“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”                            Graham Greene

May 21, 1927 – Paris, France: Forty miles from Le Bourget Airfield, he began to see the flares. Less than 33 hours earlier, 500 people had watched the daring 25-year-old pilot take off from a muddy Roosevelt Field runway in New York. He hoped to become the first pilot to make a solo non-stop flight to Paris.

As the airplane dropped toward the runway, he saw the throngs of people, a scene that would remain with him forever. An estimated 100,000 cheering people had surrounded the airport awaiting his arrival. Charles Lindbergh had become a world hero overnight.

Lindbergh was born one year before the Wright Brothers’ historic first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. He grew up on a farm in Little Falls, Minnesota. As a 20-year-old college student, he took his first airplane ride and fell in love with flying. A few months later, he dropped out of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin to pursue his passion for airplanes. After two years of Army pilot training, Lindbergh got a job flying mail from Chicago to St. Louis.

In 1919, Raymond Ortieg, a New York hotel owner, offered $25,000 to the first pilot to fly solo non-stop between New York and Paris. Five years later, several pilots died trying, but no one claimed Orteig’s prize. Despite the risk, Lindbergh committed his life savings of $2,000 and convinced several St. Louis businessmen to donate $15,000 for his attempt.

The four largest airplane manufacturers in the United States turned Lindbergh down. He found a small company in San Diego, California, to design an airplane specially for his trip. Lindbergh chose to forego the heavy pilot seat, the radio, and the parachute to reduce the plane’s weight so it could accommodate more gasoline. He would sit in a small wicker chair.  

Lindbergh’s chief concerns included engine reliability, running out of fuel, and navigational error, but pilot fatigue was his biggest worry. Thirteen days before his scheduled flight, two World War I French aviators took off from Paris en route to New York and were never heard from again.

Undeterred, on May 20, 1927, Lindbergh took off at 7:52 a.m. from the 5,000-foot runway at Roosevelt Field after two days of weather delays. With 2,700 pounds of fuel in a 2,500-pound airplane, he needed every foot of the runway to clear the telephone lines, his first hurdle.

Lindbergh used a simple altimeter to determine altitude, a compass, and a stopwatch to navigate his course. He made pencil marks on the gas tanks to track fuel levels. Benefiting from good weather, Lindbergh maintained a speed of 100 miles per hour and an altitude of 500 feet and reached Newfoundland at 6 p.m.

At 9 p.m., a thunderstorm forced him to climb to 10,000 feet to fly above the storm. With ice forming on the wings, he feared the plane would become too heavy to fly. “The ice forming worried me a great deal,” recalled Lindbergh, “and I debated whether I should keep going or go back. I decided I must not think any more about going back.”

At 2 a.m., with daylight dawning, Lindbergh calculated that he was halfway to Paris. He had another 18 hours to go, and rather than excitement, he felt only dread. At 5 a.m., a dense fog forced him to fly 10 feet above the ocean to maintain visual contact. Lindberg repeatedly nodded off, waking seconds, sometimes a minute later. Finally, after flying for hours in the fog, it cleared, and he spotted several small fishing boats. At 27 hours into his mission, he made it to the coast of Ireland. Lindbergh was now energized and wide awake.

At 10 p.m. Paris time, 33.5 hours, and 3,597 miles after leaving New York’s Roosevelt Field, Lindbergh’s plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, touched down at Le Bourget Airfield. Charles Lindberg had not slept in 55 hours.

The vast crowd stormed the barricades around the airfield and pulled the weary young aviator from his plane. They paraded him around the field on their shoulders before taking him to the awaiting press corps. Twenty-four years after the Wright brothers’ 59-second flight, Charles Lindbergh’s daring secured his place in aviation history and opened the door to new era of transcontinental flights between America and Europe.