Lindbergh's Transatlantic Flight (1927): Spirit of St. Louis

On 20–21 May 1927 the American airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh flew alone and non-stop from New York to Paris in a small single-engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. The 33.5-hour flight, about 5,800 kilometres (3,600 miles), won the $25,000 Orteig Prize and made the 25-year-old the most famous man in the world. Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight also sparked a surge of public enthusiasm and investment that helped turn aviation from a daring stunt into a modern industry.

Background: the Orteig Prize

Aviation had advanced rapidly since the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 and Louis Blériot’s crossing of the English Channel in 1909. The First World War produced faster, more reliable aircraft and thousands of trained pilots. In June 1919 the British airmen John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made the first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic, flying about 3,000 kilometres from Newfoundland to Ireland.

That same year Raymond Orteig, a French-born owner of New York hotels, offered $25,000 for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris. For several years no aircraft could carry enough fuel for such a distance. By the mid-1920s, however, improved engines such as the air-cooled Wright Whirlwind made an attempt realistic, and Orteig renewed his offer in 1926.

The prize attracted some of the best-known aviators of the day, and the attempts proved dangerous. In September 1926 the French war ace René Fonck crashed on take-off from New York in an overloaded three-engine Sikorsky; two of his crew died. In April 1927 the US Navy officers Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster were killed during a test flight of their aircraft.

On 8 May 1927 the French war hero Charles Nungesser and his navigator François Coli left Paris in their biplane L’Oiseau Blanc (“The White Bird”), heading for New York. They were never seen again, and their disappearance remains one of aviation’s enduring mysteries. Other well-funded teams, including Richard Byrd’s crew and the pilot Clarence Chamberlin, were preparing their own aircraft in New York when Lindbergh arrived.

The pilot and the plane

Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in Detroit in 1902 and grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota, the son of a congressman. He left university to learn to fly, worked as a barnstorming stunt pilot, trained with the US Army Air Service and then flew airmail between St. Louis and Chicago. He had crashed and parachuted to safety several times, and he was virtually unknown outside aviation circles.

Lindbergh believed a single-engine aircraft with one pilot would be lighter and more reliable than the heavy multi-engine machines of his rivals. Backed by a group of St. Louis businessmen, including Harry Knight and Harold Bixby, he commissioned the small Ryan Airlines company of San Diego to build a custom aircraft. Designed by Donald Hall and completed in about two months, the Ryan NYP (“New York–Paris”) was named the Spirit of St. Louis in honour of its sponsors.

The aircraft was built around fuel. Its 223-horsepower Wright J-5C Whirlwind engine drew on tanks holding around 450 US gallons (about 1,700 litres). The main tank was placed in front of the cockpit, so Lindbergh had no forward windscreen and used a periscope and side windows to see. To save weight he carried no radio, no parachute and minimal food.

What happened: New York to Paris

On 10–12 May 1927 Lindbergh flew the new aircraft from San Diego to New York via St. Louis, setting a transcontinental record. Bad weather then kept all the competing aircraft on the ground. On the rainy morning of 20 May, after a forecast of clearing skies over the Atlantic, he decided to go.

At 7:52 a.m. the heavily loaded Spirit of St. Louis lumbered down the muddy runway of Roosevelt Field on Long Island and only just cleared telephone wires at its end. Lindbergh followed a great-circle route over New England, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, then headed out over the open ocean as night fell. He navigated by dead reckoning, using compass, airspeed and time to estimate his position.

The greatest danger was exhaustion. Lindbergh had barely slept before take-off, and over the Atlantic he struggled to stay awake for hours, at times flying just above the waves and through fog, cloud and icing conditions. In his later memoir he described drifting in and out of sleep and seeing phantom-like presences in the cockpit.

On the afternoon of 21 May he sighted fishing boats and then the coast of Ireland near Dingle Bay, remarkably close to his planned course. He crossed southern England and the English Channel, followed the Seine to Paris and landed at Le Bourget airfield at 10:22 p.m. local time. A crowd estimated at around 100,000 or more, alerted by reports of his progress, surged across the field to greet him.

Key people

• Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974): the pilot, who later became an aviation consultant, author and, controversially, an isolationist campaigner.
• Raymond Orteig (1870–1939): the New York hotelier who funded the prize.
• Donald Hall (1898–1968): chief engineer at Ryan Airlines and designer of the Spirit of St. Louis.
• Charles Nungesser and François Coli: French aviators lost in their east-to-west attempt two weeks before Lindbergh’s flight.
• Clarence Chamberlin: American pilot who, with the businessman Charles Levine as passenger, flew from New York to Germany on 4–6 June 1927, setting a distance record.

Celebrity and the “Lindbergh boom”

The reaction to Lindbergh’s flight was extraordinary. He was received by the French president and fêted in Brussels and London before returning to the United States aboard the cruiser USS Memphis. President Calvin Coolidge presented him with the Distinguished Flying Cross in Washington, and New York staged a ticker-tape parade on 13 June 1927 watched by crowds estimated in the millions. He later received the Medal of Honor, and Time magazine named him its first “Man of the Year”.

Lindbergh used his fame to promote aviation. Sponsored by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis on a three-month tour of all 48 states, visiting 82 cities. Applications for pilot’s licences rose sharply, aircraft manufacturers and airline stocks boomed, and passenger air travel in the United States grew rapidly in the years that followed. Historians often call this surge the “Lindbergh boom”.

Later life and controversies

Lindbergh’s later life was marked by tragedy and controversy. In 1932 his infant son was kidnapped and killed, a crime that became one of the most publicised cases of the century. Seeking privacy, the family moved to Europe for several years. During visits to Germany in the late 1930s Lindbergh inspected the Luftwaffe and accepted a German decoration, which drew criticism.

From 1940 he was a leading speaker for the America First Committee, which opposed US entry into the Second World War. A 1941 speech in Des Moines in which he accused Jewish Americans, among others, of pushing the country towards war was widely condemned as antisemitic. After Pearl Harbor he supported the war effort and flew combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian adviser. In later decades he became an advocate for conservation, and his 1953 book The Spirit of St. Louis won a Pulitzer Prize.

By the numbers

Legacy

Lindbergh did not make the first transatlantic flight, and his aircraft was not technically revolutionary. His achievement was to prove that careful planning, a reliable engine and a light, purpose-built aircraft could cross an ocean alone, and to do it in a way that captured the imagination of millions. The flight shrank the psychological distance between America and Europe at a time when the two continents were drawing closer through trade, migration and culture.

Lindbergh also helped later pioneers: in 1929 he befriended the rocket scientist Robert Goddard, whose first liquid-fuelled rocket had flown in 1926, and helped him win funding. The Spirit of St. Louis has hung in the Smithsonian since 1928, and Lindbergh’s flight remains the best-known single journey in the history of aviation.

Timeline

• 1919, May: Raymond Orteig offers $25,000 for a New York–Paris non-stop flight.
• 1919, 14–15 June: Alcock and Brown make the first non-stop transatlantic flight.
• 1926, 21 September: René Fonck’s attempt ends in a fatal crash at take-off.
• 1927, 28 April: The Spirit of St. Louis makes its first flight in San Diego.
• 1927, 8–9 May: Nungesser and Coli disappear attempting a Paris–New York flight.
• 1927, 20 May, 7:52 a.m.: Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island.
• 1927, 21 May, 10:22 p.m.: Lindbergh lands at Le Bourget, Paris.
• 1927, 13 June: Ticker-tape parade in New York City.
• 1928: The Spirit of St. Louis is given to the Smithsonian Institution.

Why it matters

Lindbergh’s solo crossing turned long-distance flight from a gamble into a public expectation. It made aviation popular, attracted the investment that built airlines and airports, and created the first truly global celebrity of the mass-media age. Within a generation, flying across the Atlantic would become routine.