One Summer: America, 1927

lighthouse on the Normandy coast for the lights of Paris. Lindbergh by contrast hit all his targets exactly – Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, Cap de la Hague in France, Le Bourget in Paris – and did so while making the calculations on his lap while flying an unstable plane. That achievement alone makes him unquestionably a candidate for the greatest pilot of his age, if not all ages. He was the only pilot that year to land where he said he would. All the other flights that summer – and there were many – either failed, made forced landings on water or came down without knowing where they were. He seemed to think that flying straight to Le Bourget was the most normal thing in the world. For him, in fact, it was.
     
    As Lindbergh covered the last leg from Cherbourg into Paris he had no idea that he was about to experience fame on a scale and of an intensity unlike any experienced by any human before.
    It never occurred to him that many people would be waiting for him. He wondered if anyone at the airfield would speak English and if he would be in trouble for not having a French visa. His plan was that first he would see to it that his plane was stowed securely, then he would cable his mother to give her the news that he had arrived. He supposed there would be one or two press interviews, assuming reporters worked that late in France. Then he would have to find a hotel somewhere. At some point he would also need to buy clothes and personal items because he hadn’t packed anything at all – not even a toothbrush.
    A more immediate problem confronting him was that his map didn’t show Le Bourget. All he knew was that it was some seven miles north-east of the city and that it was big. After circling the Eiffel Tower, he headed in that direction, but the only possible site he could see was ringed with bright lights, as if it were some kind of industrial complex, with long tentacles of additional bright lights stretching out from it in all directions. This was nothing like the dozing airport he had expected to find. What he didn’t realize was that the activity was all for him; the sinuous tentacles of light were the headlights of tens of thousands of cars all spontaneously drawn to Le Bourget and now caught in the greatest traffic jam in Parisian history. Cars and trams were abandoned all along the roads to the airport.
    At 10.22 p.m. Paris time – precisely 33 hours, 30 minutes and 29.8 seconds after taking to the air, according to an official barograph that the National Aeronautic Association of America had bolted into the plane just before departure – the Spirit of St Louis touched down on the grassy spaciousness of Le Bourget. In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the Earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris. Le Bourget wasinstantly a scene of exultant pandemonium as tens of thousands of people rushed across the airfield to Lindbergh’s plane – ‘a seething, howling mass of humanity … surging towards him from every direction of the compass’, in the words of one onlooker. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded the field was flattened, and several bicycles were crushed under the mass of charging feet. Among those in the rush were the dancer Isadora Duncan (who would die four months later in a freak accident, strangled when the long scarf she was wearing got caught in the wheel of a car) and Jean Borotra, who with Jacques Brugnon had beaten Bill Tilden and Francis T. Hunter at Saint-Cloud that day.
    For Lindbergh, this was an entirely alarming circumstance, as he was trapped and in actual danger of being pulled to pieces. The throngs hauled him from his cockpit and began to carry him off like prize booty. ‘I found myself lying in a prostrate position, up on top of the crowd, in the centre of an ocean of heads that extended as far out into the darkness as I could see,’ he reported. ‘It was like drowning in a human sea.’ Someone yanked his leather flight helmet from his head and others, worryingly, began to pull at his clothes. Behind him, to his greater alarm, his beloved plane was being ruined by the swarms climbing over it. ‘I heard the crack of wood behind me when someone leaned too heavily against a fairing strip. Then a second strip snapped, and a third, and there was the sound of tearing fabric.’ Souvenir hunters, he realized, were going wild.
    Somehow in the confusion he found himself on his feet and the