Charles Lindbergh - Spirit of St. Louis

IN GENERAL, this book is about flying, and an aviator's life, in the beginning third of the 20th century. In particular, it describes the planning and execution of the first nonstop airplane flight between the continents of America and Europe. It has been fourteen years in the writing. Started in the city of Paris, during the tense prewar winter of 1938, its manuscript was completed on the shore of Scotts Cove, off Long Island Sound, in the hardly more tranquil year of 1952.

The chapters that follow have been drafted and revised under conditions ranging from the uncertainty of a fighting squadron's tent in the jungles of New Guinea, to the stable family life of a Connecticut suburban home, and under such diverse daily influences as accompany noonday, midnight, and dawn. On top of a manuscript sheet I often marked down my location at the moment of writing or revising. Glancing through old drafts, I now pick out, more or less at random, the following geographical positions: aboard S.S. Aquitania, en route Cherbourg to New York; Army and Navy Club, Washington, D.C.; with the Marines on a Marshall atoll; in a bomber, returning from the North Magnetic Pole; General Partridge's residence at Nagoya, Japan; in a house trailer on the Florida Keys; on an air base in Arabia; parked on a roadside in the Italian Alps; camped in Germany's Taunus mountains; at the Carrels' island of St. Gildas.

Because the writing began more then eleven years after the last incident described took place, and because detailed records were not available at the time and later could not be transported everywhere the manuscript traveled, I have drawn heavily on memory for early drafts.

Searching memory might be compared to throwing the beam of a strong light, from your hilltop camp site, back over the road you traveled by day. Only a few of the objects you passed are clearly illuminated; countless others are hidden behind them, screened from the rays. There is bound to be some vagueness and distortion in the distance. But memory has advantages that compensate for its failings. By eliminating detail, it clarifies the picture as a whole. Like an artist's brush, it finds higher value in life's essence than in its photographic intricacy.

Records, on the other hand, illuminate the corners with which they are concerned, and surround your mind with their contemporary problems. They are relatively specialized, sometimes contradictory, and often incomplete. They restrict your perspective by bringing you too close to the area they cover. But they offer pay in precision for what they lack in breadth. I have rearranged and rewritten later manuscript drafts under the light of documents culled from attics, files, and libraries.

Throughout the following chapters I have digested conversations and press articles in order to avoid tedious detail. In telegrams I have used the originals where they were available, and approximated from memory where they were not. Since it is impossible to describe exactly the wanderings of the mind, I have placed flashbacks out of sequence to attain impressionistic truth. All incidents in this book are factual, and I have tried to put them into words with accuracy. The engine log and navigation log of the Spirit of St. Louis were stolen by some member of the crowd that overran fences and guards at Le Bourget. Therefore the log entries which form chapter heads in Part II have been filled in from performance curves and other records. The figures used are close to those marked down in flight, but there is certainly some variation.

When the Spirit of St. Louis flew to Paris, aviation was shouldering its way from the stage of invention onto the stage of usefulness. Enthusiasts still talked about "the conquest of the air." Rules for safety were sometimes just the reverse of today's. When a pilot encountered fog, he turned his eyes to the earth instead of to his dials, and the quality of

his senses was as important as that of his mind. The ability of an aircraft to make an emergency landing in a small pasture warranted a considerable reduction in its cruising speed; while the advantage of a cockpit forward, from the standpoint of vision, was more than offset by the advantage of a cockpit aft, from the standpoint of crash. But the monoplane had become a serious threat to the biplane's superiority. Instrument-flying techniques were being developed by the more progressive pilots. And promises of radio communication gave airmen cause for hope.

Along with most of my fellow fliers, I believed that aviation had a brilliant future. But my vision, extravagant as it seemed at the time, fell short of accomplishments now achieved with aircraft, by their pilots, engineers, and executives. Speeds, ranges, altitudes, powers, sizes, economies, and destructive capabilities today have shattered limiting factors of a quarter century ago. Science has transformed the frail craft of Le Bris, Lilienthal, and the Wright brothers into metal, and loaded them with cargoes varying from orchids to atomic bombs. Thousands of men, women, and children now cruise each day above the racing pilot's speed of 1927. Agencies all over the world sell tickets to cross the ocean at steamer-travel prices. Airlines have flown billions of passenger miles between fatalities. Engines have changed their horsepower ratings from hundreds into thousands. Military crews fly regularly above what the world's altitude record used to be.