One Summer: America, 1927

but in all other respects he was almost painfully retiring.
    Exasperated by Chamberlin’s lack of dynamism, Levine openly manoeuvred to replace him as chief pilot. ‘He wanted to eliminate me because I was not a “movie type” and would not film well after the big adventure,’ Chamberlin recalled cheerfully in his autobiography.
    Over the objections of Giuseppe Bellanca, who liked and admired Chamberlin very much, Levine chose Lloyd Bertaud, a burly, more outgoing type, to be chief pilot. Bertaud was unquestionably a good pilot and a fearless one. As a boy in California he had built his own glider and tested it – successfully, though none too prudently – by jumping off a high sea cliff. He was also a great publicity hound. His most inspired stunt was to get married while piloting a plane, a pastor crouched between him and his obliging bride. These impulses naturally endeared him to Levine.
    So Bertaud now joined the Columbia team. Since Bert Acosta was also on the team, this meant that Levine had more pilots than he had space for in his aeroplane. Levine called Acosta and Chamberlin together and informed them that he hadn’t made his mind up which of them would fly to Paris as Bertaud’s co-pilot. He would decide with a toss of a coin on the morning of the flight. Acosta stared at him in disbelief for a long moment, then crossed the airfield and joined the Byrd team. Bertaud thereupon declared that he didn’t want Chamberlin with him in any case, and endeavoured to have his own co-pilot appointed. Bellanca said he would not let his plane take off without Chamberlin aboard.
    Giuseppe Bellanca was forty-one years old in 1927, which made him considerably senior to nearly everyone else involved in the Atlantic flights. Small (just five foot one), reserved and kindly, he had grown up in Sicily, the son of a flour-mill owner, and studied engineering at the Technical Institute in Milan, where he developed an interest in aviation. In 1911, Bellanca emigrated with his large family – parents and eight brothers and sisters – to Brooklyn. In the basement of their new house, he built a plane. His mother sewed the linen fabric; his father helped with the carpentry. He then took it to a field and taught himself to fly, taking short, cautious hops at first, then gradually increasing them in distance and duration until he was actually, properly airborne. Bellanca was a brilliant and innovative designer. His planes were among the first in the world to use air-cooled engines, to enclose the cockpit (foraerodynamic purposes, not the comfort of the occupants) and to incorporate streamlining into every possible aspect of the plane’s exterior design. A strut on a Bellanca plane didn’t just hold up the wing; it added lift or, at the very least, minimized drag. In consequence, Bellanca’s plane was probably, for its size, the best in the world.
    Unfortunately, Bellanca was a hopeless businessman and always struggled for funds. For a time, he designed for the Wright Corporation, but then Wright decided to get out of plane-building and concentrate on engines, so, to Bellanca’s presumed horror, it sold his beloved plane to Charles Levine. Since the plane was the only Bellanca demonstrator model in existence, Bellanca the man had little choice but to go along with Bellanca the plane. And so began his brief, unhappy connection to Charles Levine.
    All the parties on the Levine team now squabbled endlessly. Levine insisted that the plane should carry a radio, not for safety but so that the flyers could send reports to passing ships, which he could then sell profitably to newspapers. To make such contact easier, Levine wanted the Columbia to follow the principal shipping lanes rather than the great circle route (the shortest, most direct crossing), adding distance as well as danger to the enterprise. Bellanca, normally a mild man, responded furiously. A radio, he argued, would add weight that they could ill afford, presented a fire hazard, and had great potential to interfere with the plane’s compasses. In any case, the men aboard the plane would be too busy flying it to write jolly accounts of their adventures for newspapers. On at least four occasions, Levine ordered the ground crew to install a radio, and on each occasion Bellanca had it taken out again – an operation that cost Levine $75 a time and left him in a sputtering rage.
    Shortly before the planned day of departure, Levine made matters infinitely worse by