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3.

The Orteig Prize

AFTER Lindbergh graduated flight school in March 1925, he had no luck obtaining an army commission. One reason may have been that Lindbergh was involved just over a week before graduation in a spectacular mid-air collision with a plane piloted by one of his instructors. Amazingly, both men parachuted safely to the ground. Lindbergh soon turned to barnstorming in Missouri where he earned the nicknames “Daredevil” and “Lucky” and billed himself as “The Flying Fool.” The tall, slender pilot preferred to answer to the nickname “Slim.”

Lindbergh’s base was Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri, a 170-acre tract that had just been transformed from a hot air balloon launching park. (It would later become the Lambert–St. Louis International Airport.) As a barnstormer, Lindbergh wowed spectators by “wing-walking” — deliberately facing his inner demons and trying to conquer them. But routine performance of that circus act only exacerbated his nightmares of falling to his death. More than thirty of the first forty American pilots had already died in crashes. Lindbergh soon tried a double parachute jumping trick to overcome his fears. He later described the risky stunt as “where life meets death on equal plane.” He claimed that by forcing himself to leap into the open air and trust two chutes to open properly in succession, he finally began to sleep soundly through the night. He swore he never experienced nightmares again.

That fall of 1925 Lindbergh obtained a coveted job helping to establish private delivery of mail on a new air run between St. Louis and Chicago. The new company whose team he headed promised that they would make quick deliveries regardless of the weather. To participating businessmen, the potential for advantage seemed staggering. They could make an offer on Monday afternoon and get a reply by mid-morning Wednesday — far sooner than most competition.

Pilots carried little more than the minimum amount of heavy fuel so they could maximize the mail load. The aviators were also encouraged to take their chances with stormy skies to fulfill the fleet owner’s promises of speedy delivery. Until late 1926, Lindbergh was known mostly in the Midwest as a reckless airmail pilot. He often flew in bad weather. He lost two company planes in three months, parachuting out just before the engines died for lack of gas. Newspapers noted that Lindbergh might have set an all-time record of surviving four crashed planes. Fortunately, none of the planes killed or maimed anyone when they hit the ground.

While employed at Lambert Field, Lindbergh roomed with other pilots in boarding houses. His penchant for nasty tricks continued. He rigged colleagues’ beds so they collapsed when they lay on them, poured freezing water over one roommate as he was getting out of the shower, and put frogs and toads in the other pilots’ beds. When he had a rare passenger, he also repeated a stunt that nauseated his companion: whizzing straight up as they approached their destination — for no reason other than his whim — then plummeting straight down before leveling the plane and bringing it safely to ground. The experience must have been like taking a ride on Disney World’s “Tower of Terror,” only with unsuspecting participants given no choice to refuse the thrill ride.

To keep his head always clear, Lindbergh no longer drank alcohol or Coca Cola. He found their use had dulled his instincts for sharp thinking and interfered with physical fitness. He disdained smoking for similar reasons. He did not know — or care to learn — how to dance or make small talk and strongly disapproved of other frivolous behavior encouraged in the Roaring Twenties. He did occasionally go by himself to the movies to see war films. In September 1926, he happened to see a newsreel about a $25,000 prize he had somehow not heard of before. New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig had made the offer back in 1919 to the first pilot to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. No one had yet accomplished the feat.

Lindbergh soon talked several business clients into sponsoring his entry into that race. After a new monoplane he had his eye on proved too pricey, Lindbergh and his backers turned to Ryan Aircraft in San Diego, California, to have the company modify a mail plane to carry more fuel. The plane Lindbergh would immortalize as “The Spirit of St. Louis” also included a new twenty-horsepower engine and a gas tank in front of the cockpit to minimize the risk that Lindbergh would die in an explosion. The downside was that Lindbergh could only see ahead with a periscope or by leaning out the window.

Despite the time pressures they were under, Lindbergh could not resist playing practical jokes on the team constructing his new plane. He wired magnets to machine tools so anyone picking the tool up would get a shock. He also affixed explosives under the toilet seat in the shop so a loud bang would go off whenever someone sat on it. All of the aircraft crew must have realized Lindbergh bore a high risk of dying on this upcoming flight. Competitors considered a two-man crew essential and strongly favored planes with more than one engine.

Other entrants in the race possessed superior navigation skills and had much more flying time under their belts. Lindbergh had always relied on geographical clues like railroad lines and rivers to find his way. He had never flown over water before and simply planned to rely on dead reckoning. The main things in his favor over competitors were his phenomenal physical endurance, the fact that his plane would carry a substantially lower weight load than others, and sheer bad luck that disabled or delayed famous entrants like Navy Commander Richard Byrd, who had already flown expeditions to the North and South Poles.

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It took nearly a day and a half of nonstop flight before the bleary-eyed pilot reached the European continent from New York. By the time he arrived the sky was pitch dark. Lindbergh initially passed over the lights of Paris, the Eiffel Tower and Le Bourget Field and had to circle back where automobile headlights lit the runway. He wound up with fuel to spare. From the moment of landing on the late evening of May 21, 1927, Lindbergh, the symbol, eclipsed Lindbergh, the man.

Timing was everything. The Coolidge administration used Lindbergh’s achievement as a golden opportunity to redeem itself for a horrendous policy mistake two years before. Embracing Lindbergh as a national hero allowed top brass in the military to save face after prosecuting war hero Colonel Billy Mitchell in 1925 for speaking truth to power about America’s unreadiness for future wars. Turf-defenders in the military had stubbornly ignored Mitchell’s plea to develop an independent air force. After they ignored his dire warning, Mitchell bluntly accused the Navy and War departments of “almost treasonable” disregard for national defense. In a military “trial of the century” in October of 1925, Mitchell was drummed out of the service and ridiculed for his predictions about future national defense needs: a unified department of defense (such as the future Pentagon), protection of Pearl Harbor’s fleet from a Japanese air attack (which caught Americans by surprise in 1941), and preparation for future wars in which unmanned missiles and planes would unleash bombs and chemical weapons on civilians.

Taking advantage of Lindbergh’s sudden popularity, the Coolidge administration reversed course. The government decided to provide subsidies for much-needed airports at a critical time in the fledgling industry’s development. On the Lone Eagle’s voyage back to America, those accompanying him found themselves the subject of more practical jokes. Apart from the spectacular feat he had just achieved, those transporting him home knew little about the Midwestern pilot suddenly being thrust forward as a paragon of virtue.

A lavish display of destroyers, blimps, fighter planes and military bands greeted Lindbergh’s arrival in Washington. The military provided him with a tailored uniform to wear for the occasion. Lindbergh had received the title of second lieutenant when he graduated from his army training. His title was upgraded to “Colonel” as part of the ceremonies in Washington that June of 1927. Yet by then Lindbergh had volunteer advisors who warned him that appearing in uniform would undercut his powerful image as a loner acting on his own. He rejected the uniform as ill-fitting and showed up in a suit — the first of many public relations ploys to cement his all-American image. Lindbergh would soon complain to a fellow pilot, “I was so filled up with this hero stuff, I could have shouted murder.”

Courtesy of the New Jersey State Police Museum

Americans across the country listened on their radios as Lindbergh received the honorary title of Army Reserve Colonel and a Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge at a lavish military tribute in Washington, D.C., in June of 1927 following his historic flight.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Lindbergh_Airmail_Stamp_c10.jpg

Over 20 million airmail stamps were issued with the image of the Spirit of St. Louis.