Bob looked over at his uncle and grinned. "Why, you old sinner. What a way to talk about your favorite nephew. But now that you mention it, maybe I did intend to finish the story, seeing that I"d started it. Now, where was I?"
Pat was clearing up the debris made by four men eating a picnic lunch.
"You"ve got Lindbergh at the Nebraska flying school for a long time."
"Oh, not very long," said Bob. "You see, he stayed there really a short time. In fact, he never did any solo flying there."
"Well, why not?" asked Hal.
"They asked for a five-hundred dollar bond from every student before he went up on his first solo flight. This seemed silly to Lindy, and he left the school.
"When he left, he did what so many of the flyers were doing then. He went out west, and did stunting, risking his neck at county fairs and air circuses to give the people a thrill. He did, too. He handled his plane like a toy, doing rolls, tail spins, and every kind of stunt imaginable. But the most exciting thing that he did, and it usually isn"t an exciting thing at all, was landing his plane. He could land on a dime, and as lightly as a feather. That"s really piloting, isn"t it, Bill?"
"You bet," said the Captain. He was sprawled out on his back, enjoying his after dinner rest. "A landing will show you your flyer"s ability every time. Provided, of course, that he has a fairly decent landing field. Did I ever tell you the story that Hawks tells in his autobiography? Do you mind if I interrupt for just a minute, Bob?"
"Oh, no, go right ahead," said Bob, witheringly. "Go right ahead. I was just telling a story."
"Thanks," said Captain Bill with a grin. "I will. Well, it seems that Hawks was stunting down in Mexico, and doing quite a bit of private flying. He got a commission to fly a Congressman and a General, I think it was, back to their home town of Huatemo. Have you ever heard of Huatemo? I thought not. Well, Huatemo had never seen an airplane close up, and the two high muckamucks decided that they"d give the natives a thrill by coming back via plane. Hawks had them wire ahead to have a landing field prepared. The native officials wired that they had a fine field, clear of all obstructions, but dotted with a few small trees.
"Fine, says Hawks, but have them remove the trees immediately." The natives said that this had been done, and the party started out.
"After several adventures, Hawks flew over Huatemo, and prepared to spiral down to the landing field. Imagine his chagrin and surprise, my dear boys, when he discovered, that the officials of Huatemo had indeed cut down the Huateman trees, but had left the stumps standing!"
"Whew," said Bob. "What did he do, turn around?"
"No, he couldn"t. And anyway, there was no other place to land. The field was surrounded by dense forests. He had to make it. He brought his plane down without hitting a stump, and then zig-zagged wildly from stump to stump like a croquet ball trying to miss wickets. And he missed them all, too, except one. The wheel hit it an awful smack, and collapsed. The plane tilted up on its nose, and came to rest with its propeller in the ground and its tail waving gayly in the air, not at all like a proper plane should."
"And killed them all," said Pat.
"Who, Hawks? Not on your life. He"s a lucky fellow. Not one of them was hurt. They climbed out of the plane, and were greeted by the natives, joyously and with acclaim. And not one of the natives seemed to suspect in the least that this wasn"t the way a plane should land. Or at least the way a crazy American would land a plane." The Captain finished his story, and paused.
"Well," said Bob grudgingly, "that was a good story, too. But, as I was saying, Lindy was a good stunter, and a good flyer. He decided that he wanted a plane of his own. He heard that there was going to be a sale of army planes down in Georgia, and he went down and bought a Curtiss Jenny with the money that he had saved from his stunting work. He fixed it up, and was soon off barnstorming again. But I guess the Jenny was too clumsy a boat for Lindy. He wanted to fly the newer, better planes that the army had. So he joined the army"s training school at Brook Field, San Antonio. This was when he was 22 years old.
"I guess he got along pretty fine at San Antonio, and he was sent down to the pursuit school at Kelly Field. He joined the Caterpillar Club there. It was the first time that he had to jump from a moving plane and get down with his parachute. I guess it was a pretty close shave."
"Gee, how did it happen?" said Hal, his eyes wide.
"Wait a second, I"m coming to it," said Bob. "He and another officer were to go up and attack another plane that they called the enemy. It was a sort of problem they had to work out. Well, Slim dove at the enemy from the left, and the other fellow from the right. The enemy plane pulled up, but Lindy and the other officer kept on going, dead toward each other. There was an awful crack, and their wings locked. The two planes began to spin around and drop through the air. Lindy did the only thing there was to do. He kept his head, stepped out on one of the damaged wings, and stepped off backwards. He didn"t pull the rip-cord until he had fallen quite a way, because he didn"t want the ships to fall on him. When he"d gone far enough, he pulled the cord, and floated gently down. That was the first."
"And the second?" said Hal.
"The second," went on Bob, "happened in 1927, just about a year before Lindy flew the Atlantic. He took a new type of plane up to test her. He put her through all the stunts that he could think of, and she stood them all right. It seemed as though she was going to come through the test O.K., when Lindy put her into a tail spin. They spiraled down for a while, and Lindy tried to pull her out of it. She wouldn"t respond and went completely out of control. Lindy tugged and yanked at the controls, but he couldn"t get that bus to go into a dive. He did his best to save the ship, but it was no use. He didn"t give up until they were about 300 feet from the ground, which is a mighty short distance to make a jump, if you ask me. But Lindy made it, and landed in somebody"s back yard, the wind knocked out of him, but otherwise all right. That was the second."
"And the third?" asked Hal.
"We"re getting ahead of the story. In fact, we"re ahead of the story already. Before he made his second jump, Lindy had joined the Missouri National Guard, and was promoted to a Captaincy in the Reserve and Flight Commander of the 110th Observation Squadron. That"s how he got to be a Captain, you know how he got to be a Colonel.
"Then Lindy joined the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, at St. Louis.
While he was with them, he helped map out the first mail route from St.
Louis to Chicago, and was the first pilot to carry mail along this route. Slim had a habit of starting things off. He was the first to do a lot of things. No sitting back and waiting for others to start things.
It was first or nothing for him. Maybe it was his Viking ancestors, I don"t know.
"It was while he was flying this route that Lindy had his third initiation into the Caterpillars. He took off one September afternoon from Lambert Field, in St. Louis, on his way to Maywood. Just outside of Peoria a fog rolled in, so thick you could cut it with a knife, Lindy could climb up over it for flying, but he couldn"t land blind. He dropped a flare, but it only lit up a cloud bank. He saw lights, then, through the fog, and knew that he was around Maywood, but couldn"t get the exact location of the field. He"d circled around for two hours, when his engine sputtered and died. The tank was dry. Lindy quickly turned on the reserve gravity tank. There was twenty minutes of flying in that tank, and Lindy had to think fast.
"He tried flares again, but it was no use. When he had just a few minutes of gas left, he saw the glow of a town. He didn"t want to take a chance on landing in a town and killing somebody, so he headed for open country. In a few minutes his engine died. Lindy stepped out into the blind fog and jumped. After falling a hundred feet, he pulled the rip-cord, and left the rest to chance. Every once in a while his ship appeared, twirling away in spirals, the outside of the circle about 300 yards away from Lindy. He counted five spirals, and then lost sight of the bus. He landed in a corn field, shaken, of course, but all right. He found his way to the farm house, and told the farmer who he was. The farmer, who had heard the crash of the plane as it smashed to earth wouldn"t believe that this safe and sound man was the pilot of it.
Finally Lindy convinced him, and they went in search of the plane, which the farmer was sure had landed close to his house. They found it two miles away, looking not much like a plane, but a heap of rubbish. The mail wasn"t hurt. They got it to a train for Chicago, and the mail went through. It always does, you know."
"Yup, it always does," said Captain Bill.
"That reminds me of a story," said Pat.
"Hold it," said Bob. "I"ve got another parachute for Lindy."
"Fire away," said Pat. "But remember to remind me not to forget to tell you my own story."
"All right," Bob put in. "Now the fourth time Lindy jumped was not long before his big flight. He was still flying for Robertson"s, carrying mail to Chicago. Just south of Peoria he ran into rain that changed to snow. Lindy flew around, waiting for the fog to lift, until he heard his motor sputter and die. He was up about 13,000 feet when he stepped out of the c.o.c.kpit and jumped into the air. He landed on a barbed wire fence. Tore his shirt, but the plane was pretty much of a wreck. He grabbed the air mail; hurried to a train for Chicago, got another plane, and flew the mail through. A little late, but still, it got through. And he didn"t bat an eye. Not one of the jumps fazed him a bit.
"But it wasn"t as though Lindy jumped at the slightest sign of anything going wrong. He stayed with his plane until the very last minute, doing everything he could to save it. He hated worse than anything to have a plane smashed up. Look how long he stayed with that new plane he was testing out-until he was just 300 feet above the ground.
"Well, Lindy was one of the best mail pilots that the Robertson corporation had, in fact, he was their chief pilot. They could depend on him to go out in weather that no other pilot would think of bucking. He didn"t show off. Just knew that he could fly through anything, and he did.
"At this time there was a lot of excitement in the air. Orteig was offering his $25,000 prize for the first man to cross the Atlantic, and there were a lot of aviators who would have liked the prize, and were trying for it. Of course, the money wasn"t the whole thing. There was the honor attached to it. And besides, there was the fact that crossing the Atlantic would make people sit up and take notice that flying wasn"t as dangerous as they thought. If a man could fly all that distance in a plane, maybe planes weren"t the death traps that some people had an idea they were. Lindy must have been thinking of this when he first decided that he"d like to try for the Orteig prize. Because everything that he"s done since his flight has been to get people interested in aviation.
"But it takes money to fly across the ocean. You"ve got to get a special plane and all that. Lindy had to have backers. He couldn"t get them at first. Everybody tried to discourage him. In the first place, he looked such a kid. He was twenty-five, and that"s young, but he didn"t even look twenty-five. The men he asked to back him all but told him to run home and wait until he had grown up.
"Then Major Robertson, Lindy"s Big Boss, tried to get backers for him.
He knew that Lindy could fly and finally got some influential men to put up $15,000 for his flight. Maybe Lindy wasn"t glad! He tucked his check in his pocket and went on a shopping trip for a plane. He tried the Bellanca people in New York, but they didn"t have what he wanted, so he skipped to San Diego to the Ryan Airways, Inc., and told them what he wanted. They put their engineers to work on his specifications, and designed him a Ryan monoplane, the neat stream-lined job that was christened the Spirit of St. Louis. It"s a graceful bird-but you"ve all seen so many pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It has a wing span of 46 feet, and an overall length of over 27 feet. They put in a Wright engine-a Whirlwind, 200 horsepower. It"s a radial engine. You two probably know what a radial engine is, but Hal here doesn"t." Bob paused and turned to Hal. "Do you?"
"Uh-uh," grunted Hal. "Do you?"
"Of course I do. It"s one in which the cylinders aren"t in a straight line or in a V, but arranged around an axis, like the spokes of a wheel.
Lindy"s plane had two spark plugs for each cylinder, so that in case one missed, there was another one ready. She could carry 450 gallons of gas and twenty gallons of oil, and she was loaded to the gills when Lindy took her off the ground at the Field.
"Suppose Lindy wasn"t anxious about that plane. He hung around the factory all the time that it was being built, and made suggestions to help along Hawley Bowlus, who built the thing. You know Hawley Bowlus.
The fellow who held the glider record until Lindy took it away from him-but that"s later. Bowlus knows how to build planes, and Lindy swears by him.
"Well, they got the plane finished in 60 days, which isn"t bad time. Out in New York, Byrd and Chamberlin and the others were getting ready to fly the Atlantic. It"s wasn"t really a race to see who would be first, but of course, there"s no doubt that each one was anxious to be the first man to cross the Atlantic. Because after all, n.o.body likes to be second. So Lindy had to get out to the east coast as fast as he could.
He could hardly wait for the plane to be finished. But at last it was, and all the equipment in place. Lindy climbed into the c.o.c.kpit to test her out. The c.o.c.kpit was inclosed. I don"t know whether I told that before or not. Anyway, he could see out little windows on each side, but he couldn"t see ahead, or above him. So it was really flying blind all the time, except for a sliding periscope that he could pull in or out at the side, in case he had to see straight ahead. But Lindy doesn"t mind blind flying. He"s a wonderful navigator.
"Well, Lindy turned over the motor of his new plane, and it sounded sweet. He hadn"t got it any more than off the ground when he realized that this was the plane for him. It responded to every touch, although it was a heavy ship, and not much good for stunting. But Lindy didn"t want to stunt. He wanted to fly to Europe.
"It was on May 10, I think, that he left San Diego. It was in the evening, not quite six o"clock. The next morning, a little after eight, he got into St. Louis. Took him just a bit over fourteen hours, the whole trip. It was the longest cross-country hop that any one man had made up to that time. His old pals at Lambert Field were pretty glad to see him, and he spent the night at his old stamping grounds. But he didn"t stay long. Early in the morning he got on his way, and made New York in the afternoon, in not quite seven and a half hours. Pretty flying.
"n.o.body much had heard of Lindy until he started from San Diego. Of course, he"d been a dandy mail pilot, but they"re usually unnamed heroes. n.o.body hears about them, and they never get their names in the paper unless they crash. Not that they care. They"ve got their jobs to do, and they do them. But when Lindy flew that grand hop from San Diego to St. Louis to New York, people began to sit up and take notice. He didn"t say much after he got to the Curtiss Field.
"Out at Curtiss he spent his time seeing that everything was ready, and all his instruments O.K. He had a lot of confidence in himself-he always has-but there was no use in taking chances. In back of the pilot"s seat was a collapsible rubber boat, that he could blow up with two tanks of gas that he carried with him. It had light oars, and was supposed to be able to float him for a week in case he decided suddenly to come down in the middle of the Atlantic instead of flying all the way across. Then there were his regular instruments. He had a tachometer, and an altimeter, an earth inductor compa.s.s, a drift indicator, and-"
Captain Bill interrupted. "Just a minute, just a minute. You say those things pretty glibly. Do you know what they mean? What"s a tachometer?
Pat here doesn"t know."
Bob looked embarra.s.sed. "Well, they"re all pretty necessary instruments.