those airplanes overhead.

I unlashed the wings, blocked the wheels, set the throttle, and swung through my propeller. The engine started with the first pull on "contact." I felt highly professional as I climbed into my cockpit and started the warm-up. Three minutes of idling -- temperature and pressure normal --I pushed the throttle wide open -- 1410 r.p.m. -- Everything was perfect. But as I throttled down I heard shouts of rage behind me. I looked back to discover a great cloud of dust thrown up by my slipstream. In it I could see, vaguely, gesticulating pilots and a half dozen other planes. I'd been used to flying from sod-covered pastures, not from a crowded and newly graded airport, baked dry by Missouri's sun. It never occurred to me that I was blowing dust on other people's aircraft.

An air race official emerged from the cloud, hanging onto his hat with both hands, face and clothes yellow with dust. He outlined in no uncertain terms his opinion of my judgment as a pilot:

"God Almighty! Where did you learn to fly? Don't you know enough to taxi out on the field before you warm up your engine? Where do you come from? What's your name? How in hell did you get here?" He spluttered out questions so fast I didn't have time to answer any of them. "Get out and lift your tail around. Hold that throttle down while you taxi! All right, damn it, go ahead!"

I glance up at the compass mirror. Am I off course 'again? No, it's just the compass variation. I must remember that Newfoundland's isogonic lines mark a difference of over 30 degrees between true and magnetic north.

The incident left me feeling like a forty-acre farmer stumbling through his first visit to the State Fair. I taxied carefully out and took off; but the joy was gone from wingovers, banks, and spirals. A crowded airport wasn't my environment. The sooner I could get back to the freedom of farm fields and open prairies, I decided, the better. Maybe I'd leave St. Louis in the morning.

That had been the lowest point. Not long after I landed, e began to brighten:

"Slim! When did you get here?" It was Bud Gurney. "I came in yesterday."

"Got your Jenny?"

I pointed down the line, in answer. "Did you fly down from Lincoln, Bud?"

"No -- couldn't get a ride -- came on the train." He grinned he looked at me. "And I didn't buy a ticket."

"I know what you mean," I said, "I got into a Colorado town last summer with fifteen cents in my pocket. I never rode a freight train -- but I slept under a railroad station bench in Montana -- and once I spent a night a haystack, down in Tennessee." We laughed together. Have you got your parachute with you?"

"I've got two of them -- shipped 'em ahead by express. I won a spot-landing contest, Slim, and I came in second in the race to ground. I'm going to end the meet with a double jump."

"Who's going to drop you?" I asked.

"I haven't got a plane yet. Think you could do it, Slim?"

"I can if the Jenny will get enough altitude with a double 'chute on the wing."

"Say, a lot of fellows are here. Let's go see some of them."

We walked over to a group of pilots, mechanics, and stunt men. Talk always wound around aircraft and flying. Which racer would win the Pulitzer prize -- the Curtiss, the Verville, or the Wright? "Did you know H -- was killed last summer? Stalled on take-off down in Texas -- half spun into the ground -- drunk, of course, as usual." Was I going to sell my Jenny at St. Louis? "There are a lot of buyers at the races." My plane might bring enough to pay for a newer one in the South with two or three hundred dollars profit left over, I was told. Also, there were people at the races who wanted to learn to fly. "You could sell your plane with a course of instruction thrown in." Barnstorming wasn't very good in the South that year—there were too many planes in Texas. "Everybody goes there for the winter." And fields were scarce in the other states. "You can't make enough to live on. Riddick got down to carrying passengers for a couple of dozen eggs." "Why don't you stay at Lambert Field and do some instructing?"

That last question stuck in my mind. To be a flying instructor carried a prestige like one's twenty-first birthday. How I'd admired the older pilots who sat in the front cockpit -- so experienced, so capable that they could grab a badly handled stick in time to stop a stall or crash; instilling confidence by their calmness in danger; guiding their students through the air by gestures -- finger up for the stick back -- palm motioning downward if you climbed too fast -- hand to cheek to warn of slip or skid. A year and a half ago I'd been the student. Now, with two hundred and fifty hours in the air and a plane of my own, I had a chance to be an
instructor
-- After all, why not?

"You don't need any license," I was told, on inquiring. "They expect you to know how to fly, and to use good judgment -- that's all."

"Slim, I met a fellow who wants to buy a plane," Bud informed me while we were tying down for the night. "Maybe you could sell your Jenny. You'd have to teach him how to fly. Let's go over and talk about it."

Bud introduced me to a young Iowan who wanted to enter aviation as a profession. I set a price on my Jenny, with a solo flight guaranteed, that quickly closed the deal. In return for a down payment, I agreed to begin instruction flights as soon as the air meet was over.

Then I met Marvin Northrop, who'd come down from the Twin Cities and sold his Hisso-Standard. He asked me to instruct the man who bought it.

"You've got one student to teach. You might as well have two," he said. "It won't take you much longer. I'll pay enough to make it worth while."

Marvin Northrop never knew how glad I was to accept that job. I’d have taken it on regardless of what he paid me. It gave me a chance to spend more hours in the air, to gain experience as an instructor, to fly one of the powerful HissoStandards -- in which I'd never soloed.

In the final hour of the program, I coaxed my Jenny up to 1700 feet, and Bud cut loose on the windward side of the field for his double drop. He had bad luck that afternoon. In landing, he broke his arm.

The Spirit of St. Louis is three degrees off course. I drop the left wing slightly, and press left rudder. My throat's a bit dry. I can afford another swallow of water now, and still stay well within my ration.

Lambert Field had changed in a few days from a beehive of activity to the home of a dozen civilian planes and a National Guard observation squadron which flew mostly on week ends. The field had the appearance of a circus lot after the circus has moved on—trampled ground, hundreds of pop bottles, thousands of bits of tinfoil and paper. It had the emphasized loneliness of a place recently deserted by a multitude of people.

I found an open welcome among the handful of pilots. Since I confined my activities to instructing my two students, I didn't compete for their sources of income, which were small enough at best. On the contrary, my instructing created additional flying activity. More planes in the air brought bigger crowds to the airport, and bigger crowds meant more people who would watch for a time and then gather courage to make a flight themselves -- at five dollars a head.

When I taxied out with my first student in the rear cockpit, I was determined to combine in my teaching the best qualities of all the pilots I'd studied. For months I had praised and criticized others; now I had a chance to put into practice the ideas I'd preached. From T- I learned to inspect my plane carefully each morning before flight, but to avoid the puttering with details that made his students call him a timid pilot. From B- I learned that men who boasted the least might fly the best. I-'s bombastic methods taught me the value of patience with a student. S- was a wonderful acrobatic pilot, but he held no reserve for something going wrong; sooner or later he'd probably be killed. 0- was so afraid to bank that he always skidded on his turns, and even leaned toward the high side of his cockpit. Each pilot I'd ridden with or watched added something to my philosophy of flight.

St. Louis is a city of winds, and the air above Lambert Field is usually rough, making it difficult to teach a new student how to land properly. Since turbulence is often least in early morning, we began our day, my pupil and I, by practicing take-offs and landings. After that, we worked on the Jenny, and made frequent trips to "Louie's" lunch stand. Pilots and mechanics gathered there for meals or coffee, and to comment on the flying.

When the wind died down, I would start instructing again: take-off and landing, take-off and landing, skid, slip, and stall. There were moments when I forgot my resolution to be patient, when I jerked the stick away roughly, and zoomed the Jenny as high as it would go.

I soon discovered that I was learning as much about flying as my students. A pilot doesn't understand the real limitations of his craft until he's instructed in it. Try as he may, he can never duplicate intentionally the plights that a student gets him into by accident. When you're flying yourself, you know in advance whether you're going to pull the stick back, push it forward, or cut the throttle. You think of a maneuver before you attempt it. But you're never sure what a student is going to do. He's likely to haul the nose up and cut the gun at the very moment when more speed is needed. If you check his errors too quickly, he loses confidence in his ability to fly. If you let them go too long, he'll crash you. You must learn the exact limits of your plane, and always keep him far enough within them so the wrong movement of a control will still leave you with the situation well in hand. You must learn not how high the tail
should
go in take-off, but how high it can go without disaster; not how to avoid a wind drift when you're landing, but how much drift there can be when the wheels touch, without a ground loop or blown tire resulting. And after you've learned how to keep a student out of trouble, you find that you've become a better pilot yourself. As you instruct your student in the primary art of flying, he instructs you in its advanced phases. In a gust of wind, or if the engine fails, or in any emergency, you handle your plane more skillfully than you ever did before.

Late in the fall of 1923 I soloed my Jenny student and rode with him, as check pilot, to his home town in Iowa. He planned on starting a flying service there the following summer. I took his note for final payment, wished him luck, and told him to keep plenty of altitude until he grew thoroughly familiar with the plane. "Don't fly below a thousand feet when you don't have to; and when you go over town, always stay high enough to glide to a field if your engine fails." But you can't pass on all the wisdom you have gained. A student absorbs only part of what his instructor tells him; often it seems a terribly small part. Cost what it may in damage or injury, the rest must be learned by trial. Possibly much of human progress stems from a refusal of the student to accept rules laid down by the instructor. At any rate, the last time I saw my Jenny it was flying in a farewell salute only two hundred feet above the railroad station where I was waiting for a train.

I found a number of odd piloting jobs on Lambert Field that fall, while I was waiting to take examinations for appointment as a flying cadet in the United States Army Air Service. I'd put my application in some weeks before, and been ordered to report at Chanute Field, Rantoul, Illinois, about January 1st. During December, I made more than my living expenses, but January was a poor month for flying. Snow and wind, freeze and thaw, discouraged the most enthusiastic aviators. For nearly three weeks after I returned from my examinations I didn't leave the ground. Then, one of the student pilots suggested that we fly south, in his OX-5 Canuck. He was a young automobile dealer named Leon Klink.

Why not barnstorm south with Klink's Canuck? He wanted to take a vacation, and at the same time learn to fly; while I wanted to make a living and keep my hand in at controls until I heard from the War Department. I was free until the flying school opened sometime in March, if I received an appointment; free an indefinite time if I didn't. We could fly each morning as far as the fuel in our tank would take us, and try to carry enough passengers in the afternoon to pay for the day's expenses. It would be great fun, and we'd learn a lot about the country and the people of the South.

It was the 25th of January, 1924, when we left Lambert Field. The hangar thermometer registered five degrees below zero Fahrenheit. All the wool clothing we could wear in our open cockpits didn't keep us warm. Air leaked in around firewall and fittings until our knees stiffened and our toes and fingers pained.

I had no plans, then, for returning to St. Louis. But a year and two months later, it was the destination on my day-coach ticket. I'd become a full-fledged second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Service Reserve. My olive-drab uniform with its wings and shining gold bars was folded carefully in the bottom of my foot locker. Rumors that the flying cadets would go on active duty after graduation had proved groundless. A cotton-dusting job in Georgia paid so low a salary that I turned it down -- only two hundred dollars a month. Prices on barnstorming planes in Texas were too high for my cautious budget. They were asking a thousand dollars for a Jenny at Love Field! I had applied for authority to take examinations for a commission in the Regular Army Air Service, but the War Department hadn't answered.

"Why don't you come back to St. Louis after you get out of the Army?" Several of the pilots and mechanics at Lambert Field had extended that invitation, and it remained in the back of my mind during the year I spent in Texas, at Brooks and Kelly. There was a hospitality about St. Louis, a fellowship at Lambert Field, that I'd found nowhere else in my travels. Arriving at the races a complete stranger, I had left three and a half months later feeling that I was an accepted member of the city's little group of pilots. Now that I was in civilian life again, what better place to start looking for a job than St. Louis? With the summer season just ahead, there would almost certainly be students to teach and planes to take out barnstorming. At St. Louis they knew I could fly; they wouldn't hold it against me if I arrived by train and streetcar.