Lindbergh, alone over the Atlantic
The Orteig Prize of 25,000 dollars was offered in 1919 for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris. For years nobody collected it, and several attempts ended in disaster. In 1927 several teams were preparing for it at the same time, with large aircraft and several crew.
Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old airmail pilot, took a different approach. He asked a small company in San Diego to build a single-engine, single-seat monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis. With one engine and one man there was less to go wrong, and nearly all the space inside was filled with fuel. A fuel tank in front of the pilot meant that he could not see forward and had to use a periscope.
Thirty-three and a half hours
He took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island on the morning of 20 May 1927 and landed at Le Bourget outside Paris on the evening of 21 May. He had been awake for about 55 hours, flown through fog and sleet and navigated by dead reckoning, using a compass, a clock and the drift of the waves.
A crowd of well over a hundred thousand people met him at the airfield. The flight made him a worldwide celebrity, and it set off a rush of investment in aviation. Passenger numbers in the United States rose steeply in the following years.