SECOND-RATE PILOT
The chilly fall weather brought an end to the 1923 barnstorming season. Land-loving folks just didn’t want to go up in a freezing-cold open cockpit. With time on his hands, Charles steered a course toward the St. Louis Air Meet. Held at Lambert Field, it was meant to showcase advances in aircraft’s speed and reliability. Not only would there be landing contests, speed races, and flying demonstrations, but also the latest military aircraft would be on display—from little sport racers that could zoom at 125 miles an hour to big army bombers. Charles was wild to see it all. It would be fun “to view the show as an insider—as a pilot in my own right.”
The place was crowded with military planes, and the star performers were the army fliers, with their up-to-date equipment. After landing in a weedy area at the far end of a long row of civilian planes, Charles walked around the field, studying aircraft and growing more and more self-conscious. With his unpolished boots and oil-stained clothes, he looked like a country bumpkin beside the crisply uniformed army pilots. He tried to absorb himself in watching their flying maneuvers—many of which he’d never even heard of. But by day’s end he was itching to escape into the air himself.
That was when he learned the field was being thrown open to visiting pilots. “I couldn’t stay on the ground any longer and watch all those planes overhead,” he said. He had to show them—and maybe himself—that he was just as good a pilot.
“I felt highly professional as I climbed into my cockpit and started the warm-up,” he recalled. Meticulously, he idled the engine for three minutes to check temperature and pressure. Then he pushed the throttle wide open. “Everything was perfect.”
Until he heard the yelling.
Charles turned. Behind him billowed a thick cloud of yellow dust thrown up by his plane. Through it he could vaguely see several angry, rudely gesturing men. Charles gulped. “I’d been used to flying from sod-covered pastures, not a crowded and newly graded airport, baked dry by Missouri’s sun.”
Coughing and dust-covered, an air official emerged from the cloud. “God Almighty!” he sputtered. “Where did you learn to fly? Don’t you know enough to taxi out to the field before you warm up your engine? Get out and lift that tail around. Hold that throttle down. All right, damn it, go ahead!”
Charles felt “like a forty-acre farmer stumbling through his first visit to the state fair.” Carefully, he taxied out and took off. But any joy he’d hoped to find in the flight had evaporated. He realized that while he had loads of practical experience, his six hours of flight instruction with Ira Biffle had provided little technical training.
As a pilot, he was second-rate.
And second-rate would never do.
Within weeks, he sold his Jenny and enrolled in a one-year course in the army reserve—the most advanced and challenging flying program then available. Just months later, in March 1924, he reported for duty at Brooks Field in San Antonio, Texas. The twenty-two-year-old was one of 104 cadets. Half of them, warned his commanding officer, would be kicked out before they graduated.
Charles did not intend to be one of them.
IN THE ARMY
On the first morning of flight training—March 19, 1924—Master Sergeant Bill Winston gathered seven new recruits, including Cadet Charles Lindbergh, around him on the dew-wet flying field. “Now you fellows are going to think you’re pretty good,” he said, looking pointedly at Charles, who wore an expression of cocky assuredness. “I just want you to remember this: in aviation, it may be all right to fool the other fellow about how good you are—if you can. But don’t try to fool yourself.”
Then he waved the young pilots toward the army’s training planes—Jennies, just like the one Charles had been flying for the past year. Supremely confident, he climbed into the back cockpit behind Winston. He couldn’t wait to show off his skills. That was when he realized the controls were mounted on the left side of the fuselage. He’d only flown planes with right-hand throttles.
Changing hands on the stick threw Charles off. His first landing was far from perfect. It took three times around the field before he got the hang of the controls and Winston finally let him go up on his own.
It was a wobbly start.
Charles was also wobbly when it came to his classwork. “Photography, motors, map-making, field service regulations, radio theory, military law—twenty-five courses we took in our first half-year of training,” he recalled. On his first exam, he scored 72 percent—just two points above failing. Sliding by wouldn’t have worried him in high school, but it did now. Any cadet who failed two exams was automatically “washed out” of the program. And Charles did not want to be washed out.
“I studied after classes, through the weekends, far into the night,” he recalled. “At times I slipped into my bunk with swimming head, but I had the satisfaction of watching my grade average slowly climb through the 80’s and into the 90’s.” For the first time, “school and life became both rationally and emotionally connected.”
Even though he lived in a crowded barracks, Charles remained aloof and alone. As one historian put it, he was “able to blend into any environment—to be a part of any group, but always apart.” He joshed with the other cadets, even played practical jokes on a few, but nobody became a close friend—nobody, that is, except a stray white mutt he adopted and named Booster.
At the end of April, Charles received bad news. C.A., diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, was dying. “I may be ‘washed out’…for going up home,” Charles told a fellow cadet, “but that can’t be helped.” He hurried to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to find his father paralyzed and barely able to speak. Still, C.A.’s eyes brightened at the sight of his son. Charles sat holding his hand for most of that first day. A week later, C.A. lapsed into a coma.
Charles was willing to stay until the end, but Evangeline argued against it. C.A. wouldn’t have wanted him to sacrifice all that hard work, she said. Reluctantly, Charles returned to Brooks Field, where he crammed to catch up on all the work he’d missed. On May 24, a telegram arrived. C.A. had died, but no one expected Charles to attend the funeral. “Later,” wrote Evangeline, “when you come, you [can] comply with your Father’s wish about throwing his ashes ‘to the wind’…near the old farmstead he cared so much for.” And so, on the day C.A.’s life was being eulogized, his son studied for a navigation exam.
By September, only 33 of the 104 cadets remained in the program. One of them was Charles Lindbergh, who graduated second in his class.
After he’d packed his footlocker, he and the other “veteran” cadets headed ten miles west to Kelly Field for advanced training. Gunnery and bombing, dogfighting and flying in formation were just a few of the difficult skills the men learned. The course was so tough that by the time graduation rolled around on March 14, 1925, only nineteen remained. Charles, who earned a commission as second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps, graduated first in his class.
The next day, the graduates made a promise to stay in touch. But Charles never tried to see any of them again, and except for chance encounters, he didn’t. Already, the loner was living a “compartmentalized existence,” explained one biographer, “always packing light, carrying few people from one episode of his life to the next.”
Charles boarded a train for St. Louis. During his time in the army, his mind had kept turning back to Lambert Field and the air meet and the camaraderie he’d felt there. Now that he was a civilian again, what better place to start looking for a job? There would certainly be student pilots to teach at Lambert Field, and planes to take out barnstorming. “St. Louis is a city of winds,” said Charles. He believed they’d blow favorably for him.
“IF ONLY I HAD A BELLANCA”
Carved from a cornfield, Lambert Field was 170 acres of hard clay sod. There were no runways, just a triangular landing space in its middle. This was fine in the summer, but in the winter, gusty winds and deep, frozen ruts made taking off and landing difficult for even the best pilot. Like other airfields in those days, its facilities were rudimentary. It didn’t have navigational aids—no revolving beacons or boundary markers or floodlights. It didn’t have a control tower or even a weather service bureau. For weather reports, pilots simply telephoned railroad stations along their route and asked the ticket agent to stick his head out the door and tell them what he saw.
Most of Lambert Field’s commercial activity centered on Frank and Bill Robertson, who had set up the Robertson Aircraft Corporation. The corporation mostly reconditioned and sold army training planes and engines, but the brothers were looking to expand. They set their sights on the airmail business.
The United States had been flying mail between California and New York since 1920. Now the government wanted to add feeder lines to other areas of the country from that single cross-country route. Members of Congress did not want to pay for this expansion with federal funds. So they auctioned off the new lines to private businesses. The Robertson brothers proposed to run the St.-Louis-to-Chicago mail route.
And Charles proposed to be their chief pilot. Flying the mail was exactly the kind of job he wanted—a permanent, responsible position in aviation. But the first time he walked into the Robertsons’ office, they could hardly believe the baby-faced, gangling twenty-three-year-old was a veteran flier. Then Charles took up one of their planes and put it through its paces. He was the real thing. “There was never another like him,” recalled Bill.
Soon afterward, the Robertsons won their bid.
And Charles got his job.
He spent the winter of 1925–1926 surveying the 285-mile route, arranging for emergency landing spots along the way. He chose nine in all—one for every thirty miles. These were simply cow pastures and farmers’ fields fitted out with a little gasoline, a telephone, and somebody nearby to help the pilot. Of course, none of these fields were lit. If a pilot needed to land at night, he had to drop an emergency flare first and hope the sputtering orange flame shed enough light to avoid fences and ditches. Each plane was outfitted with one—just one—flare. For additional illumination, the pilot carried a pocket flashlight. Like everything else connected with civilian flying in 1926, the Robertsons’ mail route operated on a shoestring.
On April 15, 1926, Charles flew the first airmail from St. Louis to Chicago, the canvas sacks of letters piled in the front cockpit of his plane—a rebuilt army salvage De Havilland. The Robertsons’ contract with the government called for five round trips a week, and during the spring and summer Charles and the other two pilots completed 99 percent of their scheduled flights. “Ploughing through storms, wedging our way beneath low clouds, paying almost no attention to weather forecasts, we’ve more than once landed our rebuilt army warplanes on Chicago’s Maywood field when other lines cancelled out [and] older and perhaps wiser pilots ordered their cargo put on a train,” said Charles with pride. Because of their efforts, a letter arriving at the St. Louis post office before 3:30 in the afternoon could reach the New York post office by the next morning’s delivery—a whole day faster than mail sent by train.
Nonetheless, week after week, the mailbags remained nearly empty. To potential customers, the savings of a few hours was seldom worth the extra cost per letter (ten cents in postage as opposed to three cents for regular letter mail). Still, Charles and the others flew doggedly on. Their efficiency, they believed, would eventually prove to the public that commercial aviation was transportation’s future. “Whether the mail compartment contains ten letters or ten thousand is beside the point,” he explained. “We pilots have a tradition to establish. The commerce of air depends on it [and] we have faith in the future. Some day we know the sacks will fill.”
It didn’t take long, however, for Charles to realize that his permanent, responsible job in aviation bored him. He could no longer just “fly…where the wind blows,” he confessed in a letter to Evangeline. Instead, delivering the mail meant following the same route day after day. “The monotony of [it] is terrible,” he wrote. More and more he daydreamed of barnstorming in Alaska, or competing in long-distance airplane races. In search of a new challenge, he wrote to the National Geographic Society, asking if they needed an experienced pilot for future expeditions. And he joined the Missouri National Guard simply so he could do maneuvers with army planes that were too dangerous for civilian aircraft.
Adventure. That was what he longed for. The birth of the airplane had spurred the most exciting time in exploration since Columbus. Recently, Italian pilot Francesco de Pinedo had traveled from Italy to Australia via Japan in a series of short flights, covering thirty-four thousand miles in seven months. British pilot Alan J. Cobham had just started out on what would be a four-month trip by air from London to Cape Town, South Africa. And US Navy Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd was preparing to fly over the North Pole.
And what was Charles doing?
Flying back and forth between St. Louis and Chicago.
“Unless something new turns up, I expect to leave [St. Louis] soon,” he told Evangeline.
It was September 1926, and the last pink rays of sun had disappeared from the sky. Charles sat in the plane’s cockpit on his way to Chicago. The evening’s weather was perfect. Too perfect. There would be no flying challenge tonight. With his hand resting gently on the stick, he let his mind drift.
As he’d done since childhood, he posed questions and rolled around possible answers. He felt so detached from earth. Why couldn’t he just “fly on forever through space…beyond mountains, over oceans?” Tonight, though, he had to land in Chicago. It seemed a “roundabout method,” he thought, flying the mail north to Chicago just to transfer it to another plane (and another mail carrier) headed east. Why didn’t he have a plane that could fly all the way to New York? Such a plane did exist—the Wright-Bellanca—a monoplane, so called because it had just one pair of wings. One pair of wings meant less drag, allowing the Bellanca to fly faster and burn half the fuel.
If only I had a Bellanca, he thought. I’d show St. Louis businessmen what modern aircraft could do. He’d start by flying passengers from St. Louis to New York in just eight or nine hours.
No, wait!
If he had a Bellanca, he’d fill it with fuel tanks instead of passengers, and with the engine at low speed, the plane might be able to stay aloft for days. He could break the world’s endurance record and “set a dozen marks for range and speed and weight. Possibly—”
His mind took another leap, and a sudden notion startled him.
I could fly nonstop between New York and Paris.