One Summer: America, 1927

time and none of those who fell were seriously injured.
    The two main airfields of Long Island, Roosevelt and its more diminutive neighbour Curtiss, didn’t offer much in the way of romance. They stood in a dreary, semi-industrialized landscape of warehouses and low factories interspersed with market gardens and characterless housing developments. The airfields themselves were strictly utilitarian. Their hangars and service buildings were rough and unpainted. The parking areas were potholed and overspread with brown puddles. After weeks of rain, the paths around the buildings were a shiny slick of mud.
    Roosevelt was much the better of the two airfields, fn1 thanks to money spent by Rodman Wanamaker on rolling and grading the runway since René Fonck’s terrible crash there eight months earlier. It was the only runway in New York long enough for an Atlantic flight, which could have been a problem since it was now leasedexclusively to Wanamaker for Byrd’s use, fn2 but Byrd insisted that the other competitors be allowed to use it, too. To his immense credit, Byrd did everything he could to help his rivals. He freely shared his private weather reports, for instance. He was also one of the first to call on Lindbergh at his hangar at Curtiss Field and to wish him good luck. Then again, Byrd was by such a wide margin the front-runner and Lindbergh so obviously outclassed that Byrd could afford to be generous.
    Despite the attention Lindbergh now received, most of the other aviators and crew didn’t rate his chances highly. Bernt Balchen, a member of the Byrd team, recalled in his memoirs that Lindbergh was generally assumed to be out of his class. The president of the American Society for the Promotion of Aviation stated frankly that he didn’t think Lindbergh, or indeed any of the pilots, stood a chance.
    Compared with Byrd’s operation, Lindbergh’s was indeed arrestingly low-key. Byrd had a team of forty people – mechanics, telegraph operators, even kitchen staff to run a private mess hall. Lindbergh had no help at all lined up in New York. His backers in St Louis sent out a young man named George Stumpf, who had no relevant experience, in the vague hope that he might run errands or otherwise make himself useful. The Wright Corporation provided two mechanics to assist him with preparations (it did this for all the teams using its engines, in its own interests) and also sent a PR man named Richard Blythe to help manage the press, but considered Lindbergh such a dark horse that it made the two of them share a room in the Garden City Hotel. Apart from this, Lindbergh was entirely on his own. Byrd’s preparations were conservatively estimated to have cost $500,000. Lindbergh’s total expenses – plane, fuel, food, lodging, everything – came to just $13,500.
    Though Byrd was too well bred to betray his thoughts, he must have been appalled by what he saw when he called on Lindbergh. He was clearly just a boy. He had no relevant experience. His plane had no radio and a single engine – Byrd insisted on having three – and was built by a company no one had ever heard of. Lindbergh planned to carry no lifeboat and almost no back-up supplies. Above all, he proposed to go alone, which meant flying a difficult and unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was night-time he would have to grip a small torch between his teeth. Taken together, these were jobs that would test a crew of three. Anyone who knew flying knew that this was more than any one person could do. It was madness.
    Several newspapermen tried to talk Lindbergh out of his suicidal ambition, but to no avail.
    ‘He won’t listen to reason,’ one complained to Balchen. ‘He’s just a stubborn squarehead.’
     
    The atmosphere at the airfields, Lindbergh recalled years later in his autobiography The Spirit of St Louis , was decidedly tense. It was just over two weeks since Davis and Wooster had crashed fatally in Virginia and less than one week since Nungesser and Coli had gone missing. Myron Herrick, the American ambassador in Paris, had publicly announced that it would not be a good idea for any American airmen to fly to France