The Spirit of ST Louis (36 page)

Twilight deepens as I plunge down into the valley. Mountains behind screen off the colors of the western sky. For me, this northern city is the last point on the last island of America -- the end of land; the end of day.

T here's no time to circle, no fuel to waste. It takes only a moment, stick forward, engine throttled, to dive down over the wharves (men stop their after-supper chores to look upward), over the ships in the harbor (a rowboat's oars lose their rhythm as I pass), and out through the gap, that doorway to the Atlantic. Mountain sides slip by on either wing. Great rollers break in spray against their base. The hulk of a wrecked ship lies high upon the boulders. North America and its islands are behind. Ireland is two thousand miles ahead.

Here, all around me, is the Atlantic -- its expanse, its depth, its power, its wild and open water. Is there something unique about this ocean that gives it character above all other seas, or is this my imagination? Flying swiftly through that gap in the mountains was like diving into a cold pool. One moment you look on water from the warm dryness of land. The next, you look at land from the enveloping wetness of water. In a few seconds your standards, your sensations, your viewpoint, have all undergone a major change. You've stepped suddenly into a different frame of life and values. A minute ago, I was a creature of the land, thinking of the ocean ahead, stripping for that final plunge. Now, I'm a creature of the ocean, sensing the exhilarating coolness of the water, thinking of the continent behind. This feeling penetrates my mind and body as though I'd actually made a dive, as though there were a major change in time, in air, in existence, between one side of that narrow gap and the other.

Now, I'm giving up both land and day. Now, I'm heading eastward across two oceans, one of night and one of water. From the ocean of water, I may still turn back to that receding coast; but I can't turn back to the shore of day. Even in an airplane I could never reach it.

I look at the black silhouette of the mountains behind me. On Avalon Peninsula, fields exist where I could land with little damage, now that a third of my fuel is gone -- but never after nightfall. I've been holding on to such fields with my mind -- holding on to the field at Long Island when mists looked thick ahead; holding on to the Maine coast, just over the horizon to my left; holding on to Newfoundland as a final point of refuge on my route. Now, the last of these is slipping from my grasp. The last gate is closing behind me. I study the face of each instrument. I switch off first one magneto and then the other. The tachometer needle barely moves. There's no sign of roughness. If I were landing from a test flight, I could suggest no adjustment to the most meticulous mechanic.

Suppose that in another hour the engine does begin to miss or the oil pressure drop? Of course I'd turn back. There'd be no sensible alternative. And the engine might keep going until I reached St. John's. But what then? A scattering of lights on the black earth below, the vague outline of mountains against the stars; beyond that, night would cover cliffs and boulders as water covers shoals. It would be a crash wherever I came down -- on land or on sea.

I look back again at the lowering silhouette of the mountains, still sharp against the western sky. That is America. What a strange feeling -- America at a distance! It's as though I were saying: "That's the earth" -- far away, like a planet. There are no more reassuring islands ahead; no more test stretches of salt water. I've given up a continent and taken on an ocean in its place -- irrevocably.

I've reached the point where real navigation must begin. Now that the fun of diving down on St. John's is over, I wish I were back on route. Now, I'll have to pay for that luxury. And I'm a little ashamed of having left my course so far. I'm 90 miles south of the great circle. All the way to Ireland, I'll have this extra factor to consider in setting my compass heading. The figures on my chart are no longer exact. In addition to wind drift and magnetic variation, I'll have to compensate for starting so far south. Not that it's a complicated matter -- only a case of subtracting a few degrees. Then why should I be concerned with such a minor point? It's because I'm tired; that's it. I must realize I'm tired. That seems obvious enough; but at times my mind is too stubborn to admit it.

I look down at the ocean. Wind streaks are hard to see in the dusk—gray threads raveling across black water. This will be my final estimate. The figures I use now will have to last all through the night. The surface velocity looks close to 30 miles an hour. I wish I had some experience in estimating wind from waves. The direction is about west. I'll angle 10 degrees northward to compensate for drift. Another 5 degrees should carry me slowly back onto my great-circle route. Ideally, I want to strike it again at the southern tip of Ireland.

A change in navigation would be easy enough on a chart board, with its protractor and straight-edged rule; but in this breezy, narrow cockpit, there's no way to spread charts and lay out courses. I must estimate new angles roughly with my eye; and it's better to err north than south so I'll be sure of reaching land.

How will the wind blow during the night? Most of the afternoon it's source has shifted slowly toward the west. Will it hold from that direction? Will it continue to box the compass? Will it increase in velocity? There's no way of knowing. I can only calculate my heading from these last vague streaks on the water, and correct it at the break of dawn.

I crank the new heading into the earth-inductor dial, pull the throttle back to 1600 r.p.m. and lean out the mixture until my engine roughens slightly.

Suddenly I become aware of a white pyramid below me -- an iceberg, lustrous white against the water. I've never seen anything so white before. Like an apparition, it draws my eyes from the instruments and makes me conscious of a strange new sea. Ahead and on each side are several more. So that's why surface ships stay south in warmer waters! Well, I'm flying high enough to miss these drifting crags. Here and there a wisp of fog hangs, low-lying, above the waves.

Soon there are icebergs everywhere -- white patches on a blackened sea; sentries of the Arctic. The wisps of fog lengthen and increase in number until they merge to form a solid layer on ahead; but, separating as I pass above them, they leave long channels of open water in between -- stripes of gray fog and black water across my course. With every minute I fly, these channels narrow; until finally all the ocean is covered with a thin, undulating veil of mist. At first it doesn't hide the denser whiteness of the icebergs, but makes their forms more ghostlike down below. Then, the top of the veil slopes upward toward the east -- real fog, thick, hiding the ocean, hiding the icebergs, hiding even the lights of ships if there are any there to shine I ease the stick back slightly, take five miles from my speed, and turn it into a slow and steady climb.

The last time I climbed over a fog like this was that night on the air-mail route, northeast of Peoria, when I jumped from my plane. It was a low fog that night, too, and I encountered it at almost the same time of evening, the sky still bright in the west. I'd wondered then what I would land on after I left my cockpit. Thoughts of windmills, and railroad tracks, and big chimneys with fires at the bottom, had all skipped through my mind as I hung, rocking gently, under the parachute's silk canopy, waiting for the hard impact of substance on my feet. Tonight, I know what's down there -- wet, deep, and freezing water, with the nearest land already beyond the horizon. No, a parachute would be no good tonight. I was wise not to carry one.

Here I've left the coast of Newfoundland under the best conditions I ever hoped for -- on schedule, plenty of fuel, and a tail wind. Up to now, my every wish has been fulfilled; my plans have meshed together with the utmost smoothness -- except for the lack of sleep. But that night on the mail I'd been on schedule too, with plenty of fuel, or so I thought. Some days after the crash, I discovered that a mechanic had found a leak in the DH's 110-gallon gasoline tank. He'd taken it out, put an 83-gallon tank in its place, and forgotten to tell the pilots. We must have flown tranquilly into Chicago many times, during those weeks, with the main tank almost dry, and so close to the ground that there wouldn't have been time to shift to reserve if the engine had cut.

I won't run out of fuel over the ocean tonight. It was measured too carefully, and nobody's changed a tank in the Spirit of St. Louis without telling me. But what other unforeseen troubles may arise? The flight of a plane depends on the careful preparation of thousands of details. Has any one slipped by?

THE THIRTEENTH HOUR
Over the Atlantic

TIME - 7:52 P.M.

Wind Velocity Unknown Visibility 5 Miles

Wind Direction Unknown Altitude 800 feet

True Course 65° Air Speed 90 m.p.h.

Variation 32° W Tachometer 1625 r.p.m.

Magnetic Course 97° Oil Temp. 36°C

Deviation 0° Oil Pressure 59 lbs.

Compass Course 97° Fuel pressure 3.5 lbs.

Drift Angle 10° R Mixture 2.5

Compass heading 87° Fuel tank Fuselage

Ceiling Unlimited

Above Fog

Twelve hundred miles behind. Two thousand four hundred miles to go. One-third of the flight completed. A third is a satisfying fraction -- only twice that much again to Paris. I recheck the earth-inductor against the liquid compass, and drain another tablespoon of fuel from the Lunkenheimer trap, enjoying the pungent odor of gasoline. Let's see, I've flown an hour and a quarter from each of the outer wing-tanks, and a quarter hour from the center wing-tank. I'll run through the night on fuselage and nose tanks, leaving the gasoline in the wing-tanks for reserve. If anything goes wrong with the fuel pump, I can feed from the wings by gravity alone; and in case the big fuselage tank should spring a leak, every hour I use from it will be that much ahead.

Instrument readings are all normal. The engine sounds smoother than at the beginning of the flight. Possibly it's the night air; possibly it's simply the smoothness a well-cared-for engine gains during the early hours of its life. Whatever the cause, there's something in its rhythm that assures me, and gives me confidence with which to enter the unknown space ahead -- to climb up over the fog, over the sea, and into the night.

For some unmeasurable time in memory -- the mechanical hands of the clock say only twenty minutes, but they must lie -- I've been climbing slowly to stay above the top of the fog bank, watching a light haze form in the air around me, wondering how thick it will grow. Now, I find myself looking at stars overhead. Day -- I glance back -- has almost vanished; just a trace of it left, a wash on the western sky, only enough to illumine the gray mist rollers beneath my plane. The fog, the icebergs, and the gathering haze caused me to neglect the sky. Here it's risen on the breaking crest of darkness to claim the night for its own. Those few faint stars, twinkling down through the window above me, seem more important than all the world below.

You fly by the sky on a black night, and on such a night only the sky matters. Sometime near the end of twilight, without realizing when it happens, you find that the heavens have drawn your attention subtly from earth, and that instead of glancing from the compass down toward ground or sea, your eyes turn upward to the stars.

I wonder if man ever escapes from worldly bonds so completely as when he flies alone above clouds at night. When there's no cloud layer beneath him, then, no matter how high he may ascend, he is still conscious of the surface of the earth by day and of its mass by night. While flying over clouds in daytime, there's something about the motherly warmth and light of the sun which imparts a feeling of the earth below. You sense it down there underneath, covered only by a layer of mist which may draw apart at any moment to leave the graceful contours of land or the flat, sparkling sea, clear and naked in sunlight.

By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthy taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lived on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket, is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and the mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone, flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.

How many icebergs are floating on the ocean's surface? I no longer care about them. The stars, the gathering haze, and the rising top of the fog bank are all-important to my mind. The air speed has dropped to 85 miles an hour, and the altimeter shows 2000 feet; but stars are getting dimmer, and the fog is climbing, ramplike, as fast as my plane.

Well, let the haze thicken; let the fog climb! What does it matter? I've checked my course on the Newfoundland coast; I've received all I asked for, all I hoped for, from the continent of North America. From the ocean, I never asked as much. It isn't essential that I see its surface. Maybe it's better to have a storm above the Atlantic. I can't expect good weather over all the 3600 miles between New York and Paris. If there's to be an area of fog and storm, this is probably the best place for it to begin. Much of my overload is gone; there's nothing ahead but ocean for almost 2000 miles, and the chance that a storm will be that large is slight.

If I fly through a storm over the Atlantic, it may propitiate the gods; and by the law of averages alone there should be less chance of striking another over Europe. If I make the whole flight without meeting anything worse than those scattered squalls in Nova Scotia, I'll feel as though I'd been cheating, as though I hadn't earned success, as though the evil spirits of the sky had disdained to sally forth in battle. A victory given stands pale beside a victory won. A pilot has the right to choose his battlefield -- that is the strategy of flight. But once that battlefield is attained, conflict should be welcomed, not avoided. If a pilot fears to test his skill with the elements, he has chosen the wrong profession.

It's very dark. There's not a shade of twilight left to moderate the blackness of the night. Only a half-dozen of the brightest stars, directly overhead, pierce through the haze. The luminous dials of the instruments stare at me with cold, ghostlike eyes. The hands of the clock, which I haven't changed from their New York setting, show 8:35.

I glance at my altimeter-5000 feet now, and still climbing. I look out through the window again. The cloud layer -- you can hardly call it fog at this altitude -- is dimly perceptible in the haze -- an irregular, thicker substance, like a muddy ocean bottom to the mist. Its gray shoals are closer to my plane than before, uncomfortably close, less than 100 feet from my wheels. They've been rising faster than I.

Haze and night prevent my seeing what lies ahead in the distance. This slanted layer of clouds, like plains leading up to a mountain range, may go much higher. I'll either have to climb faster or give up the stars, withdraw into my cockpit, and follow instruments blindly through the night. I glance at the turn indicator, kicking rudder slightly as I do so. The needle jumps over to the side. Yes, it's working properly, and -- my eyes run quickly from dial to dial -- so are all the other instruments on the board.