Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight: The 1927 Solo Crossing
On the night of May 20–21, 1927, a 25-year-old American airmail pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island in a single-engine Ryan monoplane named the Spirit of St. Louis and, 33.5 hours and 3,610 statute miles later, landed at Le Bourget Aerodrome outside Paris. He was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, and the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on earth, triggered an “aviation craze” that lasted two years, and changed the way Americans thought about air travel.
For the broader context, see the parent cluster aviation in the 1920s. For the wild decade of stunt flying, For the women aviators who shared the era, For 1927 as the year everything happened, For the cultural backdrop,
The Orteig Prize
The flight was in pursuit of a prize: the $25,000 Raymond Orteig Prize, offered in 1919 by the French-American hotelier Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, in either direction. The prize was modeled on the £1,000 Daily Mail prize Louis Blériot had won in 1909 for crossing the English Channel. The Orteig Prize went unclaimed for seven years. The first serious attempt came in 1924, when a French biplane crew reached Ireland before turning back. Other attempts in 1926 and 1927 ended in crashes. On May 8, 1927, the French aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli disappeared over the Atlantic in their L’Oiseau Blanc and were never seen again.
By the spring of 1927, several American and French teams were preparing bids. René Fonck, the French ace of World War I, was preparing a multi-engine Sikorsky S-35. Richard E. Byrd, the American polar explorer, was preparing a Fokker trimotor. Noel Wien and others were also preparing. The Lindbergh bid, by a young airmail pilot with no transatlantic experience and a small, single-engine plane, was considered a long shot.
The Aviator: Charles Augustus Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902, the son of a lawyer and a chemistry teacher. His parents’ marriage dissolved when he was young, and he was raised by his mother and her parents in Little Falls, Minnesota. He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1920 to study engineering, but dropped out after two years to enroll in flying school. He trained at the Army flying schools at Brooks Field and Kelly Field in Texas, was commissioned as a reserve lieutenant, and spent 1924–26 as a barnstormer and airmail pilot for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis, flying the route between St. Louis and Chicago. In 1925 his plane crashed in a hotel courtyard in St. Louis; he was unhurt.
Lindbergh’s decision to compete for the Orteig Prize was made in early 1927. He needed an aircraft capable of making the 3,600-mile crossing nonstop, and he chose the Ryan NYP monoplane designed by Donald Hall of the Ryan Airlines of San Diego. The plane was a development of the Ryan M-2 mail plane, modified at Lindbergh’s request with a single 223-horsepower Wright Whirlwind J-5C engine, additional fuel tanks (forward of the cockpit, behind the pilot’s seat, and in the wing leading edges), and a large transparent “greenhouse” nose filled with fuel.
The Spirit of St. Louis
The aircraft was named the Spirit of St. Louis in honor of the St. Louis businessmen who had put up the $10,580 in capital that the plane’s construction had required. The chief backers were Harry Knight and Harold Bixby, with a contribution from E. Lansing Ray of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce. The plane was completed at the Ryan factory in San Diego in just 60 days, and Lindbergh flew it from San Diego to Curtiss Field on Long Island in April and May 1927, with several stops.
The plane was a high-wing, single-engine monoplane with a 36-foot wingspan. The forward-fuselage fuel tank was its most distinctive feature — to allow maximum fuel capacity, the cockpit was moved aft and a tank installed in the nose, leaving Lindbergh to peer out the side windows during takeoff and landing. The total fuel capacity was 450 U.S. gallons, enough for about 40 hours of flight.
The Flight: May 20–21, 1927
Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island at 7:52 a.m. on Friday, May 20, 1927, in heavy fog and slushy conditions. The overloaded plane barely cleared the telephone wires at the end of the field. He flew northeast over Long Island and Cape Cod, then over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where he picked up the transatlantic course. He crossed the Atlantic in a single, roughly 18-hour leg, battling sleep, icing, fog, and a headwind. He made landfall over Ireland on the evening of May 20 and flew south past England and into France through the night, using the lights of towns to navigate.
He landed at Le Bourget Aerodrome at 10:22 p.m. Paris time on May 21, 1927 — 33.5 hours and 3,610 statute miles after takeoff. He had been awake for more than 55 hours. The plane was immediately engulfed by a crowd of 100,000 people who had heard the news and rushed to the airport. The plane was damaged, Lindbergh was nearly trampled, and French police had to rescue him. The reception in Paris was the beginning of a worldwide celebrity that would last the rest of his life.
The Impact
The Lindbergh flight was the biggest news story of 1927 — the year that was already being called “the year everything happened.” Lindbergh returned to the United States aboard the Navy cruiser USS Memphis, arriving in Washington on June 11. He received a ticker-tape parade down Broadway on June 13, 1927, attended by an estimated 4 million people — the largest ticker-tape parade in New York history up to that point. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Calvin Coolidge, the Orteig Prize of $25,000, and dozens of other awards. He was given the “Lone Eagle” nickname and the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
The “Lindbergh Boom” in aviation — a sharp increase in interest, investment, and participation — lasted until the stock market crash of October 1929. The number of licensed pilots in the United States grew from about 6,000 in 1927 to 18,000 in 1929. The number of aircraft manufacturers grew from about 50 to 220. The number of airports grew from about 600 to 1,500. The 1957 film The Spirit of St. Louis, directed by Billy Wilder and starring James Stewart, dramatized the flight. The original Spirit of St. Louis is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, alongside the Wright Flyer.
The Aftermath: Triumph and Tragedy
Lindbergh’s life after the flight was a long sequence of honors and tragedies. He married Anne Morrow, the daughter of the ambassador to Mexico and a pilot in her own right, in 1929. They had six children, the first of whom, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was kidnapped from the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey, on March 1, 1932, and found dead on May 12, 1932. The “Crime of the Century” led to the Lindbergh Law of 1932, which made kidnapping a federal crime, and to the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was executed on April 3, 1936. Most historians now regard Hauptmann’s guilt as doubtful; the case was marked by circumstantial evidence and procedural irregularities.
The Lindberghs left the United States for Europe in 1935. Lindbergh made several visits to Nazi Germany in 1936–38, was awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Hermann Göring in 1938, and was sharply criticized on his return. He was a leading member of the America First Committee and an opponent of U.S. intervention in World War II until Pearl Harbor. He returned to the United States in 1941. In 1953 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography The Spirit of St. Louis. He died of cancer on August 26, 1974, in Maui, Hawaii, at 72.