One Summer: America, 1927

Dwight Morrow, a New York banker who knew nothing whatever about flying but was put in charge of the President’s Aircraft Board – a panel charged with investigating the safety and efficiency of American aviation – because he was a friend of President Coolidge. By a rather extraordinary coincidence Morrow would in 1929 become Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law. Had Morrow been told that before the decade was out his shy, intellectual daughter at Smith College in Massachusetts would be marrying an airmail pilot and former stunt flyer we may assume he would have been flabbergasted. Had he been further informed that this pilot would also by then be the world’s most celebrated individual his astonishment would presumably have been immeasurable. In any case, thanks to Morrow’s efforts, the Air Commerce Act was signed into law by President Coolidge on 20 May 1926 – coincidentally one year to the day before Lindbergh’s flight. The act brought in some minimal trainingrequirements for pilots and inspection of planes used in interstate commerce, and required the Commerce Department to keep track of fatalities. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
     
    This was the casual and high-risk world in which Charles Lindbergh learned to fly. His first flight – indeed, his first experience of an aeroplane at close range – was at a flying school in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 9 April 1922, two months after his twentieth birthday. He was instantly smitten. Almost at once he embarked on a brief but perilous career as a stunt performer. Within a week he was wing-walking and within a month he was – without any prior training – parachuting from giddy heights to the delight of watching crowds. In the course of these duties he also learned, in an entirely informal way, to fly. He proved to be unusually good at it. Like most young men, Lindbergh was capable of the most riveting foolishness. Part of the job of barnstormers was to impress the locals with their flying skills, and on a visit to Camp Wood, Texas, Lindbergh decided to do so by taking off from the town’s Main Street – an ambitious challenge since the street’s telephone poles were just forty-six feet apart and his wingspan was forty-four. As he sped down the street, he hit a bump, which caused a wingtip to clip a pole, spinning him sideways and through the front window of a hardware store. How neither he nor any of the spectators were injured is a miracle.
    Barnstorming gave Lindbergh a great deal of practical experience – he made over seven hundred flights in two years – but no technical training. In 1924, he corrected that deficiency by enrolling in a one-year course in the army air reserve, which provided the most advanced and challenging training then available. He finished top of his class – the first time in his life he had done well at anything academic – and emerged with the rank of captain. The achievement was muted somewhat by the fact that it coincided with the death of his father, from a neurological disorder, in May 1924. Because no military posts were available, he took a job as anairmail pilot on the St Louis to Chicago route, where he acquired the sort of resourcefulness that comes with flying cheap and temperamental planes through every possible type of adversity. Thanks to this varied apprenticeship, Lindbergh in the spring of 1927 was a more experienced and proficient flyer – and a vastly more gifted one – than his competitors realized. As events would show, you couldn’t be a better pilot and still be just twenty-five.
     
    In many ways Charles Lindbergh’s greatest achievement in 1927 was not flying the Atlantic but getting a plane built with which to fly the Atlantic. Somehow he managed to persuade nine flinty businessmen in St Louis, among them the eponymous A. B. Lambert, to back him, convincing them that a plane with ‘St Louis’ in its title could do nothing but good for the city’s business prospects. It was an exceedingly dubious proposition. The greater likelihood for his backers was that they would be indelibly associated with the needless death of a young, idealistic flyer, but that thought, if it occurred to them at all, seems not to have troubled them. By late autumn 1926, Lindbergh had a promise of $13,000 of funding from his backers, plus $2,000 of his own – not a lavish bankroll by any means, but with luck, he hoped, enough to get him a single-engine plane capable of crossing an ocean.
    In early February 1927,