"IN the late spring of 1927," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams."
The Minnesotan in question was Charles Lindbergh, whose nonstop solo fight across the North Atlantic from New York to Paris was the first of its kind, and a daring and, some said, foolhardy undertaking at the time.
The world held its breath as the overloaded Spirit et St Louis staggered drunkenly into the sky from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, at dawn on May 20th, 1927, barely clearing the trees at the end of the long runway. Lindbergh had on board one quart of water and five sandwiches as provisions, and had said before he left: "If I get to Paris I won't need any more. If I don't - well I won't need any more either."
Alerted by radio and newspapers, large crowds gathered along the Atlantic coastline to watch the aeroplane. But when the 25 year old pilot headed east from St John's in Newfoundland, he and his Ryan NYP monoplane were entirely on their own.
Lindbergh, in fact, was not the first to fly across this stretch of water. Commander Albert Read and five others had "hopped" from Newfoundland to Lisbon via the Azores as early as 1919. And just a few days after Lindberg, Alcock and Brown were to fly straight from Newfoundland to Connemara.
But Lindbergh's escapade captured the public imagination because he was making the journey on his own, and also because he was flying all the way to Paris, uniting two great capitals of the world more than 3,000 miles apart.
As it happened, however, Lindbergh had gone solo simply to eliminate the extra weight that bringing the customary navigator would entail; and he planned his flight all the way to Paris because a prize of $25,000 was on offer for the first person to make a nonstop flight between the two cities.
He came from the daredevil world of barnstorming and flying the mail, and effectively mounted the whole operation single handedly; he organised the finance, found himself a suitable plane, redesigned it to match his needs, and planned every detail of the flight himself.
Lindbergh's success owed a great deal to newly invented instruments that had become available only a short time before. In the early days of aviation, for example, the pilot had to control the altitude of his aircraft by looking at the skyline; if the aircraft unintentionally entered cloud, the pilot could quickly lose his orientation - often with fatal results.
The development of the gyroscopic turn and bank indicator in the early 1920s was a major innovation because, when used in combination with a good altimeter, the instrument made it possible for pilots to fly straight and level without optical reference to the ground.
He was lucky also with the weather, particularly since he made his flight in an era when weather information from the North Atlantic was extremely sparse.
As it happens, the original weather charts given to Captain Lindbergh for his epic journey are preserved in the Beverly Hills Scriptorium in California. They show a deep depression just north of Newfoundland, and another between Iceland and Norway; this combination, not untypical for late May, provided Lindbergh with following winds for almost the entire duration of his flight.
The charts are also interesting as an example of the state of the art of meteorology at the time. They show 150 bars at sea level, with the pressures marked in inches of mercury rather than the millibars or hectopascals we use today. And there are no fronts on the charts; frontal theory was still in its infancy at that time, and would not be adopted for operational use by the US Weather Bureau for another 10 years or more.
But perhaps the most interesting features of this historical weather map are notes written during the flight in Lindbergh's own hand.
Just to the west of Ireland he has written: "Spiralled down thru' hole in clouds, and soon encountered 2 hours of heavy fog."
Nearly 30 years later in a book named, like his aeroplane, The Spirit of St Louis, Lindbergh waxed more lyrical in describing this scene: "I catch only tantalising glimpses of the sea. Grey scales appear below, vague and misty, but fog closes in as I drop a hundred feet. Were those waves real, or did I see a mirage in the mist? But then the mist lightens and The Spirit of St Louis bursts into brilliant sunshine, dazzling to fog accustomed eyes - a blue sky, sparkling white caps. The ocean now is not so wild and spraylashed. It's less ragged with streaks of foam. The wind's strength has decreased and it has shifted towards my tail. Brilliant light, opening sky, and clarity of waves fill me with hope."
Nearer the coast of Ireland, the legend on Lindbergh's map reads: "Local rainclouds; saw fishing boats." And here, too, he later described what happened in more detail: "I saw a fleet of fishing boats. I flew down almost touching the craft and yelled at them, asking if I was on the right road to Ireland. They just stared. Maybe they didn't hear me, maybe I didn't hear them - or maybe they thought I was just a crazy fool. An hour later I saw land."
And that, of course, was that. It was clear weather all the way to Paris, and Lindbergh landed to a hero's welcome from 100,000 people at Le Bourget Airport at 10.24 a.m. on May 21st, 1927, having covered the 3,600 miles in 33 hours, 39 minutes, at an average speed of 107.5mph.