One Summer: America, 1927

them already. It was a terrific strain. Only an aviator knows what it means to be 18 hours without seeing the ground or water beneath. I doubt whether any other plane has ever flown blindly for half that time.’
    All this stands in interesting contrast with an account Balchen wrote for the New York Times just after the flight: ‘We had a good plane. Our motors never gave us any trouble. Not once during the whole flight did I have to crawl out on the wings to wipe the engine … So far as this flight across the ocean is concerned, it was one of the dullest and most monotonous I have ever been on.’ In his own book, Balchen described their night in the air as one of ‘beautiful starlight’ all the way. That was one of the statements that the Byrd family later made him excise.
     
    Upon reaching the French coast at Brest, Byrd instructed Balchen to follow the coastline towards Le Havre rather than head overland to Paris – a strangely deviant route. As Balchen noted later, a railway line beneath them traced a straight route to Paris, but Byrd insisted that they follow the coast to the mouth of the Seine and then follow that – a move that added two hours to the journey and ensured that they arrived after the bad weather.
    As with Lindbergh, a crowd of thousands waited at Le Bourget, but as midnight came and went, and the rain continued, most gave up and went home. Among those in attendance were Chamberlin and Levine, who had flown into Paris that day as part of a tour of European capitals.
    Byrd wrote: ‘All the French aviators waiting for us at LeBourget agreed that not only should we not have been able to land on account of the very thick weather but that we should have surely killed people had we attempted it.’ This rather jars with Chamberlin’s account. ‘There was only a light drizzle of rain,’ he recalled. ‘The clouds were low but not too low for the ship to have come in safely if she had sighted the glow of Paris through the fog and been able to come down.’ Byrd said in his book that his plane was clearly heard by those on the ground. Chamberlin said they never heard a thing.
    ‘My big job now was to try not to kill anyone beneath us and to save my shipmates,’ Byrd went on, turning a manifest failure into a selfless act of heroism. ‘The only thing to do was to turn back to water.’ He ordered the plane to return to the Normandy coast.
    By the time they got there, their fuel was all but spent. In the darkness it was too risky to land in a field, so they elected to ditch in the sea. Balchen made a perfect landing about two hundred yards off the village of Ver-sur-Mer, and the four men waded ashore at a spot that would become more famous, seventeen years later, as one of the landing beaches for British forces during the D-Day invasions. The landing sheared off the wheels and landing gear, but the plane remained intact.
    Of the landing Byrd wrote: ‘I felt myself entirely responsible for the lives of my shipmates. I don’t believe they thought there was much chance of getting down safely, but still they faced it gallantly … to the last they calmly obeyed orders. Balchen happened to be at the wheel.’ This was breathtakingly disingenuous. In fact, Balchen had been flying for hours and very probably saved all their lives with his skilful landing.
    The ridiculousness was not over yet. All four members of the crew were suffering from engine deafness and couldn’t hear each other. Acosta, according to nearly all accounts, had broken his collarbone, though he later said he didn’t feel any pain at the time. The others entirely escaped injury. They straggled ashore and almost immediately encountered a youth on a bicycle on the coastroad, but he fled at the sight of four strange men entering France from the sea. Dripping and cold, they went from house to house, but could not make anyone understand who they were. Noville, still unable to hear, unnerved villagers by shouting at them in poor French. At length they came to a lighthouse on a hilltop about half a mile inland from the beach. Marianne Lescop, daughter of the lighthouse keeper, recalled later that the family had already been woken once by the droning of the plane – an unusual sound in Ver-sur-Mer – and had looked out of the windows but seen nothing in the dark. ‘About three o’clock,’ she went on, ‘we were woken again by hammering on the door. Father saw four figures down below. One of them shouted, in French, “Airmen