One Summer: America, 1927

earlier.
    In conclusion, the mayor announced that they were renaming the airfield Lindbergh Field in his honour – an irony that cannot have been lost on young Charles since just the previous year the citizens of Springfield had overwhelmingly defeated a bond proposal to build a decent airfield in the town. That they had any field at all was thanks only to the local chamber of commerce, whichprovided modest funding to give the city the most basic facilities.
    After his ceremonies, Lindbergh was rushed back to his waiting plane for an onward flight to St Louis, where he faced more presentations, more crowds and yet another evening banquet. Lindbergh was under such constant pressure on the ground that he found the flying between cities the most restful part of his tour, and sometimes introduced long detours into his itineraries to give himself some peace. Where he could – over lakes, for instance, or level ground – he often flew just fifteen feet or so above the surface, which increased the sense of speed and thrill, but narrowed his margin for recovery to zero if anything went wrong. He was given two days a week off, which must have been a blessed relief, but even then he was far from home and constantly in the company of strangers.
     
    Charles Levine was now the only Atlantic flyer still in Europe and he showed no inclination yet to come home. He poked around for the rest of the summer. He travelled to Italy, where he met the Pope and declared Mussolini the greatest statesman in the world. Returning to Paris, he made the papers for getting into a fistfight with a fellow American near the Opéra. ‘I never saw the man before, but he insulted me and I took a crack at him,’ Levine said. ‘I used to be a boxer,’ he added significantly. The cause of the outburst was never explained, but was rumoured to involve a woman.
    Levine also announced plans to fly home with Maurice Drouhin, one of the two French pilots whose endurance record Chamberlin and Acosta had beaten in Levine’s plane in April. This would present an interesting challenge since Drouhin spoke no English and Levine no French. Levine several times announced takeoff dates, but each one came and passed. Then abruptly in late August Levine collected his plane from the hangar at Le Bourget and took off in it. Some hours later, officials at Croydon Aerodrome in London were astonished to see the plane approaching in a decidedly erratic fashion. The Columbia was a famous aeroplane, sothey recognized it at once, but it was obvious that whoever was flying it was either incompetent or incapacitated. This was a matter of some alarm: Croydon was a busy airport, with regular passenger flights to Paris and elsewhere, and controllers had only limited means to alert other aircraft to stay back. The Columbia circled the airport four times, once almost crashing into the control tower.
    Finally, it came in to land at a steep and awkward angle, and hit the ground so hard that it bounced high into the air again before slamming heavily back to earth and rolling to a halt. Out from it stepped a beaming Charles Levine. It was the first time he had ever flown solo. It transpired that he had travelled 130 miles further than necessary to get there. Levine said he had just had a whim to go up alone. Soon afterwards, however, news reached London that Levine had in fact taken off just ahead of a writ from Drouhin, who was complaining bitterly that Levine owed him 80,000 francs in wages. The hangar manager at Le Bourget also reported that he had never been paid. Levine had evidently also failed to tell his wife that he would be leaving her behind in Paris. (Their marriage did not long outlast the summer.)
    To avoid arrest now, Levine had to give a formal undertaking that he would never under any circumstances attempt to fly over British soil again. Levine was nothing if not irrepressible, and within a few days he announced plans for another Atlantic flight, this one from Cranwell Aerodrome in Lincolnshire with Captain Walter Hinchliffe, a senior pilot of Imperial Airways. In the days that followed, Levine constantly contradicted himself about whether he and Hinchliffe would fly to America westward over the Atlantic or eastward across Asia and the northern Pacific. In the event, they didn’t go anywhere and the papers lost interest in both of them.
    Drouhin did eventually get some of his back pay, but didn’t have long to enjoy it. He died the next year in a crash during a test