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Alone across the Atlantic

Lindbergh's triumph | U.S. pilot sets up three records | Crowds go mad

Monday 23 May 1927


The two British R.A.F. pilots who set out on Friday to make a non-stop flight to India from Lincolnshire were force to make a landing near the entrance to the Persian Gulf on Saturday evening, after having accomplished by far the most difficult part of their flight. They had travelled at least 3,400 miles (out of the 4,160 to Karachi), and thus beat the previous French record for a non-stop flight of 3,343 miles. An hour after they had set up this record it was beaten by Lindbergh's arrival in Paris.

The amazing New York-Paris flight
How Lindbergh arrived and his wild reception

From our own correspondent
Paris, Sunday

Early yesterday evening it became known that Lindbergh was approaching the French coast. Orders were at once given to put the wonderful air-lighting system of Northern France into action. The vertical projectors along the coast were turned on and the well-marked London-Paris routes illuminated. From any high building in Paris one could see after dusk the violent criss-cross yet regular gesticulations of the thousand-million-candle-power lighthouse on Mont Saint Valerien, with its two straight rays from Le Bourget illuminated the chimneys and spires of the city at eleven second intervals.

Thus, when the young flying man arrived at half-past eight over Cherbourg he found himself helped by the nightfall, for his route was marked out for him. In the Seine estuary he caught his first glimpse of St. Valerien twinkling in and out. Thirty miles from Paris the revolving flare of Le Bourget began to flash its welcome. Shortly after ten o'clock he perceived the red rockets that flashed constantly up from the famous air station, and shortly before a quarter-past ten he was high above the light-flooded aviation field itself at Le Bourget. Despite his thirty-three hours' strain since leaving New York this astonishing youth, instead of coming down, spent nearly ten minutes circling over Paris, for the illuminated pillar of the Eiffel Tower had caught his attention.

Where am I?

At length the roar of his propeller was heard by the vast crowd estimated at 100,000) now assembled in and about the flying ground. A silver speck swam into the probing finger of a searchlight, and a few seconds later the glistening monoplane was bounding lightly upon the vast enclosed field. It was a perfect landing, delicately and skilfully done.

At such moments mass emotion becomes uncontrollable, even dangerous. A surge began among the crowd, and instantly the barriers were down, the line of guarding troops was swept aside, and thousands and thousands of men, carried away by enthusiasm, were racing through the darkness towards the distant, now immobile monoplane still glistening under the searchlight. When the crowd reached it it still remained in all its brand newness just as it had emerged from the factory, without a speck or a stain of oil or dust after its 3,800-mile journey. A moment later it began to crumble into splinters under the penknives of souvenir-hunters, careless of their vandalism. The "Marseillaise" alternated with roars of "Vive l'Amerique."

A young fair-haired face thrust itself from the pilot's window, a light Middle West voice inquired "Where am I?" - a question that has since amused all Paris: "Just as if he had descended from Mars or some other world" - and an astonishingly long, lithe body began to extricate itself from the machine.

For the first time since leaving New York Lindbergh was in physical danger. The uncontrollable crowd surged upon him, eager to carry him in triumph, but more than like to do harm. Two French flying men and an American colleague managed to slip him away unperceived into a neighbouring hangar while the crowd in its confusion seized hold of a protesting stranger in aviator's dress and bore him struggling to the pavilion, where to their astonishment he refused to accept the bouquet offered him by the Reception Committee.

An unquenchable thirst

Over a cup of coffee in his retreat, sheltered from the singing, roaring crowd, Lindbergh talked of his journey to his rescuers, who were now joined by the American Ambassador and other notables. He talked with modesty, showed little sign of fatigue, no desire to sleep, but simply an unquenchable thirst and a preference to talk standing on his feet. "It tires me more to sit down," he explained.

His story was simple yet amazing. It may be summed up in two phrases: a perfect machine and good weather. Some of his interlocutors were expert flyers, and it was to them that his exploit seemed most miraculous. They gasped when they examined his minute pocket compass and the incredibly small scale chart of the Northern Atlantic and its coasts that had guided him. He had no sextant and in any case no knowledge how to use it - "But I've only one pair of hands, how could I have taken the sun," he protested, - no experience in ocean navigation, nothing but the usual compass variations stamped on the chart, and yet in this primitive fashion he had traversed with almost mathematical exactitude so large and empty a stretch of the world's surface.

Amazing navigation

"Do you mean to say you did it all on mere dead reckoning?" demanded of him Sir Alan Cobham, equally amazed, in a conversation this afternoon.

"How else?"

"But what sort of landfall did you make? How far were you out of your reckoning on sighting the Irish coast?" he was asked.

"Not much; only a few miles."

"Well, I simply don't know how you did it," is said to have been his British colleague's rejoinder.

Expert commentators in the Paris press, equally at a loss, are driven to attribute to the young American either stupendous luck or an instinct like that of migrant birds. Luck, however, or not luck, the lesson that is drawn from Lindbergh's success is that for such feats the light, swift machine of military scouting or chasing type is to be preferred to the giant overweighted seaplane, and that the ideal should henceforth be rather that of a projectile hurled across vast spaces at the highest possible speed. It may be noted that on landing the Spirit of St. Louis still carried enough petrol to have gone another thousand miles or so, that the engine was in perfect running trim, and the aviator far from exhausted.

So far indeed from exhaustion was he that he remained thus talking until after midnight. The American Ambassador's car drove him unobserved to Paris and through the streets, first to the Arc de Triomphe, where he paid the ritual homage to the Unknown Soldier, and then to the Embassy, where he actually received the press and answered questions, still without apparent fatigue, at two o'clock in the morning.

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