One Summer: America, 1927

Manhattan, Lindbergh decided to check the weather forecasts for one last time that day. A light rain was falling and the tops of the skyscrapers around him were lost in drifting murk, so the phone call was really a formality, but to his astonishment Lindbergh learned that conditions at sea were clearing and that reasonably good weather was expected. At once, they returned to Long Island to prepare for a morning flight.
    They had much to do, including getting his plane towed from Curtiss Field to Roosevelt. Lindbergh fussed over the plane for a few hours, but late in the evening his mechanics ordered him to go back to the Garden City Hotel and get some sleep. There Lindbergh was met in the lobby by reporters who had learned of his planned departure and wanted information for the morning editions. They detained him for half an hour with their questions. By the time Lindbergh finally got to bed it was after midnight. He was just dropping off when the door flew open and George Stumpf – who had been posted outside to see that no one disturbed him – came in. ‘Slim, what am I going to do when you’re gone?’ he asked plaintively – a strange question since they had known each other for only a week. Lindbergh spoke patiently to Stumpf for a minute or two, then sent him away, but it was too late and he was too keyed up. In the end, he got no sleep that night.
    Lindbergh returned to Roosevelt Field a little before 3 a.m. A light drizzle hung in the air, but the weather reports promised clearer weather by morning. Fuelling the plane took most of the night – it was a fussy process because the fuel had to be filtered through cheesecloth to remove any impurities – and all the systems had to be checked. If Lindbergh was nervous, he gave no hint of it. His manner was calm and cheerful throughout the final preparations. He packed five ham and chicken sandwiches, though hewould eat only one, when he was already over France. He took two pints of water.
    At some time after seven in the morning, Lindbergh folded his lanky frame into the cockpit. The plane started up with a throaty rumble and coughed out a cloud of blue smoke before it settled into a rhythmic roar – intensely loud but reassuringly steady. After a few moments Lindbergh gave a nod and the plane began to creep forward.
    After weeks of rain, the runway was soft and strewn with puddles. The Spirit of St Louis moved as if rolling over a mattress. Almost all the other airmen and crews had arrived to watch. Fokker drove his big Lancia sedan, loaded with fire extinguishers, to the far end of the runway. Just beyond him, the spot where Fonck had crashed eight months earlier still bore scorch marks.
    Lindbergh’s plane slowly gained speed, but seemed ‘glued to the earth’, as Fokker recalled later. The propeller had been set at an angle to provide maximum fuel efficiency in flight, but that meant a sacrifice in power at lift-off – and that deficiency was worryingly evident as the plane used up more and more runway without showing any sign of rising. Lindbergh in his cockpit had another concern to deal with. His lack of forward visibility, he now realized, made it impossible for him to be certain that he was moving in a completely straight line – something he very much needed to do. The plane had never been this loaded before – indeed, no Wright Whirlwind engine had ever tried to lift this much.
    ‘Five hundred feet from the end, it still hugged the earth,’ Fokker wrote in his memoirs. ‘In front of him was a tractor; telephone wires bordered the field. My heart stood still.’ As with Nungesser and Coli at Le Bourget, Lindbergh’s plane rose tentatively and came back to earth with a clumsy bump, then rose and fell again. Finally, on the third try it lifted. It was, some spectators reported, as if Lindbergh had willed it into the air. Even Lindbergh viewed it as a kind of miracle – ‘5,000 pounds balanced on a blast of air’, he wrote in Spirit of St Louis .
    The plane rose so ponderously that it seemed to have little chance of clearing the telephone wires straight ahead – wires that Lindbergh could not himself see. He would learn of his failure from the sudden twang of snagged cables, followed an instant later by a crash no human could survive. Bernt Balchen, watching from halfway along the runway, was certain that Lindbergh could not make it, and cried out with relief when he just cleared the wires. He called it a masterly takeoff. Chamberlin