His wings were icing up and he was tired. It was 1927; he was twenty-five; and his plane was whining in the fog. He went lower and lower until he was skimming the tops of the waves. The ice began to melt off the wings, but he could barely keep his eyes open. Twenty-four hours he had been flying. He had taken the dare, and now he was somewhere out over the Atlantic. Somewhere. Dead reckoning. He was flying with a compass, heading due East, hoping to stumble onto Europe, if he didn't end up in the icy Atlantic. The money was on the latter when he took off and barely cleared the telephone wires with his heavy, fuel-laden plane.

And then the voices started. When he would write about it later, people would say it was due to fatigue. Others would make mystical connections. But the voices were there. He was sure. In the darkness, with his consciousness fading in and out, the voices told him to keep going. Was it the dead? Were there lost souls out over the darkest recesses of the ocean? Did they ride on his plane like spirits looking for salvation? They were in the cockpit with him. They were there, and they kept him going.

Lindbergh turned from the window in Orville Wright's home. His flight across the Atlantic had been years ago, but suddenly he felt as if he were back over that dark ocean. Orville stood beside him, a short man with small hands, a mustache, and an oddly fastidious air about him. Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world, and he had come to see another famous man, Orville Wright. But Lindbergh's fame had broken all known barriers. He was a world-famous superstar. People regarded him as if he weren't just someone who flew over the ocean; it was as if he had walked across it. Mass celebrity had broken into universal consciousness.

The man who had invented flight was a shrunken, gray figure; but, to a twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh, most older men seemed that way. But where was the other brother? He had died, of course, and Orville was the surviving one of the pair. Now it was up to Lindbergh to get the most important plane in the world back to America.

Secretary Abbott was desperate and had turned to the most famous man in America to assist him in getting back the most famous plane in the world. As Tom Crouch wrote in The Bishop's Boys, “Abbott suggested the creation of a committee to mediate the differences between them [himself and Orville] and proposed that Charles Lindbergh should head the group. Orville accepted.”1 The committee would determine whether or not “the Smithsonian claim that the 1914 Hammondsport tests had demonstrated the capability of the 1903 aerodrome for flight.”

If the Smithsonian was right, Orville would bring the plane home from England. If Orville was proved right, then the Smithsonian would “rectify the offenses committed by it in the past in its own publications by printing full corrections in these same publications.”²

So Lindbergh met with Abbott and then Orville. He had visited Orville before in Dayton and had enjoyed his company. Orville immediately rejected the committee of the secretaries of War, Navy, and Commerce set up by Lindbergh.³ He recognized that all of the secretaries “had some official connection with the Smithsonian.”⁴ As the 1903 Wright Flyer was displayed in the Science Museum of London and Hitler's rearmament of Germany went on unabated, Orville ignored the committee and gave final terms for return of the Flyer. Orville wanted the Smithsonian to say it was misled by the Zahm report, which had claimed that the plane was “nearly as possible in its original condition.”⁵ And he wanted the Smithsonian to tell its readers to “disregard all of its former statements and expressions of opinion regarding the flights at Hammondsport in 1914.”⁶

Walcott had gone to his grave in 1927 sticking to his assertion that the Langley aerodrome was the first airplane capable of flight. That same year, 1927, Charles Abbott changed the label on the aerodrome in the museum from “The First Man-Carrying Aeroplane in the History of the World Capable of Sustained Free Flight”⁷ to “Langley Aerodrome—The Original Langley Flying Machine of 1903, Restored.”⁸ He had the Smithsonian Board of Regents pass a resolution in 1928 stating “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a propeller-propelled, heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.”9

Orville was not moved. He told Lindbergh that he wanted just two things, and then the 1903 Flyer could return: “a published list of the differences between the 1903 Aerodrome and the 1914 Hammondsport machine and an admission by the Smithsonian that the craft was heavily modified.”¹⁰

Abbott countered with a full report that could be released, but not an admission by the Smithsonian that the 1903 aerodrome had been modified.¹¹ Orville saw the list being buried in a report and giving him no satisfaction as to wrongdoing by the Smithsonian. He gave his last response on the subject in 1935. The patent suit had been long settled with Glenn Curtiss by the government's establishment of a patent pool, so this would be his last chance to right the wrongs done to him and his brother by Curtiss and the Smithsonian.

Instead of a paper such as you have proposed may I offer the following suggestion: That the Smithsonian publish a paper presenting a list of specifications in parallel columns of those features of the Langley machine of 1903 and the Hammondsport machine of 1914 in which there were differences with an introduction stating that the Smithsonian finds that it was misled by the Zahm report of 1914; that through the Zahm paper the Institution was led to believe that the aeroplane tested at Hammondsport was “as nearly as possible in its original condition”; that as a result of this misinformation the Smithsonian had published erroneous statements from time to time alleging that the original Langley machine without modification, or with only such modifications as were necessary for the addition of floats, had been successfully flown at Hammondsport in 1914; that it ask its readers to disregard all of its former statements and expressions of opinion regarding the flights at Hammondsport in 1914 because these were based on misinformation as the list to follow will show.¹²

Orville wanted the Smithsonian to admit it had lied in 1914. Abbott never responded. It was up to Lindbergh now.

Lindbergh knew the Smithsonian would never go for what Orville wanted. To bring the plane back, they had to admit that they were wrong and that Langley's plane could never have flown. They wouldn't do that, and Orville wouldn't bring back the Flyer. The Smithsonian, and America, really, had to get the plane back somehow. It was America's. It was not England's. England had not solved flight, America had. Abbott believed Lindbergh could mediate between the Smithsonian and Orville Wright. The man had flown alone across the ocean. Alone. He could surely deal with this cranky old man and get the damn plane back. Lindbergh was a god in America. He was the first superstar. He was the first mass-media celebrity. He was world-famous. Surely, he could get the Wright Flyer back.

So, Orville wrote Lindbergh his demands, which, again, were nothing short of the Smithsonian saying it was totally wrong. Lindbergh tried to reason with Orville and get him to understand that they couldn't really say that. Orville probably didn't think much of Lindbergh. After all, Lindbergh had used his technology and technically speaking he had not paid him a royalty. He could not have flown across the ocean if it were not for Orville and Wilbur's invention. The 1903 Flyer paved the way for Lindbergh to become a world celebrity, and it irked Orville that people went so crazy over this man. No one had given him and Wilbur a ticker-tape parade in New York. Now they were trying to say the Wright invention didn't matter. They were trying to say that Samuel Langley had beaten him and his brother and had first invented a plane that would fly. If this was true, then why did they care so much about getting the 1903 Flyer back from England? No. The Smithsonian would have to admit its duplicity; confess that it had changed Langley's aerodrome during the trials and then lied about it; and then state for the world that there was only one plane that was capable of flying in 1903—and that was the plane sitting in London.

Apparently the star power of Lindbergh did nothing to change Orville's mind. He basically ignored what Lindbergh and Abbott had proposed: “Orville then proceeded as if the committee proposal had never been made. He sent Lindbergh a list based on Griffith Brewer's 1921 paper with the specific dimensions of the 1903 Langley aerodrome on one side of the page and those of the 1914 machine on the other, so that any reader could see the differences.”13

Lindbergh passed on the list and proposed that a long article be published by the Smithsonian with the list included, but Orville would have none of it. He responded with the above-mentioned request that the Smithsonian publish an itemized list of specifications showing how the 1914 Hammondsport machine differed from the original Langley machine of 1903.

Essentially, the Smithsonian would have to say that it was wrong and had lied.

Lindbergh eventually gave up. He later wrote in his diary that he believed the fault lay “primarily with the Smithsonian people. But Orville Wright is not an easy man to deal with in the matter. I don't blame him much, though, when I think of the way he was treated for a period of years. He has encountered the narrowmindedness of science and the dishonesty of commerce.”14

A few years later, Lindbergh then left for Nazi Germany, at the invitation of Adolf Hitler, to see how far the Germans had come in aviation. America had kidnapped and murdered his son, and people would not leave him alone. People needed to be controlled. Democracy was too chaotic. Lindbergh believed in precision, control, and eugenics.¹⁵ He believed in racial superiority. Men like Hitler would change the world. Fascism was the answer.¹⁶ Look at the autobahn, the Volkswagen, and the Luftwaffe. Germany was a sterling example of how the world should be. Even Orville Wright, the pioneer of flight, had lost his way in America. Maybe the flyer should stay in London. Lindbergh left and did not return to America until 1938.¹⁷

The tide of public opinion was turning against Abbott and the Smithsonian. “During the next eight years Abbott was bombarded with scores of petitions, most of them a result of a drive by the aviation magazine Contact asking that the Smithsonian take the requisite steps to get back the 1903 Flyer. Bills were introduced in Congress calling for an investigation and the creation of a committee to resolve the dispute…. A new organization Men with Wings was established to support the return of the airplane from England.”¹⁸

The 1903 Wright Flyer would remain in London as the first bombs fell during World War II. Lindbergh became involved with an isolationist movement called the America First Committee to keep America out of the war. He thought the Germans knew what they were doing. He thought fascism was the answer.¹⁹ When the Final Solution was revealed, Lindbergh would denounce the Nazis, but it was too late. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was disgraced forever.²⁰

The Germans declared war on America soon after.