The Spirit of St. Louis

Here in the main entrance to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, hovering over a Mercury space capsule and a model of the Wright brothers' flyer, is perhaps the most famous airplane ever built. The Spirit of St. Louis was Charles Lindbergh's plane, in which he flew non stop from New York to Paris in 1927, opening a new age of avation.

A few weeks before his flight Charles Lindbergh was but one of a number of barnstorming young pilots full of courage, wild ideas and dreams of glory, considered by many to be crazy at the idea that a person could actually fly thousands of miles across the Atlantic and land safely on the other side. In its time it may have been an even wilder idea than the thought of putting human beings on Mars.

Others had tried to make that flight and had failed, some going to their death. Although Lindbergh's backers had confidence in the man they knew as "Slim," very few outside the aviation community knew anything about him. Personally supervising the construction of the plane on which his life would depend, Lindbergh prepared for the flight by calculating every gallon of fuel he would need and studying maps of the areas over which he would fly. On the night before his flight Lindbergh slept only fitfully, for less than two hours, even though he faced an ordeal of over 30 hours duration.

At 6:00 a.m. on the morning of May 21, 1927, the "Lone Eagle" bounced his machine, which was filled with as much gasoline as it could possible hold in every space available, down a muddy runway on Long Island and, barely clearing the trees, lifted off on his journey. Thirty three hours later, during which his greatest enemy was fatigue, Lindbergh set his craft down among thousands of cheering Parisians who had tracked his perilous flight and had come to welcome him.

Within hours this young American had become quite probably the most famous man in the world. For the rest of his life, he and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and their children would struggle to live some semblance of a normal life in the face of publicity that might have destroyed lesser humans.

The Lindberghs' story is one of the most fascinating in American history, and has been written about both by Charles and Anne as well as by many biographers, admiring and critical. Their tale is full of joy and tragedy and all the emotions in between. Yet no matter how many times one has heard the stories, looking at this tiny little machine one still is affected: impossible, we say, and yet Lindbergh did it, and in flying from New York to Paris accomplished one of the most heroic feats of this long and troubled century.