Contents
Cover
Frontispiece
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Instant Fame—or Flaming Gasoline
Chapter 1: “We’ve Come to Fly the Atlantic”
Chapter 2: “Where Does France Come In?”
Chapter 3: “The Ace with the Wooden Leg”
Chapter 4: The Fortune of the Air
Chapter 5: Slim
Chapter 6: Giuseppe, the Gypsy, and the Junk Man
Chapter 7: Revving Up
Chapter 8: Against the Prevailing Winds
Chapter 9: Come to Earth
Chapter 10: Little Silver Plane
Chapter 11: Paris au Printemps
Chapter 12: A Stout Heart Does Not Fear Death
Chapter 13: Limbo
Chapter 14: Hunting Dragons
Chapter 15: We Two
Chapter 16: “Vive l’Amérique!”
Chapter 17: “Lindbergh Is Our Elijah”
Chapter 18: Two More Across
Chapter 19: The Atlantic No Longer Exists
Epilogue: Restless Spirits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
This book is printed on acid-free paper. 
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Bak. All rights reserved
Photo Credits: Page 13: First Across Association; pages 16 left, 25, 33, 55, 59, 86, 104, 117, 124, 135, 137, 173, 180, 182, 212: Library of Congress; page 21: Vickers; page 26: New York Public Library; pages 42, 52, 114, 120, 150, 155, 159: Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace; page 65: Sikorsky Archives; pages 94, 167, 188: Smithsonian Institution; pages 95, 235: Record Flights; pages 108, 217, 221, 256: National Archives; page 241: Skyward; pages 243, 247: L’Illustration.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bak, Richard, date.
The big jump : Lindbergh and the great Atlantic air race / Richard Bak.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-471-47752-5 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-04376-9 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-04377-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-04378-3
1. Aeronautics–Competitions–History–20th century. 2. Transatlantic flights–History–20th century. 3. Aeronautics–United States–History–20th century. 4. Aeronautics–History–20th century. 5. Lindbergh, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1902-1974. 6. Air pilots–United States–Biography. 7. Air pilots–Biography. I. Title.
TL537.B35 2011
629.13092–dc22
2011010967
Acknowledgments
While the pursuit of the Orteig Prize by Charles Lindbergh, Clarence Chamberlin, Richard Byrd, Charles Nungesser, René Fonck, Paul Tarascon, and others is the focal point of this narrative, the race to be the first to connect New York and Paris by air plays out against the broader backdrop of North Atlantic flight, from the initial crossings in 1919 through the flurry of attempts in 1927 and concluding with the first Paris-to-New York flight in 1930. To more fully present the French side of the story, a viewpoint typically given short shrift in the many accounts of Lindbergh’s epochal flight, my research necessarily involved locating and deciphering materials that challenged my meager foreign-language skills. I consider myself fortunate to have found Carolyn Miller, an archival researcher fluent in French, who expertly and expediently translated many documents for me. My daughter Rosemary also translated several items, often on short notice, proving that her year of study in Marseilles still held value. Additionally, librarians, archivists, curators, booksellers, historians, and aviation aficionados on both sides of the Atlantic contributed in various ways to the completion of this work, and to each of them I offer my deepest thanks. My editor, Hana Umlauf Lane, and my literary agent, Jim Donovan, both deserve some sort of prize of their own for their patience. Finally, thanks to Wiley Senior Production Editor John Simko for his forbearance and attention to detail.
Prologue
Instant Fame—or Flaming Gasoline
The barrier was both physical and psychological, and cost more than a few lives. Flying over water was far more dangerous than flying over land, where any flat space was a suitable landing field for a 1920s craft. The Atlantic had its stepping-stones like the Canadian coast, Bermuda, the Azores, England, and Ireland, but for the big jump the pilots poised at the edge of the water, like small children waiting for somebody else to stick a toe in first.
—George Vescey and George C. Dade, Getting Off the Ground
In the early-morning gloom, all eyes were on the little monoplane with its distinctively burnished cowling. As the nine cylinders of the Wright Whirlwind engine issued a powerful, monotonous roar, the young pilot inside the cramped cabin weighed the risks of trying to leave Long Island, New York, under less than ideal conditions against those of waiting an additional day. By then his rivals in what reporters, oddsmakers, and the rest of the enthralled public were calling “the world’s greatest air derby” likely would be ready for departure as well. Like all airplanes attempting to make the “big jump” across the cold, treacherous expanses of the North Atlantic, his machine, with nearly a ton and a half of fuel on board, was essentially a flying gas tank. In this situation, with a single engine straining to lift the overloaded aircraft off a sticky, unpaved runway, nobody would have faulted him for postponing his departure until the sun dried out the field and the air.
“It’s less a decision of logic than of feeling,” was the pilot’s explanation. “The kind of feeling that comes when you gauge the distance to be jumped between two stones across a brook.” And if he had gauged wrong—well, that was the advantage of going it alone. He had no one to answer to except himself.
He buckled his safety belt and pulled down his goggles.
“What do you say,” he said. “Let’s try it.”
The wheel blocks were kicked out. A handful of men pushed against the wing struts to free the plane from the ooze, then ran alongside to help send it on its way. After a hundred yards the last of the helpers dropped off and the fishtailing craft was moving on its own, churning through the muck in the general direction of the ambulance parked ominously at the end of the runway.
John Miller, a youthful aviation buff, had spent a sleepless night on the floor of the lobby of the Garden City Hotel, waiting for history to be made. “I think most of the non-aviation people out there expected a crash,” he said of the curiosity-seekers who had flocked to Roosevelt Field in the wee hours of a dreary, rainy morning. “They were out there to see a disaster.”
“Disaster” had become the operative word in the transatlantic sweepstakes the New York Times had labeled “the greatest sporting event of the age.” During the previous eight months a series of catastrophes had claimed some of the world’s finest airmen as they chased aviation’s most prestigious prize. Four men had been killed outright, while two others had disappeared somewhere over the ocean and were presumed dead. Several other fliers, including such familiar names as Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett, the conquerors of the North Pole; Tony Fokker, the builder of Germany’s famous fighters; and René Fonck, the Allies’ leading ace during the Great War, had either been seriously injured or narrowly escaped death in mishaps. One Times reporter who watched the string of aspirants roll down the runway and into the headlines sardonically handicapped each pilot’s chances for the elusive Orteig Prize. It was either going to be instant fame, thought John Frogge—or flaming gasoline.
Within just a few years of Orville Wright’s brief but historic 1903 flight off a North Carolina sand dune, daring aeronauts were knitting together odd corners of the map. One July morning in 1909, the Frenchman Louis Blériot created a sensation by being the first to fly across the English Channel, a twenty-two-mile hop that in its day was as celebrated a long-distance feat as Apollo 11’s round trip to the moon sixty years later. One hundred thousand Parisians cheered Blériot upon his return. “This transformation of geography is a victory for the air over sea,” flight pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont declared in a congratulatory note. “One day, thanks to you, aviation will cross the Atlantic.”
The French, with their traditionally romantic self-image, were especially smitten with les chevaliers de l’air, making the cult of the poet-pilot an integral part of their national culture even as more than a hundred young French fliers died in the period between Blériot’s channel crossing and the outbreak of the Great War five summers later. Enthusiasts insisted that powered flight was above all a spiritual undertaking, a deeply aesthetic experience that offered the potential for self-transcendence and a rejuvenation of the soul. It seems almost quaint today, but in the early years of aviation there was a widespread mysticism attached to communing with the clouds, a belief that something so rapturous would somehow develop into a benevolent instrument of social change. That nations would co-opt flying machines for purposes of war was perhaps inevitable, but military applications did hasten vast improvements in aeronautics and demonstrated aviation’s practical side.
As the industry came of age in the postwar years, airplanes and airships continued to transport man ever higher, faster, and farther through the sky, creating excitement and adventure and opening up unlimited possibilities for their use. Progress was steady, with each new achievement building on the spectacular triumphs—and often-fatal failures—of a swelling fraternity of tinkerers, mechanics, engineers, daredevils, and scientists. By the early 1920s airplanes were being catapulted off the decks of ships, used to “sky-write” advertising messages ten thousand feet above the earth, and journeying to some of the most isolated parts of the planet. Hardly a day went by when one didn’t pick up a newspaper and read of some airman flying faster, farther, and at greater peril than the one before him. Frontiers and records—along with a corresponding number of pilots and planes—fell with the regularity of autumn leaves.
One major challenge loomed largest in the news: the $25,000 Orteig Prize, the purse to be awarded for the first direct nonstop flight between the two great cities of New York and Paris. The inspiration behind the Orteig Prize was Raymond Orteig, a onetime shepherd boy who had made his fortune after coming to America. An admiring friend once toasted the Manhattan millionaire as “a worthy son of mother France, a conscientious citizen of the United States, and a brother to your fellow man.” The dapper hotelier had created the prize in 1919 to encourage scientific progress while also rebuilding strained relations between his native and adopted countries. During the immediate postwar years, as airlines established regular passenger service between the major cities of Europe, and as distance and speed records steadily increased, the Orteig Prize remained tantalizingly out of reach of the world’s best pilots and planes. But due to rapid improvements in aircraft design and technology, especially in the form of lighter and more reliable engines, by the mid-1920s a New York–Paris flight was not only feasible, it was inevitable. By then scores of people had already crossed the Atlantic in a variety of lighter- and heavier-than-air crafts, often in stages. The initial flights over the North Atlantic, as chancy and conspicuous as they were in their day, usually followed abridged routes that carried no immediate commercial implications. Shorter flights over the South Atlantic, while important in their own right, inspired little passion among ordinary Americans and Europeans.
However, connecting New York and Paris in a single bound meant an epic journey of more than thirty-six hundred miles, roughly twice the distance of previous transatlantic crossings. It also meant having the spotlights of the media and cultural capitals of the world shining directly on the men and planes involved, ensuring maximum coverage and impact. To certain dauntless and adventuresome types, the Orteig Prize was an almost intoxicating challenge. Whether one landed in Paris or New York or fell into the ocean somewhere in between, a splash of some type was guaranteed—glory, riches, the kind of fame that accompanies even spectacular failure. By the time the major contenders were lined up on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring of 1927, the question was no longer can the Orteig Prize be won, but by whom?
Years earlier, pioneer balloonist Augustus Post had provided a clue to the winner’s identity and alluded to the acclaim that awaited him. “A man is now living who will be the first human being to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air,” he wrote in a remarkably prescient article published in 1914.
“He will cross while he is still a young man. All at once Europe will move two days nearer; instead of five days away, it will be distant only thirty hours. . . . Imagine, then, the welcome that awaits the Columbus of the air. The cable warns of his departure before he flies; the wire announcing his progress; ship after ship, awaiting the great moment, gets a glimpse of the black spot in the sky. Ocean steamers bearing each a city full of human beings, turn thousands of glasses on the tiny winged thing, advance herald of the aerial age. The ocean comes to life with gazing humanity. Above all, he rides, solitary, intent. There will have been no time to decorate for his coming. Flags will run up hurriedly; roofs in an instant turn black with people; wharves and streets white with upturned faces, while over the heads of the multitude he rides in to such a shout as the ear of man has never heard.
“No explorer ever knew such a welcome,” concluded Post, “and no conqueror ever knew such a welcome as awaits the Columbus of the air.”
The little silver plane surged down the runway, splashing through puddles and picking up momentum. As it ate up more and more of the nearly mile-long strip, the young man at the controls resisted the temptation to abort. He had earlier marked the spot on the runway where, if he felt that he had not gathered enough speed to lift off, he would throttle back and attempt to coast the brakeless craft to a stop, but now pilot and plane roared past the point of no return. The wheels bounced once . . . twice . . . a third time . . . and then the Spirit of St. Louis finally lifted free of the sticky earth, slowly rising above and then past the web of telephone wires at the end of the field.
The barograph required by the National Aeronautic Association, installed and sealed a few hours earlier, began its official recording of time and altitude. It was 7:54 a.m., Friday, May 20, 1927.
A local youngster, Anne Condelli, had joined her parents and brother in seeing Charles Lindbergh off. “There was a great relief,” she recalled many years later. “But there was no clapping, no joyful noises at all. Just relief that his plane had cleared those wires.”
John Miller watched the plane disappear into the mist. He shook his head and said to no one in particular, “We’ll probably never see the poor guy again.”
