In 1927, an unknown air mail pilot from rural Minnesota
enters a race against the best aviators in the world.
He will fly from New York to Paris, alone across the empty sea.
Charles Lindbergh is a dark horse in a deadly competition.
He risks his life on the longest flight ever flown
and he lands as the most famous man on earth.
The story is an American legend:
Lindbergh's dream to prove aviation's future.
A Lone Eagle, who inspires the world to look to the skies.
Early in the 20th century, the airplane is a deadly innovation.
Few people dare to flyand those who do often pay with their lives.
The heavens beckon, and then destroy.
The most lethal challenge is to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
A feat so hazardous that, in 1919,
a New York millionaire offers 25,000 dollars
to the first plane to fly nonstop between New York and Paris.
No one dares. Planes are too slow, too primitive and the ocean, too wide.
Three years pass.
Then, at a remote airfield in Nebraska,
a twentyyear old from rural Minnesota begins his apprenticeship
in the uncertain world of flight.
Charles Lindbergh has dropped out of college
after just one year to pursue his dream.
Lindbergh wants to be a pilot.
When a daredevil named Erold Bahl brings his aerial act to town,
the young Lindbergh sees a way to fiinally get off the ground.
Bahl admires the newcomer's enthusiasm,
and decides to take him on as a protege.
Lindbergh is selfreliant, calm, and driven.
He is shy and modest, but determined.
Lindbergh knows aviation is his future.
He is electrified by the perils and the freedom of flight.
"Trees become bushes; barns, toys; cows turn into rabbits as we climb.
I lose all conscious connection with the past.
I live only in the moment in this strange space,
crowded with beauty, pierced with danger."
In the air, Lindbergh shows no fear,
perfecting the most perilous barnstorming stunts.
Wingwalking...
Then skydiving, with a primitive silk parachute.
He makes hundreds of jumps.
With each leap, he risks his life, and enriches his spirit.
"Of course there's danger;
but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life.
I don't believe in taking foolish chances;
but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.
What civilization was not founded on adventure,
and how long could one exist without it?
What justifies the risk of life?"
Lindbergh masters the singleengine biplanes of the day.
Over the next year, he hops from town to town,
performing stunts across the rural midWest.
Then, Charles Lindbergh decides to make a serious commitment
to his flying infatuation.
In 1924, he enlists in the US Army flying school in San Antonio, Texas.
Lindbergh wants to hone his skills as a pilot,
and the Air Corps owns some of the fastest planes in the world.
Flying in formation teaches him precision
and about the dangers of carelessness.
On a routine flight, Lindbergh collides with another plane.
Both pilots narrowly escape with their lives.
Lindbergh is back in the air within the hour.
Nothing can keep him out of the skies.
Of the hundred and four men who join the Air Corps with Lindbergh,
only nineteen pass.
Lindbergh, once a firstyear college failure,
now graduates at the top of his class.
When his oneyear army tour is over,
Lieutenant Lindbergh goes to one of the capitals
of the burgeoning aviation industry Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri.
St. Louis has ambitions to be an aviation hub.
Lindbergh's experience earns him the best,
but most dangerous job on the field:
Chief pilot of the Air Mail run to Chicago.
Air mail pilots live short lives.
Thirty one of forty are killed in crashes
in the first five years of service.
The planes are World War One surplus.
Pilots call them "flaming coffiins."
But Lindbergh ignores the terrifying record of the air mail service.
He believes the skies must be tamed.
What a future aviation has; yet how few people realize it!
Somehow they must be made to understand the possibilities of flight.
It is 1926.
Seven years have passed
since the 25,000 dollar prize was offered for a New YorkParis flight.
Not one aviator has stepped forward.
But Charles Lindbergh has not yet heard of the challenge.
Throughout the year,
Lindbergh carries the mail through the Midwest's worst weather.
With little more than a compass and courage, he gets the letters through.
Twice, in the dead of the night,
he is forced to parachute from his crippled aircraft.
He dutifully runs his fuel tanks dry
to prevent letters from being consumed by flames.
He breaks the nation's record for deathdefying leaps,
and earns a new nickname from his fellow air mail pilots: "Lucky."
The crashes shake the public's opinion of air mail's safety.
Charles Lindbergh makes it his mission to change their minds.
"Whether the mail compartment
contains ten letters or ten thousand is beside the point.
We have faith in the future.
Some day we know the sacks will fiill."
Lindbergh can only dream of aviation's future,
while another pilot flies to fame.
On May 9, 1926, US Navy Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd
flies his threeengined Fokker over the North Pole.
The achievement sums up Byrd himself:
Part science, part adventure, part selfpromotion.
Richard Byrd is acclaimed as America's king of the skies.
With the Arctic defeated, Byrd now sets his sights on the Atlantic,
and the sevenyearold challenge to reach Paris.
Byrd plans a mission for a crew of four in one of the largest,
most expensive planes ever built.
But another pilot beats him to the airfield.
On September 15, 1926,
French war ace Renee Fonck sets off from New York for Paris.
But Fonck's huge, overloaded plane does not even lift off the ground.
Two crewmen are killed in the wreck
Fonck survives his dream in ruins.
But Charles Lindbergh takes inspiration from the tragic headlines.
It is the first time he has heard of the New YorkParis prize.
Lindbergh decides to enter the race.
But his plan is different.
He will fly with just one engine.
And, he will do it alone.
It would be a thirtysix hour, sleepless ordeal.
But first, he needs a decent plane.
Lindbergh approaches eight of the wealthiest men in St. Louis.
Inspired by the young man's boldness,
they stake Lindbergh with 15,000 dollars,
gambling that the publicity will make St. Louis
the aviation hub of the Midwest.
Lindbergh offers his own life savings, 2,000 dollars.
In February, 1927, he makes his way toward
the only manufacturer that will build a plane on his meager budget.
His destination is San Diego, California,
and a company he has never heard of Ryan Aircraft.
But no one has ever heard of Charles Lindbergh, either.
On February 25th, 1927, Lindbergh arrives at Ryan Aircraft in San Diego.
First impressions are discouraging:
A dilapidated hangar, with no runway, and a staff of just a dozen.
Ryan's owner is barely a year older than Lindbergh...
Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, a former bond salesman
who bought the company after taking a few flying lessons.
He shares Lindbergh's passion for aviation
and his desire to win the transAtlantic race.
Donald Hall is Ryan's only engineer.
He's also young, just twentyseven.
Hall is astounded by Lindbergh's vision of a solitary,
sleepless flight to Paris.
But a crew of one would mean more room for gasoline.
He begins sketches at once for a small aircraft, a flying fuel tank
Lindbergh wires his sponsors in St. Louis.
"Believe Ryan capable of building plane with sufficient performance.
Delivery within sixty days.
Recommend closing deal.
Lindbergh."
Lindbergh has his team.
Now, it's time to get to work
The aircraft will be an extension of Charles Lindbergh himself.
"Every part of it can be designed for a single purpose
every line fashioned to the Paris flight.
I can inspect each detail before it's covered with fabric and fairings.
I can build my own experience into the plane's structure."
The young men who plan a leap across the Atlantic
need to know precisely how far it is to Paris.
Lindbergh has a primitive solution.
The bit of white grocery string under my fiingers
stretches taut along the coast of North America,
bends down over a faded blue ocean, and strikes the land mass of Europe.
It's 3600 statute miles.
It will be twentyeight hours to Ireland and thirtysix to Paris.
Lindbergh will use a simple compass to guide him from New York to Newfoundland,
then across two thousand miles of open sea,
with no hope of surviving if anything goes wrong.
As Lindbergh's work gets under way, the competition heats up.
On March 2, in New York
Richard Byrd announces that his plan to reach Paris is almost complete.
Byrd has built a 100,000 dollar,
gigantic aircraft named "America," and will be ready by May.
Just two weeks later, in Virginia,
American Navy pilots Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster
unveil their own contender: A trimotor called "American Legion."
But Lindbergh holds to his plan to build a small aircraft.
He is certain that the bigger the plane,
the bigger the chance of a fatal accident.
Then, on March 26, a new challenger emerges in Paris.
Ace Charles Nungesser and his oneeyed navigator Francois Coli
are ready for a westbound crossing in their plane,
the "White Bird."
The Ryan team works around the clock
a race against the world's most famous aviators
all for a twentyfive year old with a dream, and determination.
Then comes a stunning blow.
In midApril, American pilot Clarence Chamberlin announces that
he has stayed aloft for a recordsmashing
fiftyone hours in skies over New York
His powerful plane Columbia is now ready for Paris.
Four planes are ready to go,
waiting only for clear skies over the Atlantic,
while Charles Lindbergh is on the Pacific coast,
still waiting for his aircraft to be built.
Suddenly, the odds begin to change.
A test flight of Byrd's America on April 16 ends in a twisted wreck
Byrd and two of his crewmen are seriously injured
and the America needs weeks of repairs.
Eight days later,
Clarence Chamberlin takes off from the same New York runway.
He crash lands the Columbia.
Chamberlin walks away, but his landing gear is destroyed.
Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster are not as fortunate.
On April 26, both men are killed
when their overloaded plane stalls and crashes in Virginia.
Lindbergh's prediction has come tragically true.
Loaded down multi engine giants are too unreliable for transatlantic flight.
Two Americans and four Frenchmen have given their lives
in the race to link their nations.
April 28, 1927.
Two months after Charles Lindbergh arrived in San Diego,
his dream plane is born the Spirit of St. Louis.
Named in honor of his backers in St. Louis,
the Spirit is just over twentyseven feet long,
with a fortysix foot wing span.
The plane is trucked to a local airfield, for its maiden voyage.
For Lindbergh, Mahoney, and Hall, the moment of truth has come.
The Spirit of St. Louis is all Lindbergh dreamed it would be.
"I've never felt a plane accelerate so fast before.
There's a huge reserve of power."
There are no front windows.
A gas tank blocks Lindbergh's forward view.
Visibility and comfort have been sacrificed for endurance.
Weighing just over a ton empty,
the Spirit is a tiny challenger to Richard Byrd's eightton America.
The first test is a stunning success
Every possible ounce of weight has been eliminated.
Lindbergh will confront the Atlantic without a radio,
without navigational instruments, without a parachute.
He has thought through everything and carries nothing.
He makes two dozen test flights, and declares the Spirit ready.
The time has come to leave for New York and the starting line.
But he may be too late.
On May 8, French aviators Nungesser and Coli take off from Paris.
The next day,
newspapers report the French aces have been spotted over Nova Scotia.
So close to fulfiilling his dream.
Lindbergh despairs he has lost the race.
But Nungesser and Coli never arrive in New York
Their aircraft mysteriously disappear.
It is never found.
Six Men have now been sacrificed.
But Lindbergh has been granted one more chance.
May 10, 1927.
Lindbergh says goodbye to Benjamin Franklin Mahoney,
Donald Hall, and the Ryan factory workers.
They have built the Spirit,
it is now up to Charles Lindbergh to fly to New York
before any other pilot attempts the Atlantic.
But first, he must stop in St. Louis to meet his backers.
He flies all night, testing the Spirit, and his own stamina.
He calculates fuel consumption at 100 miles per hour,
his planned airspeed over the Atlantic.
And he practices holding his course on a dead heading for St. Louis.
It is dry run, over land, for his Atlantic journey.
Fourteen hours and twentyfive minutes after lifting off from California,
Charles Lindbergh lands the Spirit of St. Louis in the city of her name.
He has broken the world speed record on his flight.
"No man has ever traveled so fast from the Pacific coast before."
Lindbergh's sponsors want to show off their investment,
but the great race to Paris will not wait for a Missouri parade.
They urge him on to New Youk
Seven and a half hours later, Lindbergh reaches New York
"Manhattan Island lies below me
millions of people,
each one surrounded by a little aura of his problems and his thoughts,
hardly conscious of earth's expanse beyond.
What a contrast to the western spaces I have crossed.
I feel cooped up just looking at it"
At 4:31PM, on May 12, 1927,
the tiny Spirit of St. Louis touches down at Curtiss Field, Long Island.
Charles Lindbergh has crossed the North American continent
more quickly than any man in history.
Suddenly, the race to Paris has a new contender.
A young daredevil from the American heartland,
with the fastest plane in the sky.
In the Spring of 1927, three aircraft and their impatient pilots
are lined up in the race to be the first to Paris.
Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis,
Richard Byrd's rebuilt America,
and Clarence Chamberlin's repaired Columbia.
All three are ready to go, but bad weather keeps them on the ground.
The fliers maintain a link of friendship and respect.
The national hero Byrd is courteous to Chamberlin
and the young outsider Lindbergh.
Each understands that the best man and the best machine will win.
And that any, or all of them may die trying.
Charles Lindbergh gives the press the story they've been waiting for.
The underdog,
the farm boy,
the Flyin' Fool.
Lindbergh is besieged.
On one day alone,
30,000 people come to catch a glimpse of the gallant young American pilot.
Publicity is good for the cause of aviation, so Lindbergh complies.
"The journalistic atmosphere has reached fever heat.
The moment I step outside the hangar I'm surrounded.
The attention of the entire country is centered on the flight and me.
We've helped focus everybody's eyes on aviation and its future."
His mother arrives in New York to see her son off.
Cameras turn as the two pose stiffly together,
a moment they both know may be their fiinal goodbye.
Commander Byrd admires Lindbergh, and praises his undeniable courage.
But he is certain that a single engine, and a single flier,
cannot possibly endure a 3,600 mile flight.
Seven days pass and the weather holds the frustrated pilots down.
"The sky is overcast.
Rain is falling.
It may be another week or two before I can take off.
I feel depressed at the thought".
May 19, 1927.
Bored and restless, Lindbergh accepts an invitation to a Broadway musical.
Before reaching the show,
he receives a forecast of clearing skies over the Atlantic.
He races back to his hotel, hoping to catch a few hour's sleep before dawn.
But Lindbergh is far too excited to rest.
At 2:30 AM, already awake for twenty hours,
he begins preparing for the 36hour flight ahead.
At dawn, the Spirit of St. Louis is towed out to the runway.
Five hundred soaked spectators gather,
eager to be witnesses to history, or tragedy.
"My plane lurches backward through a depression in the ground.
It looks awkward and clumsy.
It appears completely incapable of flightshrouded, lashed and dripping.
It's more like a funeral procession
than the beginning of a filght to paris."
7:30 AM, May 20, 1927.
Fully fueled, the plane weighs two and a half tons.
Lindbergh has never attempted a takeoff at this maximum load.
The commotion has awakened Commander Byrd.
Byrd himself would not dare attempt a takeoff in this wretched weather.
But the pilot nicknamed "Lucky" is willing to take the gamble.
A reporter asks Lindbergh
if he has brought enough supplies to live on for nearly two days in the air.
He has packed just five sandwiches and a gallon of water.
He answers with a grim joke.
"If I get to Paris I won't need anymore,
and if I don't get to Paris I won't need anymore either."
Loaded with explosive fuel, on a 5,000 foot runway of clinging mud,
the Spirit lumbers into position.
It is a vital moment in the history of human technology, and human courage.
A tiny silver plane, straining and roaring a lone pilot
who has passed the point of aborting his flight.
He will take off, or he will crash.
Lindbergh clears wires at the end of the runway by just twenty feet.
And Lindbergh is gone.
As the Spirit of St. Louis disappears into the clouds,
Commander Richard Byrd estimates soberly that
the odds against Lindbergh's survival are three to one.
As his thirtysix hour odyssey begins, Lindbergh sets his course.
50cent highway maps guide him over the New England coast.
He alternates fuel tanks every hour to balance his load,
and keeps a careful log of speed, altitude, and course.
The Spirit's engine is the most powerful ever built for flight:
223 horsepower of aluminum and steel.
It must perform perfectly for almost two days nonstop,
fourteen million explosions in its nine cylinders.
As he leaves Massachusetts behind,
Lindbergh heads over open ocean for the first time in his life.
250 miles from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia,
a preview of the 2,000 mile ordeal across the Atlantic ocean.
He flies low, and faces the sea.
"I come down to meet the ocean, asking its favor
the right to pass for thousands of miles across its realm.
The earth released me on Long Island; now I need approval from the sea."
The skies clear.
But in the sun, Lindbergh begins to suffer the tortures of fatigue.
He already regrets staying awake all night before departure.
New York is just five hours behind him.
As he soars over Nova Scotia, the journey has barely begun.
Navigating by a simple compass heading,
he is only six miles off his planned course.
But as each hour passes, the drone of the engine,
and the monotony of the waves, dull his consciousness.
Urging surrender, demanding sleep.
Twelve hours after takeoff,
still a day away from a seemingly impossible touchdown,
he is over Newfoundland.
One quick wingover, and the vast Atlantic awaits.
"North America and its islands are behind.
Ireland is two thousand miles ahead."
Now, Lindbergh has only his compass and his courage to guide him.
Caught between sky and sea,
no traveler in history has ever been so alone.
The first night of his journey begins.
"I've given up a continent and taken on an ocean in its place irrevocably."
Over the North Atlantic,
not far from where the Titanic sank just fifteen years before,
Lindbergh spots icebergs.
He dreams of landing and sleeping.
If he drifts off, even for a few seconds,
he will tumble into the waves and die.
"Sleep is winning."
At this moment, at Yankee Stadium in New York City,
40,000 people gather at a heavyweight boxing match.
The announcer asks the audience for a moment of silence for Lindbergh.
All 40,000 join as one.
Over the Atlantic, Lindbergh flies into dense clouds.
He climbs above them for better visibility.
But at ten thousand feet, the air is colder.
He has made a dangerous mistake.
"I pull the flashlight from my pocket and throw its beam onto a strut.
Ice!"
His only hope is to dive for warmer air
and pray the ice clears before the Spirit falls from the sky.
After ten perilous minutes, he triumphs.
A nation flies with him, sleepless and anxious.
The New York Times receives 10,000 telephone calls, asking for updates.
But there is no news to print.
Lindbergh flies alone, without a radio, over the desolate ocean.
Nineteen hours out, he estimates that he is halfway to Paris.
But his body is numb, beyond hunger and thirst.
"My greatest goal now is to stay alive
and pointed eastward until I reach the sunrise."
He abandons his log book too weary to care.
In New York
the newspapers can only repeat stale bulletins from Newfoundland.
No one on earth knows where Lindbergh is, or the agony he endures.
"This is the hour I've been dreading.
I know it's the beginning of my greatest test.
This early hour of the second morning the third since I've slept".
Just before dawn, Lindbergh believes he is visited by ghosts.
"These phantoms speak with human voices
vaporlike shapes, without substance.
The feeling of flesh is gone.
Am I now more man or spirit?"
On the verge of defeat and death, he fiinds the fortitude to fly on.
"I'm gaining strength, I'm crawling upward.
I've fiinally broken the spell of sleep.
The sight of death has drawn out the last reserves of strength."
His ghosts, and his fears, dissolve in the sunrise.
Suddenly he sees something moving below.
The world has come alive again.
Porpoises.
Then a seagull.
A certain sign that land must be near.
Soon, a tiny dot that can only be a mirage.
Fishing boats.
Where is he?
Where are they from?
Within half an hour, another apparition.
He refuses to believe his eyes.
Land.
He looks at the chart, and at the mass below.
It is Ireland.
He is just three miles off his plotted course,
and over two hours earlier than he expected.
When he is spotted over Dingle Bay, the world rejoices.
For Charles Lindbergh has not been flying alone.
Only the British Isles remain, then the Channel.
Then, France.
Lindbergh will be the first man in history to be in New York one day,
and Paris the next.
"Yesterday I walked on Roosevelt field, today I'll walk on Le Bourget."
Five hours after reaching Ireland, at 9:52 PM
Lindbergh is fiinally over Paris.
But at this moment of triumph, strange lights below disorient him.
He circles lower.
He fiinally locates Le Bourget Airfield, obscured by bright lights.
Below him, a public hysteria unlike any in history is about to erupt.
One hundred and fifty thousand people have come to witness his arrival.
The lights are their automobiles.
At 10:24 PM, after thirtythree and a half hours in the air,
the Spirit of St. Louis returns Charles Lindbergh to the earth.
But his feet do not even touch French soil.
The mob surges forward, carrying the exhausted Lindbergh like a rag doll.
They claw at the Spirit of St. Louis, tearing off pieces of history.
A group of French aviators fiinally rescue Lindbergh,
and carry him off to a waiting car.
He is taken to the American embassy, where he sleeps for nine hours.
And awakens the most famous man of the century.
Lindbergh's shy grace wins the heart of Paris.
The crowds hail not only the pilot,
but the dawn of a new age of unity between Europe and America.
Paris is in a Lindbergh frenzy for a week
Then he flies on to Brussels and London
and is greeted with explosive hero worship.
But Lindbergh is more than a hero.
He is a 20th Century phenomenon, the first international superstar.
After two weeks of European adoration,
President Calvin Coolidge orders Lindbergh home.
A Navy cruiser brings the nation's most popular hero
and his nowfamous plane back to American soil.
When he arrives in Washington, 250,000 people are there to greet him.
An innocent twentyfiveyearold
from the midWest has become a living legend.
His next stop is New York
where four million people line the streets
for the largest tickertape parade in the city's history.
The public's rapture exhausts the quiet Lindbergh.
But he seizes the opportunity to promote aviation's future.
And now, people will listen.
For the summer of 1927,
he crisscrosses America in the Spirit of St. Louis,
on a crusade to convince the public to take to the skies.
30 million Americans in 82 cities throng to hear his message,
new converts to the aviation revolution.
Lindbergh heralds the dawn of a new era.
By 1928, the air mail service triples its load
and the passenger business carries four times
as many people than before Lindbergh's Paris flight.
His dream is fulfiilled.
Those who once soared above Lindbergh now fade in his shadow.
On June 29, Richard Byrd and his crew of three fiinally take off for France
in their 100,000 dollar plane.
Byrd forcelands off the Normandy coast.
Few take notice of his clumsy flight.
The contest to unite the continents has already been won,
by the graceful Lone Eagle.
Charles Lindbergh spends the rest of his life in the air,
promoting the cause of aviation.
At the age of 27, Lindbergh marries.
With his wife, author Anne Morrow,
he maps new flight routes across the Atlantic and Pacific.
The young couple opens the skies for air travelers of today.
Lindbergh would also endure agonizing personal tragedy.
The kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh's baby son in 1932.
And outrage following his speeches opposing war with Nazi Germany.
But Charles Lindbergh's legacy is not controversy.
It is courage.
The daring of a twentyfiveyear old air mail pilot
who believed he could change the world, and did.
"When the Spirit of St. Louis flew to Paris,
aviation was shouldering its way
from the stage of invention to the stage of usefulness.
I believed that aviation had a brilliant future.
Technically, we have accomplished our objectives, passed beyond them.
We actually live today in our dreams of yesterday
and living those dreams, we dream again."