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LEGENDS LEGENDS OF

OF AVIATION

Contents

Eight icons of flight who forever changed the course of aviation history

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The Promise of Flight Fulfilled

By C.V. Glines

Wilbur and Orville Wright struggled to make their flying machines pay—and protect their designs from copycats.

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Red Baron: Ace for the Ages

By Shane Simmons

Manfred von Richthofen began World War I as a cavalry officer but became the war’s most celebrated fighter ace.

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Lindbergh’s Path to Glory

By C.V. Glines

For all his legendary luck, Charles A. Lindbergh’s fame was built on solid piloting skills.

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The Amelia Mystique

By Stephan Wilkinson

Amelia Earhart’s flying talents were questioned by contemporaries, yet she’s never lost her iconic status.

Opposite: Amelia Earhart wears a Mona Lisa smile in a studio portrait circa 1932 (story, P. 22).

Cover: American Opposite: Amelia aviator Charles Earhart wears a Lindbergh charts a pathLisa to glory Mona smile in a (story,portrait P.16). circa studio 1932 (story, P. 22).

COVER: NATIONAL ARCHIVES, PHOTO Cover: Chuck Yeager COLORIZATION: BRIAN WALKER; OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS stands beside the Bell X-1 rocket plane ©2018 HISTORYNET, LLC / Legends of that in 1947 earned Aviation is published by HistoryNet, LLC., him immortality 1919 Gallows Road, Suite 400, Vienna, (interview, P. 36). The VA 22182-4038, 703-771-9400.

contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without OPPOSITE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS the written consent of HistoryNet, LLC. (COLORIZATION

BY SLINGSHOT STUDIO) COVER:PROUDLY U.S. AIR FORCE MADE IN THE USA

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Solving the Problem of Fog Flying

By Richard P. Hallion

How Jimmy Doolittle, backed by philanthropists and innovative engineers, ushered in the era of instrument flying.

36

The Voice of Experience Interview by Carl von Wodtke and Jon Guttman

“The facts of life,” according to legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager.

44

Top Pencil

By Peter Garrison

Why Burt Rutan is the most famous aeronautical engineer of our time.

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Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1909, when growing fame was at last bringing them commercial success.

Opposite: Orville achieves controlled heavier-than-air flight in 1903.

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Far from being hailed as successful innovators for their achievements at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers initially faced the widespread disbelief of the public By C.V. Glines

The Promise of

Flight Fulfilled W ilbur and Orville Wright were entrepreneurs in every sense of the word. They invented the world’s first successful flying machine and planned to build it in quantity, promote and sell it. They organized a company, assumed the risks, applied for patents to protect their creation and sought sales contracts. They succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams. But they had to travel to Europe to prove what they had done.

During the years after their first successful flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903, they improved their Flyer and made many test flights at Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio. With a patent pending, they were afraid their invention would be copied while they carried on negotiations to find buyers. After their last flights in 1905, they stored the Flyer and did not take to the air again for the next 21∕2 years.

During that time, they were constantly defending against the disbelievers their claim of having flown. When they wrote a letter to Scientific American magazine telling what they had done, the editor published a cynical editorial in the January 13, 1906, edition headlined “The Wright Airplane and Its Fabled Performances.” The editor called for the names of witnesses to their flights, which the Wrights promptly furnished. Letters were then sent to 17 onlookers, who confirmed that they had indeed seen the Wrights fly. The ALL PHOTOS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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magazine stated in its December 15, 1906, issue that “in all the history of invention, there is probably no parallel to the unostentatious manner in which the brothers of Dayton, Ohio, ushered into the world their epoch-making invention of the first successful aeroplane flying machine.” And still there was widespread public disbelief.

The Scientific American episode was typical of what the brothers experienced as they tried to market their invention. They attempted to interest the U.S. government in “the production of a flying machine of a type fitted for use” but were turned down— not once but twice. Although they received a U.S. patent on May 22, 1906, they were reluctant to furnish drawings or data to individuals for fear they would lose control of their own invention.

There seemed to be no viable interest in purchasing the Flyer in the United States, so they wrote to a number of government officials in Europe, then decided they should make a trip to meet potential deal-makers in England, France and Germany and demonstrate the latest version of their flying machine. Wilbur traveled to England and France in May 1907 and was joined in July by Orville and later by Charles E. Taylor, their mechanic. The latest version of the Flyer was shipped to Le Havre in anticipation of demonstrations, and talks began with European agents, discussions the Wrights hoped would lead to a sales commitment. But negoLEGENDS OF AVIATION

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tiations soon collapsed, as would-be competitors were then building and flying their own machines. European aviators received so much public acclaim for their short flights that the Wrights seemed likely to lose the recognition they deserved for being first to fly. The Wrights did, however, sign an agreement with Flint & Co. and Hart O. Berg, an American engineer, to act as sole agents for the brothers abroad and to negotiate agreements with governments for pur-

Electing to fly at a racetrack at Hunaudières, near Le Mans, Wilbur Wright was surprised to learn the British and French press were hostile to him.

chase or use of Wright machines and formation of companies to take over ownership or exploitation of the brothers’ inventions.

They returned home in the fall of 1907, disappointed in developments on the Continent but determined to continue their work.

They built new, improved aircraft, conducted experiments with hydroplanes and floats and also tested a new engine.

Despite the apparent put-down in Europe, 1907 proved to be a turning point for the Wrights in America. On August 1, the War Department established an Aeronautical Division within the U.S. Army Signal Corps for the “study of the flying machine and the possibility of adapting it to military purpose.” In December the Signal Corps advertised for bids for a heavier-than-air flying machine, and the Wrights made a bid on February 1, 1908, to furnish the War Department with an aircraft that would be capable of carrying two men and sufficient fuel for a flight of 125 miles, with a speed of at least 40 mph, and would “permit an intelligent man to become proficient in its use within a reasonable length of time.”

Two pilots had to be trained by whoever won the competition. The Wrights stated they would furnish a machine for $25,000 in 200 days that would fly at a speed of 40 mph with two men aboard.

Their bid was accepted on February 8.

When the specifications were announced, newspapers criticized the move as a waste of taxpayers’ money. The New York Globe editorialized: “One might be inclined to assume that the era of practical human flight had arrived....A very brief examination of the conditions imposed and the reward offered for successful bidders suffices, however, to prove this assumption a delusion....Nothing in any way approaching such a machine has ever been constructed—the Wright brothers’ claim still awaits public confirmation.”

In March 1908, the Wrights signed a contract with Frenchman Lazare Weiller to form a syndicate that would control the right to build, sell or license the Wright plane in France. They had already applied for patents in France, Britain and Germany to safeguard 6

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various parts of their creation. The Wrights now had two contracts to fulfill, but the competition was rapidly taking the potential market away from them. The construction secrets that the brothers had wanted to protect were soon revealed in other aircraft, most notably by Glenn Curtiss, whose Red Wing and June Bug models were first flown in 1908. French pilots Gabriel Voisin, Henri Farman and Léon Delagrange and Romania’s Traian Vuia had flown briefly in machines of their own design. Alberto Santos-Dumont had also managed to get a plane into the air, but he couldn’t figure out how to make turns—and his longest flight was only 722 feet.

The brothers returned to Kitty Hawk in April 1908, hoping to build six planes by summer’s end. They practiced in the 1905 Flyer, altering it to meet Army specifications. As they reported in a magazine article: “The operator assumed a sitting position, instead of lying prone, as in 1905, and a seat was added for a passenger. A larger motor was installed, and radiators and gasoline reservoirs of large capacity replaced those previously used.” They took up a passenger, Charles Furnas, for the first time on May 14, and within two weeks made 22 flights, most of them observed by reporters.

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t that point Wilbur and Orville decided it would be best for them to separate in order to fulfill their contracts. Orville would build a 1908 Flyer and fly it to comply with the specifications of the Army Signal Corps contract. Wilbur would go to Europe, assemble the 1907 Flyer that was still waiting on the docks at Le Havre and demonstrate it for potential buyers.

Wilbur arrived in France on May 29, 1908, and spent much time locating a suitable field. He repaired the plane, which arrived in bad shape because French customs officials carelessly renailed the boxes after their inspection. Electing to fly at a racetrack at Hunaudières, he was surprised to learn the British and French press were hostile to him. Few Europeans, it seemed, believed the Wrights had actually flown as they had claimed. Hurt by that reaction, Wilbur at first avoided spectators and refused to grant interviews.

Without fanfare, he made his first flight on August 8. Although he flew only a little over two miles and was aloft just one minute and 45 seconds, he showed such control in turns that the French skeptics were amazed. He flew daily for the next five days and increased his times and distances to the point that he circled the field seven times. In a letter to Orville, Wilbur wrote,“You never saw anything like the complete reversal of position that took place after two or three little flights of less than two minutes each.” He soon moved to nearby Camp d’Auvours, where ever-larger crowds gathered each day. Le Figaro, a French newspaper, declared the Wrights’ plane “was not a success; it was a triumph!”

Meanwhile, Orville was preparing for the trials at Fort Myer, Va. He made his first flight on September 3, and in the following two weeks went up a total of 14 times, establishing records for duration almost every time he flew. His longest flight was one hour and 14 minutes, during which he circled the field 71 times. He also carried

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Wilbur, Orville and mechanic Charles Taylor ready their Wright Flyer for a demonstration flight at Fort Myer, Va., in July 1909.

aloft Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm and Major George O. Squier on test flights to prove the plane could safely handle two passengers.

Apparently there was some degree of friendly competition between the brothers. When Orville set a record, Wilbur was reportedly pleased—and promptly went out to set one of his own.

London’s Automotor Journal editor observed that it seemed “just a case of what was naturally to be expected, with better to follow.”

On September 17, Orville had a tragic accident, the first in a Wright aircraft. He crashed while flying with Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge as a passenger, and Selfridge was killed. Orville sustained a broken thigh, several broken ribs and cuts and bruises. The accident was traced to a prop that split and caused the housing and chain drive to vibrate. One of the guy wires running back to the tail had torn loose, resulting in Orville’s losing control of the plane.

Wilbur was shocked to hear of the accident but decided to continue flying in France whenever the weather was favorable. In following weeks he wrote encouraging letters to his brother. Wilbur had carried his first European passenger, French balloonist Ernest Zens, on September 16. A few days later he flew 40 miles in one hour and 31 minutes without a passenger. On October 6, he flew with Arnold Fordyce for one hour and 4½ minutes, the longest flight in duration yet by two persons. This flight fulfilled the requirements of the contract with Weiller, which called for the payment of $100,000 to the Wrights and gave the French syndicate the rights to manufacture and sell Wright airplanes in Europe.

The next day Wilbur carried aloft Edith Berg, the first woman passenger to fly in an airplane. Conscious of what the wind might do, he tied a rope around her long skirt. Berg inadvertently started

a new fashion trend, the hobble skirt, when she was photographed with the rope still holding down her skirt after the flight.

Wilbur was still reticent about granting interviews. After much coaxing, he agreed to accept an honor from the Aero-club de la Sarthe—on the condition that he did not have to give a speech.

When the audience begged him to talk, he shook his head no, then rose to his feet and said, “I know of only one bird, the parrot, that talks, and it doesn’t fly very high.” He then sat down—to loud applause. His reticence only made newsmen more enthusiastic. Wilbur wrote to Orville, “Instead of doubting that we could do anything, they were ready to believe that we could do everything.”

Wilbur seemed to establish new records every day. Since his contract called for training three pilots, he began teaching Count Charles de Lambert, Paul Tissandier and Captain Lucas de Girardville on October 28. Prizes were being offered by the Aero-club de France to inspire French pilots to compete against Wright. First was a prize for attaining an altitude of 25 meters, and another for being the first to climb to 30 meters. Wilbur won both easily, climbing to 90 meters. On December 18, he set an altitude record of 110 meters, staying aloft for an hour and 55 minutes. On the last day of 1908, he set an endurance record of two hours and 20 minutes, and flew a record 77 miles to win the Michelin Cup. His total prize winnings amounted to 24,500 francs ($4,900). Between August 8, 1908, and January 2, 1909, he made more than 100 flights in France.

In his letters to Orville, Wilbur wrote at length about his European endeavors. He seemed especially delighted with the attitude of many European writers, who had come to doubt but stayed to praise. “Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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neighborhood here, but also every country of Europe,” he noted in one letter. “Queen Margharita of Italy was in the crowd yesterday.

Princes and millionaires are as thick as flies.”

When Orville had recovered sufficiently from his accident, Wilbur wanted him and their sister Katherine to join him in Paris.

They arrived in early January 1909. Orville, still limping and saddened by the death of Selfridge, did not intend to do any flying.

Meanwhile, Wilbur had moved his operation to Pau, where the weather was warmer, and he had departed to resume his flying.

“Every day there is a crowd of people not only from the neighborhood here, but also every country of Europe....Princes and millionaires are as thick as flies.”

Ironically, while en route to Pau from Paris to join him a few days later, Orville and Katherine barely escaped injury in a train wreck.

Wilbur continued training Lambert, Tissandier and Girardville, establishing the world’s first flying school. He was visited by King Alfonso XIII of Spain and England’s King Edward VII. The Wrights returned to Paris briefly, then Wilbur entrained for Centocelle, Italy, on March 28 to demonstrate the Flyer and also train two pilots for an Italian company. He made 42 flights there beginning in midApril. On one flight, he permitted a “bioscope” cameraman from the Universal News Agency to fly with him, thus producing the first motion pictures taken from an aircraft in flight. He was joined by Orville and Katherine for a month, then the three of them went to Paris and London. They returned exhausted to the States in May, where they received a rousing two-day celebration in Dayton.

During their sojourn in Italy, the Wrights had received an offer

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from some wealthy Germans to form a German Wright company, build planes and obtain sales rights to five other countries. They signed a preliminary contract that meant they would receive cash, stock and a 10 percent royalty on all planes sold.

Orville’s visit to Europe had provided newsmen, who now followed both brothers relentlessly, even more incentive to publish material about the Wrights. By that time their fame was also resulting in additional problems. At Pau, Wilbur learned of a report in the Dayton Daily News that he had been named as a correspondent in a divorce suit filed by a Lieutenant Goujarde. He rushed off a letter to the editor saying that the report was entirely without foundation. The news service that had sent the item, after an investigation, discharged its reporter and apologized to Wilbur.

While Wilbur was in Europe, a joint resolution had been introduced in the U.S. Congress to award a medal “in recognition of the great service of Orville and Wilbur Wright, of Ohio, rendered the science of aerial navigation in the invention of the Wright aeroplane, and for their ability, courage, and success in navigating the air.” The Smithsonian Institution also recommended that the newly established Langley Medal be awarded to the brothers “for advancing the science of aerodromics in its application to aviation by their successful investigations and demonstrations of the practicability of mechanical flight by man.”

Once the homecoming celebrations were over, Wilbur and Orville decided it was time to return to Fort Myer with a new plane and complete the Army flight tests. They arrived in Virginia with their latest Flyer on June 20, 1909, and the first series of flights began on June 29. There was an unspoken agreement that Orville would be the pilot for the trials, even though he had not flown since the accident. On July 27, Orville announced to the Aeronautical Board that he was ready to resume testing. He chose to comply with the specification calling for a “trial endurance flight of at least one

The Wright Model A demo (left) drew thousands of observers, including three senators (above), and convinced the Army to adopt the Model A as its first airplane.

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hour” and another requiring that the plane “be designed to carry two persons having a combined weight of about 350 pounds.” He chose tall, slim Lieutenant Frank Lahm to fly with him, and complied with both requirements by staying in the air for one hour, 12 minutes and 38 seconds, a world record for a two-man flight. That flight was witnessed by President William H. Taft, his cabinet, other high-level government officials and an estimated 10,000 spectators.

On July 30, Orville told the Aeronautical Board that he was ready for the cross-country and speed test. Army Signal Corps Lieutenant Benjamin D. Foulois joined him as his passenger and navigator for the 10-mile cross-country flight. The course was from Fort Myer to Shuter’s Hill in Alexandria, Va. They circled a captive balloon used as a marker and returned to Fort Myer, setting a record for twoman flight at a speed of 42.5 mph to complete that phase of the contract. However, they still had to train two Army pilots.

The pilots assigned were Lieutenants Lahm and Frederic E. Humphreys, a Corps of Engineers officer, and this time the training was conducted at College Park, Md. The brothers decided that Wilbur would do the instructing while Orville went to Germany, where the German Wright company had already been set up. He and Katherine arrived in Berlin in late August 1909. There Orville flew one of the German-manufactured planes at Tempelhof Field on September 4. He set an altitude record of 565 feet on September 17 and also established an endurance record with a passenger of one hour and 35 minutes. He tried for another altitude record on September 30, climbing to an unofficial height of 902 feet. Most of his flights were witnessed by the German royal family.

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hen Orville returned home, both men felt that it was time to size up their future. They were now involved in about 20 legal actions to protect their patents. The Wrights by then had held the world’s attention for two years, achieving fame and fortune beyond their dreams. Between September 1909 and the end of 1910, they had received more than $200,000 in the United States alone, including $30,000 for the first Army plane, $15,000 for Wilbur’s flights while Orville was in Germany, $100,000 for the formal organization of the Wright Company on November 22, 1909, and more than $50,000 in dividends and royalties. At this point, they had three possible courses of action: continue their flights and prove their superiority as the world’s foremost pilots; devote their attention to manufacturing aircraft and defending their patents; or retire from the aviation business and pursue other interests. They chose the second course.

But the invention they had brought to the world was being improved upon daily by other innovators, who were also advancing the frontiers of aeronautical knowledge. During 1910 the speed of aircraft had increased to more than a mile a minute; the distance record had increased to an astounding 244 miles in five hours, 32 minutes; the altitude record had reached 8,692 feet; and engine power had increased from 25 to almost 100 horsepower. The Alps had been

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crossed by air, flights had been made from London to Paris and four passengers had been successfully carried aloft with a pilot.

Despite the Wrights’ initial successes, European nations were then developing aircraft of their own more rapidly than the U.S. In March 1911, Wilbur went to Europe to prosecute patent infringements. Orville later returned to Kitty Hawk to experiment with an automatic control device on a glider. But there were so many newsmen around that he never tested it, for fear it would be copied— although he did make 90 glides and set a soaring record of nine minutes and 45 seconds, a record that lasted almost 11 years.

Time and the struggle to defend their inventions were taking their toll on the Wrights. They purchased a 17-acre plot of land in a Dayton suburb and began planning a new home for themselves and their sister. But shortly after their first visit to the site Wilbur became sick, and he was diagnosed with typhoid fever. Fatigued and stressed by the many battles he and his brother were still fighting, he could not summon sufficient strength to overcome the illness.

Wilbur Wright died on the morning of May 30, 1912. In his diary, Bishop Milton Wright marked his 45-year-old son’s passing with a short eulogy that seems to sum up both Wilbur’s character and career: “…A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty....”

A grieving Orville, now 41, assumed the reins of the Wright Company as its president. Flying had by then become big business.

Besides the alleged infringments of Wright patents detailed in lawsuits, aircraft manufacturers in Europe had copied the Wrights’ control system and designs without benefit of license. Orville willingly gave up his position three years later, in August 1915, when a syndicate headed by William B. Thompson purchased his stock interest, retaining him as chief aeronautical engineer.

With the death of the one brother, the world of aviation had also lost the brilliance of the other. Orville would never again seriously experiment, devise or invent. He did, however, test a hydroplane and other models between 1913 and 1916, and made a series of flights with an automatic stabilizer. He had only one reported crash: On August 21, 1914, while flying a hydroplane with Navy student pilot Kenneth Whiting, a wing collapsed and the plane fell into the Miami River. The two narrowly escaped drowning.

Orville last flew as a pilot on May 13, 1918, when he piloted a 1911 Wright biplane in formation with a Liberty-engine de Havilland DH-4 that was being license-built by the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, which he had joined as a technical adviser. He briefly recaptured media attention in January 1928 when he shipped the repaired 1903C Flyer to the Kensington Museum in London “because of the hostile and unfair attitude shown towards us by the officials of the Smithsonian Institution.”

The famous brothers had triumphed as entrepreneurs and achieved what some of history’s greatest minds had not been able to accomplish. Not only were they the first to build and fly a powered flying machine, they also founded the science of aeronautical engineering and set the world’s course toward the stars. ★ LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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Red Baron

Ace for the Ages Ninety-five years after his death on the Western Front, fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen’s fame remains undimmed By Shane Simmons

Anthony Fokker prepares to fly his preproduction F.I in August 1917, as Manfred von Richthofen (third from right) looks on. Inset: The Red Baron with his “Blue Max.”

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PHOTOS: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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t is the most romanticized image in air combat history: a scarlet triplane, piloted by the notorious Red Baron, plucking another Allied aircraft from the burning French skies of World War I, adding it to the long list of kills that made him the original ace of aces, with 80 confirmed air victories. The truth about Germany’s World War I hero lives up to the legend, although most of the war would be over before that famed sight became a reality.

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen was born on May 2, 1892, the eldest of three sons. A career in the military was inevitable. He was enrolled in the military school at Wahlstatt at age 11, following the wishes of his father, a Prussian nobleman whose own active military career had been cut short by deafness. He excelled in sports but fell behind academically, working just enough to get by in an environment he disliked.

Six years later, Richthofen attended the Royal Military Academy at Lichterfelde, which he enjoyed more. There he warmed up to the idea of life in the military and was determined to apply his riding skills to become a cavalry officer. After a short time at the Berlin War Academy, he was commissioned an officer in the 1st Regiment of Uhlans Kaiser Alexander III in April 1911.

The following year he was promoted to lieutenant, and was still participating in regiment horse-jumping and racing competitions when World War I broke out in August 1914. Richthofen went into battle with the Uhlans in the early months of the war and saw action at Verdun. But as static trench warfare set in, the cavalry became obsolete.

He served as a messenger during the winter of 1914-15 and saw some combat, but he felt there was no glory to be had crawling through muddy trenches and shell holes. Having had his fill of unromantic ground warfare, Richthofen wrote to his commanding general to request a transfer to the air service.

Richthofen knew nothing of flying or air combat and, like many infantrymen, had held aviators in contempt. But now the air offered him a new war, one not restricted by an immobile front line.

Richthofen’s transfer was approved. Worried that the war would end before he had a chance to see action in the air, he decided to train as an observer. Pilots were required to undergo three months of training, whereas Richthofen, as an observer, was ready for the field in four weeks.

Sent to Grossenhain on June 10, 1915, Richthofen was the first of his training class to be assigned. He began his flying career at Feldflieger Abteilung 69 as an observer on the Eastern Front, taking photographs of Russian troop positions. A couple of months later, he transferred to a Western Front unit in Belgium (later to become Kampfgeschwader I) as a bombardier.

Richthofen had enjoyed flying from the first moment he took to the air during training. His love of flight was further enhanced by watching the bombs he dropped explode on enemy targets. His fascination with seeing the damage he was inflicting earned him his first war wound. Frantically signaling to his pilot to bank for a clear view after dropping a load on a village near Dunkirk, he acLEGENDS OF AVIATION

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cidentally dipped his hand into one of the bomber’s whirling propellers and lost the tip of a finger.

In September 1915, Richthofen had his initial encounters in airto-air combat, both times firing on Allied Farman biplanes. The first was an exchange of shots between observers without result. The second encounter ended with the French plane dropping away and crashing after being hit by a couple of bursts of machine-gun fire.

Richthofen did not receive credit for the victory because the plane had fallen behind enemy lines, robbing him of any physical evidence.

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fter June 1915, the Fokker Eindecker (monoplane) series became the most feared fighters in the air.

Equipped with synchronized machine guns that could fire through the propeller arc without damaging the plane, they gave German scout pilots a firm advantage in air combat. With his new assignment at Kampfgeschwader I, Richthofen hoped he would get a crack at piloting his own plane. Still flying as an observer, he prevailed upon his friend 1st Lt. Georg Zeumer for help. Zeumer was an experienced pilot, and Richthofen had often flown as his observer ever since the two were first teamed on the Eastern Front. After only 24 hours of Zeumer’s tutoring, Richthofen took to the air on his first solo flight, and promptly destroyed his plane while trying to land.

Uninjured and undeterred, Richthofen kept at it, practicing for two weeks before heading off to the flying school at Doberitz. Five months later he returned to his squadron as a pilot, flying Albatros two-seaters near Verdun. They were not the monoplane scouts he had been hoping for, but once he had fixed a gun to the upper wing of his plane, he was able to take offensive action. April 26, 1916, saw his second kill, a French Nieuport, go down near Fort Douaumont—again behind enemy lines, and again not officially counted.

Fokker Eindeckers, although successful, were rare at the time.

Only Germany’s top aces, like Max Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke, were equipped with them. When Richthofen finally got a chance to fly a single-seat scout, it was on shared time, with him using it mornings and another pilot flying it afternoons. The Fokker did not give him the success he had expected, and neither pilot did well with their mount. After the second pilot crashed it in no man’s land, Richthofen was given another, only to crash that one himself.

Boelcke was Germany’s top ace at the time and easily its most respected aviator. Richthofen had first met him aboard a train while traveling to flying school. The two met again when Richthofen’s squadron returned to the Eastern Front. Boelcke was touring the area in August, assembling pilots for his new Jagdstaffel, Jasta 2. Not wholly content flying bombers and strafing Russian infantry and cavalry with machine-gun fire, Richthofen jumped at Boelcke’s offer to join him on the Somme to at last become a full-fledged fighter pilot. He left the Eastern Front three days later and reported for duty back on the Western Front on September 1, 1916.

By then the Fokker monoplanes had lost any advantage they once held. They now came up against improved Allied scouts that were

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also capable of firing forward through the propeller arc. German factories were busy turning out better fighters—biplane scouts with two forward-firing guns. While Jasta 2 awaited delivery of these aircraft for its new fighter pilots, Boelcke trained the men under him in the intricacies of aerial combat. By the time some Albatros D.II biplanes arrived on September 16, the pilots were ready for action.

The very next day, Richthofen scored his first confirmed kill.

Diving out of the sun with the rest of Boelcke’s squadron on September 17, Richthofen chose an F.E.2b two-seater as his target.

His inexperience allowed the Allied observer to get off some dangerous bursts at him, but he finally managed to close in and riddle the belly of the two-seater. He followed the crippled plane down to the ground and landed near it, then watched German soldiers lift the two mortally wounded British aviators from their cockpits. The observer, seeing Richthofen and recognizing him as the victor, acknowledged him with a smile before dying. The pilot never regained consciousness and died on the way to the hospital.

An avid collector of trophies from the hunt, Richthofen started a personal tradition by ordering a small engraved silver cup to commemorate his victory. He would do the same for the ones that followed. By October 10, he had earned his place among the German aces with his fifth kill. On October 25, he was certain he had recorded his seventh confirmed kill, but two other pilots claimed the downed B.E.12 as their own. Richthofen insisted there had been no other German planes nearby until after the enemy aircraft had crashed south of Bapaume. Nevertheless, his claim was disallowed, despite evidence in his favor.

Jasta 2, while distinguishing itself as a top fighter squadron, suffered heavy casualties. Half its pilots and planes were shot down, and other fliers suffered nervous collapse. Its greatest setback came on October 28. Two days after his 40th victory, Boelcke took off with five other planes in his flight. Richthofen flew at his right wing, Boelcke’s friend Erwin Böhme at his left. Details vary as to what happened once they engaged two de Havilland D.H.2 scouts. Some accounts blame Richthofen’s enthusiasm for causing a collision while diving into combat. Others suggest it was Böhme’s shaky skills, or merely the confusion of the chase, that sent one German plane grinding against another. What is known for certain is that the undercarriage of Böhme’s Albatros scraped across Boelcke’s upper wing, causing him to lose control of the aircraft. The damaged wing tore away as Boelcke descended, and his plane crashed, fatally crushing his head on impact. Böhme was inconsolable. At Boelcke’s grand funeral in Cambrai on October 31, Richthofen carried his mentor’s decorations on a black pillow in the procession.

With Boelcke’s death and that of Immelmann before him, Germany had lost its top aces. But it became apparent that Richthofen might fill their shoes. Encouraging him to become Germany’s next aviation hero, officials were less strict about confirming his victories, taking him at his word for victims that fell behind enemy lines.

One of Richthofen’s most famous air battles took place almost a month after Boelcke’s death. On November 23, 1916, he went up

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Recovering from a head wound, Richthofen visits Jasta 11, which he made into the Western Front’s top-scoring German fighter unit.

against Major Lanoe George Hawker, the well-respected commander of No. 24 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, who had seven air victories and a Victoria Cross. Hawker was in a four-plane flight, led by Captain John O. Andrews, that attacked five Albatroses south of Bapaume. When the four D.H.2s crossed the front lines into German territory, Hawker suddenly found himself alone. Two British planes had had to turn back with engine trouble, and Andrews had quickly joined them after being hit and suffering an engine misfire.

Hawker chose his target: Richthofen’s D.II. He dived on the Albatros from behind, getting off a five-round burst that missed when Richthofen cut sharply left. Hawker followed him into the turn.

The equally matched pilots began a frantic, spinning chase as each tried to outturn the other and maneuver into position for a clear shot. Their tight circle, less than 300 feet in diameter, slowly descended from almost 10,000 feet to nearly treetop level.

Hawker was now at a disadvantage. Dangerously low on the German side of the lines, he knew he would be hit from the ground or forced to land if he did not end the battle quickly. A succession of loops, which Richthofen’s less creative flying style could not match, placed Hawker in a position to get off another burst that came close, but missed the Baron’s plane. Realizing that he had most likely lost his chance, Hawker turned and bolted for the Allied lines with Richthofen in pursuit. With the Baron and the ground closing in on him, Hawker zigzagged at high speed to stay out of the line of fire. He was nearly saved when the German’s guns jammed after one burst. The jam cleared, however, and with his second burst Richthofen shot Hawker through the back of the head. His D.H.2

pitched up and then nosed into the ground, just 50 yards short of the German frontline trenches. Richthofen claimed Hawker’s Lewis gun from the wreck as a trophy and hung it above the door of his quarters. Hawker was confirmed as his 11th victory.

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he new year marked a series of successes for Richthofen. With his 16th victory on January 4, 1917, he became the leading living German ace. Along with this victory came his reassignment as leader of Jasta 11 at Douai. Two days later, notification came that he was to be awarded the Orden Pour le Mérite, the “Blue Max,” Germany’s highest military medal. To further distinguish himself from his fellow fighter pilots, Richthofen started painting sections of his aircraft red, possibly after the colors of his old Uhlan regiment.

Jasta 11, although founded around the same time as Jasta 2, lacked the prestige of Richthofen’s old squadron, which had come to be known as Jasta Boelcke. Since its formation in September 1916, his new unit had not scored a single victory, and it fell upon Richthofen to whip the 12 officers under him into shape. Command did not come easily to him, but he sought to follow in Boelcke’s footsteps. Leading by example, he shot down the squadron’s first enemy aircraft shortly after his arrival, on January 23, 1917.

Richthofen’s red Albatros, now a newer D.III, was already making a name for itself. The two-man crew of a British F.E.2b, forced to land as the Baron’s 18th victory, referred to the plane that had brought them down as “le petit rouge.” On this same flight one of the wings of Richthofen’s plane cracked and he had to rapidly deLEGENDS OF AVIATION

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scend 900 feet for an emergency landing. Another F.E.2b that had fired at him claimed this as a victory, but the damage had been due to structural failure.

With success came fame, and Richthofen’s good fortune in combat was milked by the German propaganda machine for all it was worth. Picture postcards and newspaper articles about him circulated widely, and correspondence soon began arriving at his air-

With success came fame, and Manfred von Richthofen’s good fortune in combat was milked by the German propaganda machine for all it was worth.

field from all over Germany—mostly fan mail from women. The Red Baron had become Germany’s number one war hero.

March and April of 1917 saw a thrust of German air power near Arras against Allied forces that outnumbered the Germans by an average of 3-to-1. In those two months Richthofen brought down another 31 aircraft, surpassing Boelcke’s old record. Under his tutelage, Jasta 11 pilots were fast improving, and competition between them and Jasta Boelcke fliers was fierce. Allied airmen began referring to Richthofen’s squadron as the “Flying Circus” because of its brightly colored planes, highlighted in red to match their leader’s.

During this period, Richthofen had two close calls. The first occurred shortly after his 25th victory, when enemy fire ruptured his fuel tanks and forced him to shut off his engine, lest it explode, and land. April 2 saw another near miss when (according to Richthofen) he was hit from the ground by the observer of a Sopwith 11∕2 Strutter two-seater he had just brought down near Givenchy. In his first report, Richthofen claimed to have returned fire and killed the observer, although he later said he held back and did not shoot again despite the dying observer’s attack. The surviving British pilot, however, insisted that his observer was in no condition to fire after their plane hit the ground. Werner Voss, Richthofen’s friend and competitor from Jasta Boelcke, had observed the incident and was cited as a witness to the Baron’s restraint from shooting.

By the time Richthofen went on leave in May, he had led Jasta 11 to more than 100 victories. Lothar von Richthofen, since joining the air service in his brother Manfred’s footsteps, had also done well. Within a month of joining his brother’s squadron, Lothar, too, had made a name for himself, with 20 victories. He was left in charge of Jasta 11 while Manfred toured Germany, meeting with the kaiser, hunting game and visiting his mother.

Richthofen returned to the front on June 14 with new orders to organize four Jagdstaffeln into a single wing. Jastas 4, 6, 10 and 11 became Jagdgeschwader I (JG.I). When Richthofen assumed 14

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command as Rittmeister of JG.I in the Courtrai region, he passed on his command of Jasta 11 to Lieutenant Kurt Wolff.

While leading Jasta 11 as its JG.I commander on July 6, Richthofen became involved in an epic dogfight with the British that quickly escalated until there were as many as 40 aircraft involved.

A chance shot from an F.E.2d, 1,200 feet away, cleaved a 2-inchlong groove in Richthofen’s skull. He was temporarily paralyzed and blinded, and his Albatros D.V fell out of control. Regaining the use of his limbs a few thousand feet above the ground, he cut the engine, tore off his goggles and looked directly at the sun to clear his vision. Realizing he was behind the German lines, he restarted his engine at 150 feet and searched for a suitable place to set down.

He was finally forced to make an emergency landing. The Albatros tore down some telephone wires before coming to rest, and Richthofen tumbled out of the cockpit. He was still conscious when aid came and transported him to St. Nicholas’ Hospital in Courtrai.

Despite his nearly fatal wound, Richthofen put himself back on duty at JG.I less than three weeks later—against doctors’ recommendations. He was plagued by headaches as a result of the bone fragments still lodged under his scalp, and also experienced nausea while flying. But he fought on, all the while insisting that Lothar, also wounded in battle, should not return until fully recovered.

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he end of August 1917 saw the arrival of new Fokker F.I triplanes at Courtrai. Richthofen and Voss were among the first to take them into combat. Trading in the Albatros D.V for what would become his most famous mount, Richthofen shot down his 60th plane, an R.E.8, on September 1. It was the last victory he could commemorate with a trophy cup. Silver was becoming scarce in Germany, and Richthofen was forced to discontinue this practice.

The victories he scored after his return to duty failed to inspire Richthofen. He had lost much of his zest for combat, and his friends noticed a distinct change in his personality. Already a loner, he became even more withdrawn. Killing was no longer the sport it had once been for him. On September 6, still troubled by his head wound, Richthofen embarked on a period of convalescence. In his absence, his first triplane mount was shot down on September 15, as Kurt Wolff piloted it against a squadron of Sopwith Camels. Voss also met his end in another Fokker F.I during an epic battle on the day of his 48th victory, September 23, outnumbered by a swarm of S.E.5a fighters of No. 56 Squadron led by Major James T.B. McCudden. But Richthofen was back at JG.I on October 23, after visiting home, hunting and writing about air combat in his autobiography.

He shot down a couple more planes on his return, again flying an Albatros D.V. He then continued inspecting and testing other aircraft that seemed likely to fare better than the Fokker triplane, whose safety and suitability in the face of new Allied fighters was being questioned. Because of official duties and leave, Richthofen was not able to add to his score again until March 12, 1918, once more flying the Dr.I, as the Fokker triplane was now designated.

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Between then and April 20, Richthofen downed his last 16 planes, mostly fighters. The final two victories, Sopwith Camels of No. 3 Squadron, came after the Flying Circus moved to Cappy.

Richthofen led his flight of triplanes to search for British observation aircraft on the morning of Sunday, April 21, 1918. Four triplanes from Jasta 5 were fired on from the ground around 10:30 a.m., after attacking two R.E.8s from No. 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps. The anti-aircraft fire drew the attention of a flight of Camels led by Canadian Royal Air Force pilot Captain Arthur Roy Brown from No. 209 Squadron. Soon after the Camels intercepted and shot down one of the Jasta 5 planes, Richthofen’s flight joined in the battle.

On the fringe of the fight was Roy Brown’s friend Lieutenant Wilfred R. May, a fellow Canadian. May was a novice pilot, and this was his first offensive patrol. He had been ordered to keep out of combat, but he could not resist going after an enemy triplane that passed close by. His Vickers guns jammed after being fired too long, and, defenseless, he headed away from the battle toward the Somme Valley.

Richthofen spotted the lone plane breaking off and chose it for his next victim. Brown, seeing this chase unfolding a few thousand feet below him, dived to help his fellow airman. He realized that the lone Camel stood little chance with the red triplane hot on its tail.

May, quickly losing altitude, tried every wild maneuver he could think of to stay out of the Red Baron’s sights. It was only the unpredictability of the inexperienced pilot’s maneuvers that kept Richthofen from picking off the Canadian flier quickly with his probing bursts. “Richthofen was giving me burst after burst from his Spandau machine guns,” May would later say. “The only thing that saved me was my awful flying. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

It was then, with Brown closing from behind, that Richthofen, usually a meticulous and disciplined fighter pilot, made a mistake and broke one of his own rules by following May too long, too far and too low into enemy territory. Two miles behind the Allied lines, as Brown caught up with Richthofen and fired, the chase passed over the machine-gun nests of the 53rd Battery, Australian Field Artillery.

Sergeant C.D. Popkin opened fire with his Vickers, followed by gunners William Evans and Robert Buie, plus a number of riflemen.

Richthofen was hit, but the debate over who fired the shot that passed through his torso, killing him, goes on. None of the principal shooters ever said with certainty that he was the one who got him. Those who defended the shooters’ claims were their friends and colleagues, choosing sides based more on nationality and emotion than hard evidence. Top Canadian ace Billy Bishop said, “Nobody will ever convince anyone who flew in World War I that anyone but Roy Brown shot down Richthofen.” He also suggested there was a bias against Canadian fliers, saying, “Had he been in any other air force he would have been given credit and would probably have received half a dozen decorations from his own and other countries.”

Whether hit from the air or the ground, Richthofen was mortally wounded. He tore off his goggles, opened the throttle briefly, then cut off the engine and dipped down for a crash landing. His

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plane bounced once, breaking the propeller, and settled in a beet field alongside the Bray–Corbie road near Sailley-le-Sac. He died moments later, at 10:50 a.m.

Manfred von Richthofen was laid to rest late in the afternoon of April 22 in a small cemetery in Bertangles. He was buried with full military honors after a short service by an Anglican chaplain.

Twelve men from No. 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, each fired three rounds into the air. Other officers placed wreaths on the grave. The body was set with feet facing the marker, a four-bladed propeller trimmed to form a cross. Upset about a German being buried in their cemetery, the villagers descended on the grave that night, uprooted the marker and tried to dig up the body.

That same evening, RAF pilots dropped canisters containing news of Richthofen’s death and pictures of his funeral over Jagd-

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The Allies gave the Red Baron a funeral with full military honors, complete with an Australian honor guard.

geschwader I, confirming the fears of the German officers there.

First Lieutenant Wilhelm Reinhard succeeded Richthofen as commander of JG.I, as per Richthofen’s wishes, but he only lasted two months; 1st Lt. Hermann Wilhelm Göring assumed command after Reinhard’s death on July 3.

Richthofen’s body was moved after the war to a cemetery at Fricourt. His brother Karl Bolko had his body moved again in 1925, this time to Berlin, where, in a state funeral with thousands in the procession, he was buried at Invaliden Cemetery. A modest flat memorial stone was unveiled the following year by his mother. Göring added a monument in 1938. All the Red Baron’s war trophies, an impressive collection kept at his home, were lost when the Russians advanced through Schweidnitz near the end of World War II. It has been 95 years since Manfred von Richthofen died in battle, but the legend of the Red Baron lives on. There was much regret from both sides that he did not survive the war. Richthofen’s death, as much as his life, assured his continued presence in history as one of World War I’s greatest enigmas. ★ LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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Before he gained a worldwide reputation as ‘Lucky Lindy,’ Charles A. Lindbergh developed a solid repertoire of aviation skills By C.V. Glines

Lindbergh’s

Path to Glory W hen Charles A. Lindbergh set out on his solo transatlantic flight in May 1927, it signaled the beginning of one of aviation’s most exciting episodes. But the 25-year-old pilot who would be called “the prophet of a new era” had already gained a wealth of experience as a wing-walker, barnstormer and airmail pilot before he set off from New York’s Roosevelt Field to Paris on that misty May morning.

He was born on February 4, 1902, in Detroit, Mich., and his last name would have been Mansson—if his grandfather Ola had not changed his name to August Lindbergh after emigrating from Sweden in 1859. One of August’s sons was named Charles August Lindbergh. He married Evangeline Land in March 1901, and a son was born to them 11 months later. Instead of being named after his father, the baby was given a middle name that was created by adding a single syllable. And so it was that Charles Augustus Lindbergh represented the third generation of Lindberghs in America.

Young Charles’ early years were spent on a farm near Little Falls, Minn. His father was a lawyer who later represented his district as a U.S. congressman. The family moved numerous times, and Charles attended schools in a dozen different locations between Washington, D.C., and California. His travels included a trip to Panama with his mother in 1913 to see the Panama Canal under construction.

Campaign trips with his father gave him the opportunity to drive an automobile and learn about its inner workings. As time went on, his major interests developed along mechanical and scientific lines.

After high school, Charles entered the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. But, as he later admitted,“The long hours of study at college were very trying for me. I had spent most of my life outdoors and had never before found it necessary to spend more than a part of my time in study.” His recreations 16

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included pistol and rifle shooting, as well as riding a motorcycle.

After finishing the first half of his sophomore year at Wisconsin in 1922, he motorcycled to Lincoln, Neb., and enrolled as a student at the Nebraska Aircraft Company, where he had his first flight in a Lincoln Standard. There was no ground school, so he learned what he could about airplanes from the workers. His flying instructor was willing to let him fly solo after eight hours, but the company required a student to furnish a bond to cover any damage to the plane, and Lindbergh could not afford it.

Erold G. Bahl, one of the instructors, was planning a barnstorming trip through Nebraska, and Lindbergh asked if he could go along.

To help attract customers for Bahl, he began wing-walking, and he made his first parachute jump in June 1922. For the next few months, he also wing-walked and parachuted for H.J. Lynch and barnstormed until mid-October in Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Lynch frequently allowed him to take the controls, and that experience made the young man determined to buy a plane of his own.

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Charles Lindbergh was transformed from an obscure mail pilot to the most famous man on earth. Inset: Lindbergh tours the U.S. in his Ryan NYP following his solo transatlantic flight.

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In April 1923, Lindbergh bought a war surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” in Americus, Ga., for $500. He received 30 minutes of dual instruction, then soloed without telling anyone beforehand. A few days later he made his first solo cross-country flight. He decided to barnstorm alone en route to Texas and sold his first passenger ride in Mississippi. He had his first accident when he nosed up in a farmer’s field near Maben, Miss., after which he replaced the prop and worked as a lone barnstormer for several months.

Lindbergh learned that the Army Air Service was accepting applications for pilot training, and decided to apply because, as he said, “I always wanted to fly modern and powerful planes.” After

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plane collided with another student’s. Both bailed out and were back flying again within an hour.

Out of a class of 104, only Lindbergh and 17 others received their wings in the spring of 1925. They were commissioned second lieutenants in the Air Service Reserve Corps and relieved from active duty to return to civilian life. Lindbergh promptly went back to barnstorming and carnival flying in a rented OX-5 Standard at St. Louis. He instructed students and flew on several circus and passenger-carrying engagements while waiting for a permanent job with St. Louis’ Robertson Aircraft Corporation, hoping to fly the mail if that company was awarded a contract by the post office.

Spirit of St. Louis is loaded with fuel prior to takeoff from Roosevelt Field on the morning of May 20, 1927.

passing the exams, he was ordered to report to Brooks Field at San Antonio, Texas, on March 15, 1924.

He sold his Jenny and joined Leon Klink, an automobile dealer who had bought a Canuck (a modified Canadian-built Curtiss JN-4C) and was learning to fly. The two barnstormed their way to San Antonio via Mississippi and Florida, arriving in February. Since it was still too early for Lindbergh to report for training, they decided to continue westward, but they had an accident at Maxon, Texas. When the Canuck was repaired, it was time for Lindbergh to return to San Antonio, and Klink continued on to California.

At that point, Lindbergh had logged 325 hours of pilot time.

Lindbergh was enlisted as a flying cadet and completed the rigorous year of flying and ground school at Brooks and Kelly fields.

Training at the latter included cross-country and formation flying and gunnery in World War I de Havillands, then transition flights in more advanced aircraft. During a formation flight on March 6, 1925, Lindbergh made his first emergency parachute jump after his 18

On June 2, Lindbergh was forced to make a second emergency jump while testing a new plane for Robertson called a Plywood Special. Having put the plane in a spin, he could not pull it out. He finally jumped when only about 350 feet from the ground.“A strong wind was drifting me towards a row of high tension poles,” he recalled, “and it was necessary to partially collapse the chute in order to reduce the descent and land before striking the wires. I landed rather solidly in a potato patch and was dragged over a road before several men arrived and collapsed the chute.”

Meanwhile, Lindbergh joined the 110th Observation Squadron of the Missouri National Guard, commissioned a first lieutenant.

Robertson had received a mail contract on April 15, 1925, and Lindbergh began flying the St. Louis–Chicago route.“Our route was not lighted at first and the intermediate airports were small and often in poor condition,” he noted.“Our weather reports were unreliable and we developed the policy of taking off with the mail whenever local conditions permitted. We went as far as we could and if the

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visibility became too bad we landed and entrained the mail.”

Flying in fog and at night led to many accidents for airmail pilots. Those conditions resulted in Lindbergh’s next two emergency parachute jumps. One was on the night of September 16, 1926, after a takeoff from Peoria under clear skies. He ran into fog but flew under it and headed on a compass course for Chicago’s Maywood Field. Lindbergh churned around for about two hours until his gas ran out and he had no choice; he jumped and landed in a cornfield. Six weeks later, on November 3, Lindbergh had to make another jump while en route at night from Springfield to Peoria. Headed for Chicago, he encountered fog over Peoria and climbed to 13,000 feet, searching for cloud breaks. When he could not find any and his gas was gone, he bailed out and landed near Covell, Ill., on a barbed-wire fence. Fortunately, the barbs did not penetrate his flying suit. He could not find the wreck in the fog, so he got a ride to Chicago, flew another plane back the next morning, and located the remains of his original plane only 500 feet from where he had landed the night before. At that point he was the first pilot to have made four successful emergency parachute jumps.

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hortly after that episode, Lindbergh began thinking about a New York–to–Paris flight, motivated by the offer of French-born Raymond Orteig, who owned hotels in both cities. Orteig’s Hotel Brevoort in New York City became the headquarters for French and American aviators who had visited the city during World War I. Proud to be their host, Orteig joined the Aero Club of America. On May 22, 1919, the innkeeper had offered $25,000 “to the first aviator who shall cross the Atlantic in land or water aircraft (heavierthan-air) from Paris or the shores of France to New York, or from New York to Paris or the shores of France, without stop.” The prize went unclaimed for seven years, but by 1926 several European and American pilots were planning to compete for it. The first to try flying eastbound from America was World War I French ace René Fonck with a crew of three in a Sikorsky S-35 trimotor, but they crashed on takeoff from Roosevelt Field on September 21, and two of the crew members were killed.

Noel Davis and Stanton H. Wooster became the first Americans to publicly announce their intention to fly from New York to Paris.

Their plane was a modified Huff-Daland Keystone trimotor bomber.

Then Richard Byrd, fresh from his unsubstantiated claim that he had reached the North Pole, declared he would make the flight in a Fokker trimotor. Clarence Chamberlin announced he was going to fly a single-engine Bellanca in the competition.

French fliers planning to fly westbound included Charles Nungesser and one-eyed François Coli, who intended to fly a Levasseurdesigned trimotor. Their competitors, Paul Tarascon and Dieudonné Costes, were obtaining a Breguet for their projected flight. British pilots Frank T. Courtney, F.W.M. Downer and R.A. Little planned to make their attempt in a Dornier Wal seaplane. In addition, German airmen were considering flights in Junkers-built planes.

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The more Lindbergh thought about how aircraft had improved since World War I, the more possible the flight seemed to him.“Several facts soon became outstanding,” he recalled in his book We. “The foremost was that with the modern radial air-cooled motor, high lift airfoils, and lightened construction, it would not only be possible to reach Paris but, under normal conditions, to land with a large reserve of fuel and have a high factor of safety throughout the entire trip as well.”

Lindbergh asked William B. Robertson, owner of Robertson Aircraft, and several other St. Louis businessmen if they would finance such a project. They were cautiously encouraging, so he went to New York to obtain information about available planes, engines and equipment. He rationalized that a single-engine monoplane would be better than a trimotor biplane, saying: “A single motored plane, while it is more liable to forced landings than one with three

“A strong wind was drifting me towards a row of high tension poles, and it was necessary to partially collapse the chute in order to…land before striking the wires.”

motors, has much less head resistance and consequently a greater cruising range. Also there is three times the chance of motor failure with a tri-motored ship, for the failure of one motor during the first part of the flight, although it would not cause a forced landing, would at least necessitate dropping part of the fuel and returning for another start.” He first considered buying a single-engine Bellanca, but the price was too high and delivery would take too long. He also checked on a Fokker, but Tony Fokker would not consider turning out a single-engine plane for such a flight. Travel Air of Wichita, then building a cabin plane, also turned him down.

Lindbergh had learned about an excellent monoplane used by airmail pilots that was built by Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego.

The company’s founder, T. Claude Ryan, had dissolved his partnership with B. Franklin Mahoney but remained as manager, and the firm kept his name. Lindbergh wondered whether Mahoney and Ryan would consider selling one of their planes.

It was difficult to convince the businessmen in St. Louis to bankroll his flight, but Lindbergh’s enthusiasm was persuasive. A fund of $15,000 was developed, including $2,000 of Lindbergh’s own savings. On February 3, 1927, a telegram, prepared by Lindbergh but signed as if coming from Robertson Aircraft to get the firm’s attention, arrived at the Ryan factory: “Can you construct Whirlwind engine plane capable flying nonstop between New York and Paris stop If so please state cost and delivery date.” Ryan called in Donald A. Hall, a young engineer he had recently hired, to discuss LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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the proposed flight. They agreed that the flight could be accomplished in a single-engine monoplane with a great overload of fuel.

Ryan responded: “Can build plane similar M one but larger wings capable of making flight cost about six thousand without motor and instruments delivery about three months.” An answer quickly followed, asking whether the plane could be built in less than three months because of the competition that was rapidly developing.

Ryan replied that they could furnish a plane in two months and would require a 50 percent deposit. Lindbergh traveled to San Diego, where he liked what he saw. He recommended the backers accept the deal, and an order was placed on February 28 for a plane equipped with a Wright Whirlwind engine, costing $4,000.

Lindbergh and Hall worked closely on construction details of a plane resembling the M-2. There would be no radios or nightflying equipment. To provide a structure capable of handling the weight of the extra fuel on takeoff, an extended wing and widewheel-tread landing gear were designed. Lindbergh wanted the cockpit placed in the aft position behind the main fuselage tank, not between the engine and the tank, where he could be crushed

“Each minute makes my fuel load a little lighter,...separates me that much farther from the earthly impact that’s almost certain to be crushing to my body and my plane.”

in an accident. That restricted forward visibility, but Lindbergh noted, “I will be flying by instruments and there will probably be no one I will run into out over the Atlantic Ocean.”

At one point during the assembly, a shy workman named A.C. Randolph, a former submariner, was concerned about the pilot’s restricted visibility. He approached Lindbergh with drawings for a simple periscope. Lindbergh approved the idea, and one was installed, although he preferred to poke his head out the window.

The name of the plane, Spirit of St. Louis, had been agreed upon by the eight businessmen who had contributed to the fund. Lindbergh stayed at the plant as construction continued seven days a week. Some workers voluntarily put in double shifts. Hall himself, on one occasion, worked 36 hours without resting.

Lindbergh had never made an overwater flight or flown more than 500 miles nonstop. He gathered Rand McNally state maps for the flight to New York, but since he would be flying a great-circle route over the ocean, he spent hours plotting the track he would follow on a variety of charts. “From New York to Paris,” he said, “I worked out a great circle, changing course every hundred miles or approximately every hour. I had decided to replace the weight of a navigator with extra fuel, and this gave me about three hundred 20

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miles additional range. Although the total distance was 3,610 miles, the water gap between Newfoundland and Ireland was only about 1,850 miles, and under normal conditions I could have arrived on the coast of Europe over three hundred miles off my course and still have enough fuel remaining to reach Paris: or I might have struck the coastline as far north as Northern Scandinavia, or as far south as Southern Spain and landed without danger to myself or the plane, even though I had not reached my destination. With these facts in view, I believed the additional reserve of fuel to be more important on this flight than the accuracy of celestial navigation.”

Lindbergh carefully weighed the equipment he would carry, including a raft in case he had to ditch. In addition to food for the flight, he included five cans of Army rations and a gallon of water, plus an Armburst cup, for condensing the moisture from human breath into drinking water. He elected not to take a parachute.

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eanwhile, the newspapers carried stories about others on their New York–to–Paris projects.

Chamberlin had set an endurance record of more than 51 hours on April 14, Byrd’s plane had an accident on the 18th and Nungesser stated that he would leave France on April 24. Two days later, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster were killed on takeoff from Langley Field,Va. That left Byrd, whose plane was repaired, and Chamberlin still in the running, although Chamberlin had a takeoff accident on April 24.

On April 28, just over two months after the order had been placed, Lindbergh was ready to give Spirit its first test flight. “Today, reality will check the claims of formula and theory on a scale which hope can’t stretch a single hair,”he said.“Today, the reputation of the company, of the designing engineer, of the mechanics, in fact every man who had a hand in building the Spirit of St. Louis, is at stake.

And I’m on trial too, for quick action on my part may counteract an error by someone else, or a faulty move may bring a washout crash.”

He was immediately pleased with Spirit’s performance. “The plane was off the ground in six and one-eighth seconds, or in 165 feet,” he said,“and was carrying over 400 lbs. in extra gas tanks and equipment.” He noted its top speed was 130 mph and that it was very stable in banks and stalls. Lindbergh’s greatest concern was weight. He made progressively heavier load tests at an abandoned Army post, and speed runs were flown on a course along the Coronado Strand. When he was satisfied, he took the plane to Rockwell Field and made more load tests with up to 300 gallons of fuel.

On May 8, Nungesser and Coli left Paris, in the first plane to take to the air en route to the other side of the Atlantic in the competition. They soon disappeared, never to be found. Now only Chamberlin in his Bellanca was left as the most promising competitor, although Byrd was still hedging about his intended takeoff date and declared that he was not concerned about the prize.

Lindbergh left from Rockwell Field on May 10 for St. Louis. He flew a compass course and headed over Arizona’s mountains as haze and darkness obscured checkpoints below. A lazy moon gave him

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some light, and all instruments were reportedly operating normally.

Suddenly, the engine began to sputter and shake. He could not identify any possible landing places in the darkness. He tried various throttle and mixture control settings, and in spite of the ominous coughing and sputtering, the Whirlwind engine was still putting out some power. He asked himself, “Will some miracle keep my Whirlwind going while I circle between these mountain ridges through the night?…Each minute makes my fuel load a little lighter, reduces my landing speed some fraction of a mile. Each minute separates me that much farther from the earthly impact that’s almost certain to be crushing to my body and my plane.” He considered

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of 21 hours, 45 minutes was an unofficial record for a coast-tocoast flight. Lindbergh was besieged by the press, asking when he would leave for Paris.“I’ll go when everything is right,” he answered, referring to the installation of a new compass, a thorough engine check and satisfactory weather.

The next few days were spent working with engine and instrument experts, and checking out nearby Roosevelt Field, which seemed safer than Curtiss Field for the takeoff. It remained for meteorologist James H. Kimball to indicate the best time to depart.

On Thursday, May 19, the forecast was encouraging. Spirit was moved to Roosevelt Field, and a barograph was installed by a rep-

A police cordon keeps crowds at bay at Le Bourget airfield after Lindbergh’s 3,610-mile flight across the Atlantic.

returning to San Diego, five hours behind him, but that would mean flying over high mountains again, so he continued eastward as the engine continued its uncertain rhythm. He thought briefly he might turn south toward Mexico, where the mountains were lower.“I have plenty of fuel in the tanks,” he wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), “but that would destroy the check on navigation which is my main object of the flight. It’s extremely important to see how far off route I am when the sun rises. If serious errors have crept [in,] I must learn about them before I start across the ocean.”

He was able to ease up to 13,000 feet over the Continental Divide, and when he had cleared the summits, he descended into warmer air and the engine ran more smoothly. He knew then the problem was carburetor icing.“I’ll have a carburetor heater put on in New York,” he told himself.“The warning I received tonight may save my life over the North Atlantic, flying in still colder air.” This incident was not revealed in We. No one knew for a long time how close he might have come to never realizing his dream.

He landed at Lambert Field 14 hours and 25 minutes after takeoff. Next morning he departed St. Louis and arrived at Curtiss Field, Long Island, seven hours and 20 minutes later. The total flying time

resentative of the National Aeronautic Association to ensure that the flight would be officially sanctioned.

It was misty and raining lightly when “Lindy,” as the press had dubbed him, climbed into the wicker pilot’s seat. “Sitting in the cockpit, in seconds, minutes long,” he recalled, “the conviction surges through me that the wheels will leave the ground, that the wings will rise above the wires, that it is time to start the flight.” It was 7:54 a.m., May 20, 1927, as he began the takeoff. The plane felt like “an overloaded truck” at first, without “the magic quality of flight.” But gradually the controls stiffened as the halfway point passed. It bounced twice, but finally rose in triumph and cleared by 20 feet the telephone wires at the end of the field.

We know about the successful outcome of that flight and the unprecedented reception Lindbergh received.“I had entered a new environment of life,” he said,“and found myself surrounded by unforeseen opportunities, responsibilities, and problems.” But everlasting fame was not to be denied. Louis Blériot, first to cross the English Channel by air, summed up the achievement most succinctly when he kissed an embarrassed Lindbergh on both cheeks and said, “You are the prophet of a new era.” ★ LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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Why the endless fascination with a woman who by most accounts was a mediocre pilot, best known for disappearing in the Pacific?

By Stephan Wilkinson

The

Amelia Mystique

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DIZ MUENCHEN GMBH, SEUDDEUTSCHER ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY; ABOVE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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ith the exception of two or three famous astronauts, there are only four pilots in the entire history of aviation whose names every American will recognize: Wilbur and Orville Wright, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. In fact the producers of the major 2009 Earhart biopic figured (incorrectly, it turned out) that her first name alone would be enough to draw tens of millions of customers to Cineplexes, to Blockbuster, to Netflix. Amelia. Admittedly she had the good fortune to have not been christened Sally or Martha, and to have inherited a surname so perfect even a romance novelist would reject it: Air-heart.

Earhart’s position in history might seem strange. Her talents as a pilot were questioned, perhaps with envy, by many contemporaries. Her fame grew out of a flight on which she was simply a passenger—as important as “a sack of potatoes,” according to one critic—when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. And her ultimate notoriety came from a flight that failed—her 1937 round-the-world attempt—at least in part due to some grievous errors of airmanship.

Yet Amelia lives on, while Louis Blériot, Eddie Rickenbacker, Wrong-Way Corrigan, Frank Hawks, Wiley Post and hundreds of other skilled, brave, inventive and once-famous pilots have been tossed into the trashcan of aviation enthusiast history.

A crowd of spectators salutes Amelia Earhart after her solo flight in a Lockheed Vega across the Atlantic, the first by a woman, in May 1932.

Above left: The aviatrix poses in an autogyro.

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Let’s be honest and admit that outside of grade school classrooms, where Earhart’s role as a proto-feminist and all-American hero are still taught, the three questions that continue to fascinate us about her are: 1. How good a pilot was she? 2. What was her sex life like? and 3. Where and how did she die? Her life and times have been exhaustively described in biographies—the best of them by

Earhart ran into icing at night and at one point spun the Vega, recovering only after breaking out of the clouds low enough to see individual whitecaps.

Susan Butler (East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart), Mary Lovell (The Sound of Wings) and Doris Rich (Amelia Earhart: A Biography)—so we’ll cut to the chase.

If I have one advantage over Earhart’s otherwise superb biographers, it’s that as a pilot I have spent thousands of hours flying modern (and vintage) aircraft of performance and complexity equivalent to those that Amelia piloted. And as a pilot of embar-

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rassingly ordinary skills, I have a tiny window into the difference between baloney and prime beef in what has been written about Earhart the aviator.

If she had a fault, it was that she would never have admitted such a lack of flying talent. With one exception, when she acknowledged planting a Lockheed Vega on its nose due to “over-application of the brakes,” accidents were never her fault. They were always due to a hidden ditch, “spectators say a whirlwind hit me,” landing gear weakened by another pilot’s bounced landing, or a mechanical failure. When Earhart crashed an autogyro heavily in 1931, she climbed out of the wreckage and in a moment of candor said, “It’s all my fault.” But she later explained that, heavens, what she actually meant was that it was her fault that her husband, George Putnam, had tripped and broken a rib while rushing toward the wreck.

It would have been better, perhaps, if Earhart confessed to occasionally screwing up, for it was a time when engines routinely failed, pilots got lost because they had no navigation aids other than railroad tracks, and landings in pastures because it was getting dark were part of the game. Of course she crashed now and then. Who didn’t?

Amelia learned to fly during an era, the early 1920s, when the Avro Avians and Kinner Airsters she first flew were vastly more difficult to handle than are the Cessna 150s and Piper Cherokees she’d have been using half a century later. And she quickly progressed to big radial-engine, taildragger Lockheed Vegas and Electra twins

TRINITY MIRROR/MIRROR PIX/ALAMY

Earhart peers from the Fokker F.VIIb/3m Friendship following her first transatlantic flight on June 19, 1928—as a passenger.

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that few of her modern amateur pilot critics could even start, much less taxi—and forget about actually flying the beasts.

In fact test pilot Wiley Post declared Earhart’s first Vega, which she flew across the country to the Lockheed factory in California for repairs, “the foulest he’d ever flown,” yet she had safely managed many hours in the big pig. It was so bad that Lockheed traded her a new one rather than fix it.

Earhart flew that single-engine Lockheed across the Atlantic in 1932, becoming the first woman to solo the Pond. The flight required many hours of night instrument flying, which was a new and relatively untested skill for her and had to be done with what a modern pilot would consider emergency-only “partial panel” instrumentation. At that, her altimeter failed several hours into the flight, and she figured out a way to basically estimate altitude by what power settings the engine would accept, which happened to be a very smart move. She ran into icing at night and at one point spun the Vega, recovering only after breaking out of the clouds low enough to see individual whitecaps. (Anybody who makes light of this has never flown an airplane, certainly never spun one.)

Worse yet, an exhaust collector ring weld failed, and she flew for hours watching right in front of her, through the gap between cowling and fuselage, a pulsing blue flame, knowing the firewall might not hold if the exhaust fractured completely. Then avgas began dripping down the back of her neck from a wing tank fuel-gauge leak above her…

The previous year, Putnam, always in search of publicity, had lined up Earhart to make the first transcontinental flight in a Pitcairn autogyro, its fuselage plastered with the logo of chewing gum purveyor Beech-Nut, the flight’s sponsor (see “Amelia Earhart’s Autogiro Adventures” at www.historynet.com). Amelia had no interest in the autogyro’s STOL capabilities but flew it simply as a kind of Goodyear blimp, an odd advertising vehicle that attracted crowds wherever it landed. She crashed her Pitcairn three times, once so close to the crowd at Abeline, Texas, where she was demonstrating it that the Department of Commerce issued what would today be called an FAA violation and wanted to ground her for 90 days, a major penalty. Only the intercession of a few high-placed friends kept her flying, with just a formal rebuke in her file.

But the Pitcairn was so difficult to fly that it was said the incident/accident rate was once every 10 flying hours. A factory pilot crashed Earhart’s own (borrowed) Pitcairn not five hours after it had been repaired. Amelia had unwittingly become a test pilot.

One of Earhart’s major critics, Hollywood flier Paul Mantz, said she was an impatient and careless pilot. Many assumed he must have known what he was talking about, since he’d flown and traveled with Earhart extensively, and certainly Mantz had the weight of vast experience and flying talent behind his words. But he also was hugely miffed that Amelia had, for a variety of reasons, decided to dispense with him as her “aviation adviser” on the eve of her round-the-world attempt. One has to wonder how much of Mantz’s ill will toward his one-time pal—they were even falsely rumored

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Amelia strikes a glamorous pose in her flight suit in November 1928. By then she had her sights firmly set on a solo transatlantic crossing.

to have had an affair—was simple resentment and payback.

Another Earhart detractor, young pilot Elinor Smith, was an acquaintance but also a competitor, which may have flavored her words. (Smith was convinced George Putnam had seen to it that she didn’t get sponsorship for any of her own flying projects, which would hardly make her a fan of his wife.) Smith was a demo pilot for Bellanca, and Earhart was considering buying a Bellanca. So she flew one with Smith, who many years later recalled that Amelia had done a dreadful piloting job—so dreadful that Giuseppe Bellanca supposedly refused to sell her one of his airplanes.

But that was still early in Earhart’s flying career, and virtually all her flight time had been in low-powered lightplanes such as her Airster and Avian. The Bellanca was the first high-performance single she’d ever flown, so perhaps Elinor Smith should have cut her some slack rather than, years later, perpetuating the Ameliacouldn’t-fly legend.

Soon thereafter, Earhart bought her first Lockheed Vega, which probably was about as demanding to fly as any first-line fighter of LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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the era. Imagine a 250-hour private pilot today buying a P-51D Mustang and soloing it. (Earhart claimed 560 hours at roughly this point, but probably half of it was bogus, what pilots came to call “Parker P-51 time,” after the popular fountain pen. Amelia rarely logged her flight time, and it is difficult to imagine how she could have flown that much between 1921 and 1929, what with 1924 through 1928 being virtually devoid of flight time.)

She was a pilot who sometimes— and necessarily—was in over her head, urged by her promoterhusband to constantly push her own aviating envelope.

The inexperienced Earhart had a hard time handling the big Vega, so Putnam initially hired a pro, Bill Lancaster, to do the actual flying. Lancaster was listed as Amelia’s “mechanic,” and the fact that he did much of the piloting was kept quiet. But Amelia couldn’t fake being at the controls during the original Powder Puff Derby, in 1929, and she ran off the end of the runway at a refueling stop in Yuma, Ariz., bending the prop. Characteristically, rather than admit she had misjudged the Vega’s hot landing speed, she said that “something had gone wrong with the stabilizers,” a nonsensical claim.

At the end of the race, in Cleveland, she made a horrendous landing, bouncing and porpoising and nearly ground-looping. Still, even critical Elinor Smith was awed that the low-time Earhart was able to survive flying the big Lockheed. And the famous Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson, who helped check Amelia out in her next airplane, a special twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E, thought her a good pilot, “sensible, very studious, and paid attention to what she was told.”

Earhart’s most notorious crash came as she was leaving Hawaii westbound in her Electra on her first round-the-world attempt.

Something went bad during the takeoff, and she ended up groundlooping at speed, doing damage that required an extensive rebuild.

Some say a blown tire caused it. Earhart later hinted that Mantz was the cause, since he flew the San Francisco–to–Honolulu leg and made a rough landing that, Earhart claimed, weakened the starboard gear-leg oleo strut, which collapsed to initiate the ground loop. But Amelia had one bad habit as a twin-engine pilot: Even at speeds where the rudders were effective, she still tried to control direction with differential throttles. That can work at the beginning of a takeoff roll, but it’s a big mistake at 80 mph with the tail up and could well have caused the swerve that collapsed a gear leg on the heavily overloaded airplane.

Having twice flown the Atlantic in light twins and made countless transcontinental trips in everything from two-seaters to business jets, I’m awed by Earhart the aviator because she had the 26

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ability and temperament to fly day after day, week after week, for five to eight hours a day. Only somebody who has been there can comprehend how physically and emotionally wearying it is to be a single pilot totally in charge of navigating, aviating, weather-guessing and dealing with every aspect of an airplane’s needs in the air and on the ground. Earhart did it when navigation aids, weather forecasting and airport facilities were laughably primitive compared to what today even the rankest student pilot has at her disposal. To read Amelia’s own accounts of navigating across Brazil and the South Atlantic, then crossing bleakest Central Africa under the pounding sun day after day, can’t help but make a pilot admire her strength, intelligence and courage.

Certainly navigator Fred Noonan did much of the hard work, but Earhart was still in charge and, like any captain, bore the ultimate responsibility. She was a pilot who sometimes—and necessarily—was in over her head, urged by her promoter-husband to constantly push her own aviating envelope. Yet Earhart ultimately rose to the challenge and performed beyond the bounds of what far too many of her critics, both then and now, might themselves be able to accomplish.

E

arhart grew up spunky and adventuresome, and as an adult she chose to keep her hair in a quasi-masculine tousle and wear pants (though skinny and lanky from the knees up, she felt awkward about her disproportionately heavy legs and ankles). She made her career in a man’s world of airplanes and oily engines, so she was inevitably lumbered with the term “tomboy,” in some circles taken as shorthand for lesbian. There is in fact zero evidence of that being true, though the myth still lingers, as it does around so many strong women. If anything, Earhart was somewhat asexual; her emotional drive focused on adventure and accomplishment, not sex and marriage.

When she wed George Putnam in 1931, she presented him, hours before their marriage, with a bold pre-nup (though the term hadn’t yet been invented). Amelia required that both she and Putnam were to feel free to do as they wished, whether alone or with whomever they wished, and that neither should feel constrained by anything as archaic as marriage vows and monogamy.

And if after one year of marriage Earhart decided she didn’t like being someone’s wife, the deal was off.

Earhart had been engaged, before her marriage to Putnam, to young engineer Sam Chapman. Her involvement with Chapman almost certainly was a relationship she agreed to because that’s what a conservative, proper young woman did in the 1920s: got engaged, planned a wedding and married. There was apparently no sexual involvement with Chapman; they were just friends and indeed would remain so after she ended the engagement.

There would be whispers and gossip about several of the men with whom Earhart flew and traveled, not only Paul Mantz but also navigator Noonan. Earhart never had more than a friendly relationship with the happily married Mantz, and as for Noonan, just

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a month before he and Amelia left on their last flight, he’d married a woman who Amelia knew well and who obviously had no qualms about sending her new husband forth with the famous aviator for several weeks of enforced cockpit intimacy. Noonan spent every spare moment during the round-the-world trip posting letters home to his wife—hardly the conduct of a cheating husband.

Some suspect that Earhart was in fact pregnant with Putnam’s child during the round-the-world flight. Either she was susceptible to avgas fumes—her explanation—or Amelia was experiencing frequent bouts of morning sickness.

But one of the most tantalizing questions that has come down through the 75 years since Earhart’s comet blazed brightest is whether she had a long-term affair with handsome ex–West Point football team captain, Olympic athlete, former Army Air Corps pilot, entrepreneur and government official Eugene Vidal—father of writer Gore Vidal. The film Amelia spends much of its energy perpetuating that legend, with Hilary Swank (Earhart) and Ewan McGregor (Vidal) vigorously heating the cinematic sheets.

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Above: Earhart and husband George Putnam plan her next flight. Top: Amelia waves from a Pitcairn PCA-2 in 1931.

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There’s ample evidence that Earhart had a crush on the married Vidal—they were involved in a number of business dealings together—but little to indicate a sexual relationship beyond the insistence of Gore Vidal that Amelia was his father’s mistress. Gore would have been about 10 at the time, so the affair was most likely the imaginings of a fertile young mind amplified over the years.

If Earhart hadn’t disappeared into the Pacific on July 2, 1937, she’d today be as obscure an aviator as Jacqueline Cochran, Louise Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Beryl Markham, Hanna Reitsch, Amy Johnson and

a dozen other women pilots who were accomplished record-setters but today are little known to the general public. But tragedy created notoriety—particularly tragedy that took the life of an attractive, mysterious and strangely sexy woman, which was guaranteed to thrum the heartstrings of celebrity-besotted Americans.

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ow and where Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan died have fascinated everyone from conspiracy theorists to analytical calculators of Earhart’s known and assumed flight tracks, fuel consumption, possible power settings, potential groundspeed, wind drift, navigational sun sights, emergency options, what she had for breakfast and everything else that can be deduced—make that guessed— about her last flight. For the sake of simplicity let’s roll eyes editorially and ignore Elvis theorists who claim Earhart was alive and well in New Jersey, or died in Japan’s Imperial Palace or was beheaded as a spy. Without belaboring the excruciating details and the angry debate that has created an Internet cottage industry, the two leading theories of how she and Noonan vanished currently are: That when Earhart and Noonan couldn’t find Howland Island, the navigator provided her with a northwest/southeast search track roughly perpendicular to their course toward Howland—capping the T, in effect—and that she took a chance and followed it on the southeast heading, which took her away from Howland, to an uninhabited atoll today called Nikumaroro. There she force-landed and survived, making several pleading radio calls while the Electra’s batteries lasted, until lack of fresh water and food brought them a slow and painful death.

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Above: Fred Noonan and Earhart board their Lockheed 10E Electra. Below: After she ground-looped the Electra at Luke Field in Hawaii, it had to be shipped to California for repairs.

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This theory is espoused by the U.S. organization Tighar (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery), which has so far spent about $6.2 million searching Nikumaroro during 10 expeditions. Tighar has recovered some encouraging artifacts, but nothing that can unquestionably be connected to Earhart or her Electra. Tighar’s director Richard Gillespie and a multitalented volunteer team have been poring over underwater imagery captured during the most recent expedition, which he claimed revealed a shape consistent with that of an Electra’s main landing gear leg.

A second intriguing theory is that Earhart had a carefully considered fallback plan if she failed to find Howland: She would do a 180 and fly back toward New Guinea and hope to blunder across one of the substantially larger islands that lay to the east of it—perhaps New Britain, which had two airstrips at Rabaul.

Australian wreck-chaser David Billings, who is openly contemptuous of Tighar’s methodology, claims that in 1945 an Australian army patrol on New Britain stumbled across the corroded hulk of a radial engine and nacelle, plus the overgrown airframe of a twin-engine airplane of some sort. Busy fighting late-war Japanese holdouts, the soldiers had only enough time to retrieve a metal “repair tag” wired to the engine mount, and the tag—which has since disappeared—is said to have denoted the engine’s type and the serial number of the airplane for which it had been repaired. Both matched Earhart’s Electra, construction number 1055 with two Pratt & Whitney S3H1 Wasp engines. Billings claims to have a crude map of the patrol’s route, and penciled onto its margin are the very same numbers and letters.

Billings and volunteers have tramped the New Britain jungle hoping to stumble across the wreckage just as the Aussie patrol did 68 years ago, but so far no luck. He realizes they need an expensive helicopter-borne magnetometer search if the wreckage is still there, by now totally overgrown and perhaps even buried.

Actually, there’s a third theory that she searched frantically for Howland, found nothing and finally ditched or perhaps crashed into the Pacific. Having flown many hours in twin-engine aircraft in the Caribbean and the Bahamas—similar to the islanded areas of the Pacific—I can tell you that finding a tiny island on the sea when there are clouds in the sky (and there were many when Earhart arrived in the vicinity of Howland) is a fool’s errand: Each cloud creates a perfect shadow the size and shape of an island, for dozens of miles in every direction.

Once when I was low on fuel in a Shrike Commander twin, I radioed the airport operator at the tiny Caribbean island of Grand Turk and asked him to step outside and tell me if he could hear my engines. Just as Earhart begged the Coast Guard cutter Itasca to

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Amelia smiles from the Electra’s cockpit. Her place in aviation legend was assured when she and Noonan vanished without a trace on July 2, 1937, during their round-the-world attempt.

home on her, I begged Grand Turk to tell me yes, they could hear me. They couldn’t. So I know her terror, know what it’s like to fly from one phantom shadow to another. I survived. She didn’t, but I know what happened to her, because it almost happened to me.

So perhaps it’s time to stop, and leave the lady where she lies.

The search for Earhart has become an expensive yet ultimately pointless exercise. Ric Gillespie of Tighar at least admits that it’s not the Earhart legend that drives him but the chase—the deduction and analysis, the footwork and fundraising, overcoming obstacles for a goal that is not gold bullion sunk in a Spanish galleon, or a rich-veined Dutchman’s Mine, or strange Nazi secrets entombed in a U-boat; it’s the intellectual exercise.

Country singer Iris Dement certainly didn’t have Earhart in mind when she wrote “Let the Mystery Be,” but she might as well have.

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done But no one knows for certain, so it’s all the same to me I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

That might be the most meaningful way of all to honor Amelia: Let the mystery be. ★ LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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How private philanthropy, inventive engineers and a courageous pilot put the “I” in IFR By Richard P. Hallion

Solving the Problem of

Fog Flying

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irmen of all nations faced a common problem in the 1920s: flying safely when darkness, clouds or fog obscured their way. In an era when IFR flying literally meant “I Follow Railroads,” it constituted the greatest of all flight safety challenges. By day, pilots typically followed roads, rivers and railroads. At night, they relied on moonlight, easily recognized stars and, after the creation of lighted airways, evenly spaced rotating beacons and flashing markers between major cities. But rapidly forming fog and clouds could quickly rob them of these references. If they became trapped in clouds or fog, potentially fatal vertigo often swiftly followed. Uncertain of the airplane’s attitude, many pilots crashed, driven out of control by their own confused senses and impulsive control inputs. Even if they did not crash, fog and clouds often forced them to chance risky emergency landings. In one year, the U.S. Post Office recorded nearly 800 such landings by its airmen, approximately one for every 20 flying hours, a national average of more than two a night.

Disorientation and subsequent loss of control made any longdistance flight potentially hazardous, for in the course of a journey of several hundred miles an airplane was likely to overfly clouds or enter obscuring conditions. In May 1919, the crew of the U.S. 30

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Navy’s Atlantic-crossing Curtiss NC-4 encountered disorienting sea fog broken occasionally by a hazy sun. The NC-4 slipped into a spiral dive, prelude to a fatal spin. Fortunately the pilot, Coast Guard Lieutenant Elmer Stone, aided by providential glimpses of the solar disk, recognized the direction of rotation, and recovered control.

A month later, it was the turn of Britain’s John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. Flying through clouds between Newfoundland and Ireland, they lost control of their twin-engine Vickers Vimy, which abruptly stalled, mushed oceanward and began a slow spin. Luckily the cloud deck did not descend all the way to the sea, and they spun out of the base of the clouds with barely enough altitude to recover.

In 1927, flying from New York to Germany, Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine became disoriented in clouds, stalled their Bellanca WB-2 and then lost 17,000 feet before safely recovering and continuing onward. Later that same year, Hermann Köhl took off from Dessau, Germany, attempting the first east-west airplane flight to America. As he was passing over Ireland in thick weather, a rising howl warned him that his Junkers W33 monoplane had dropped into a spin. He recovered as much by luck as skill, decided he’d had enough for one flight and flew back to Dessau.

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Of his many aerial accomplishments, James H. Doolittle regarded his blind flights in 1929 as “my most significant contribution to aviation.” Opposite: Doolittle with the NY-2 he flew on instruments.

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Doolittle and Harry Guggenheim stand beside the Vought O2U-1 Corsair in which Doolittle crash-landed in fog on March 15, 1929.

Existing instruments were of little help, so imprecise that instructors told students—Charles Lindbergh among them—to trust their senses instead. Such advice constituted a death sentence for many airmen, for if instruments could mislead a pilot, reliance on “seat of the pants” feel certainly did mislead them.

In 1926 extensive Air Corps tests of hooded pilots sitting in rotating gimbaled chairs proved that the mind, its perceptions governed by the inner ear, is notoriously unreliable in the absence of visual cues for judging motion, acceleration and position. No matter how great their previous skill and experience, with their vision obscured all the pilots routinely mistook rates and directions of rotation, missed reversals of direction and changes in seat angle or could not even tell if they were moving at all. Under such conditions pilots risked not only losing control but, miscued by their senses, actually putting their airplane out of control. What was to be done?

The answer came from a remarkably energetic, conscientious Swiss émigré family, the Guggenheims. After arriving in America in 1848, the family had made millions in mining and mineral investments, turning much of it to public benefit by supporting various charities and foundations. Such generosity, combined with scrupulous honesty, earned the family high marks from reformers.

Daniel Guggenheim and his son Harry were responsible for the family’s interest in aviation, the former because he saw its business potential, and the latter because he enjoyed flying and thought it could help bring the world’s peoples together. Plagued by heart 32

problems, Daniel had retired in 1923, at age 67, establishing The Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation for “the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Daniel’s son Harry, born in 1890, had studied mining at Yale and political science at Cambridge.

In World War I he became one of the first naval aviators. He returned afterward to the family’s business, building a sprawling mansion on the north shore of Long Island, and flying with a local aero club.

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n 1925 Daniel Guggenheim had given $500,000 to New York University to create an aeronautics program and educate“highly trained engineers capable of building better and safer commercial aircraft.” The school opened a year later, a two-story building with a 9-foot wind tunnel, classrooms, laboratories and an initial enrollment of 57 students. So great was the aviation community’s reaction that the Guggenheims immediately began considering a larger effort. On January 16, 1926, the elder Guggenheim announced The Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, a $2.5 million (roughly $30 million today) fund. It subsequently undertook a wide and influential range of educational grants, scientific research, technical evaluations and practical commercial aircraft demonstrations.

While on a European study trip immediately after establishing the fund, Harry Guggenheim emphasized to a British acquaintance that “safety was the vital necessity to civil aviation.” To that end, the fund’s trustees hoped (as one announcement read) to convince the

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public “not by statistics, but by actual demonstration that airplanes are inherently no more dangerous than steamships or railroads.”

In 1927 this led to a West Coast “Model Air Line” experiment with Western Air Express, using three new Fokker F-10 trimotors. (The F-10 was a development of Tony Fokker’s popular 10-seat F.VIIb/3m, but powered by Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engines, with Dutchbuilt wings and larger American-built steel-tube-framed fuselage capable of carrying a dozen passengers.)

The Model Air Line included an experimental radio and weather service along the route. A chain of reporting stations issued bulletins and weather updates, and balloons were launched at various points to measure winds aloft. Telegraph, telephone and teletype machines speeded surface communications across the airway and airport network. The Guggenheim weather-reporting network greatly influenced the federal airways system and the Weather Bureau’s reporting network. Still, the blind-flying challenge remained. Pilots could navigate cross-country using radio aids and informed of weather hazards en route, but how could they fly safely, in all weather, day and night, if they couldn’t see the ground?

In June 1926, fund trustees had agreed to finance an effort to overcome the challenges of “fog flying,” but only after first executing a series of grants creating widespread national aeronautical engineering education. Two years later, with this endeavor well underway, they announced a switch in emphasis from education to research,“particularly meteorology and the problem of fog-flying.”

Shortly after that, however, their confidence was dashed when Jerome Hunsaker, a leading aeronautics authority, concluded that “safe landing in fog is not today possible, and no means are in sight to make it so.” His discouraging views recalled an episode in the Wright brothers’ career: In 1901 Wilbur Wright had exclaimed that man wouldn’t fly for 50 years—but then in two years the brothers achieved success at Kitty Hawk. Now the emerging technology of radio navigation, coupled with new cockpit instruments, would soon make fog flying a practical reality.

The Bureau of Standards’ Aeronautical Research Division had developed radio beacons enabling long-distance navigation. Though these were not perfect, they had already proved their value. The bureau’s beacon design incorporated two antennas to transmit the Morse letters “A” ( −) and “N” (− ). Flying in a particular quadrant, the pilot would hear one of these two letters. But where the A and N signals overlapped, the pilot would hear a steady tone, the “equisignal” (—). As the pilot approached the beacon, the signal would build in strength until the airplane passed directly over it.

Then it would enter a “cone of silence”: The signal would abruptly end, then resume again as the pilot flew away from the beacon.

Knowing the location of the beacon, the plane’s course approaching it and the distance and direction of an airfield in relation to the beacon, a pilot could use a combination of maneuvering and timed turns to precisely position his aircraft for landing.

In the summer of 1927, barely a month after Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget after flying the Atlantic, Air Corps Lieutenants ●

●

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Lester Maitland and Albert Hegenberger flew the Fokker trimotor Bird of Paradise from California to Oahu, navigating some 2,400 miles by using (in the words of the flight report) “the most precise and complete equipment for astronomical, dead reckoning, and radio navigation.” Bird of Paradise had left Oakland on June 28, carrying voice radio, a homing receiver, compasses, drift meters, sextants and navigational references. The radio beacons worked only sporadically; updates from ships, dead reckoning and sun-and-star sights proved more reliable. Radio played one important role: Nearing the islands at 10,000 feet, Maitland and Hegenberger used signals from a beacon on Maui to make final course corrections.

The Dole Air Race fiasco a month later underscored the risk of not having radio. Woolaroc, a big high-wing Travel Air 5000 monoplane flown by Art Goebel and William Davis, won largely by simply surviving. Since their plane was equipped with a radio, Goebel and Davis were able to take bearings from Maui, confirming a hunch that the winds had changed. They survived—but seven other fliers vanished over the unforgiving Pacific, lost in three planes without radios. Radio navigation clearly saved lives. By the end of the year, the Bureau of Standards had equipped an airway between Cleveland and New York with radio beacons for civil trials.

Then just 31, Jimmy Doolittle was the archetype of the scientific test pilot, possessing both extraordinary piloting skills and an MIT Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering.

Preparing to tackle blind flight, the Guggenheim Fund turned to the Air Corps, Navy, General Electric, MIT, AT&T and the Bureau of Standards for assistance in establishing a laboratory, as well as acquiring airplanes and experts. All furnished equipment, support and staff. Air Corps chief Maj. Gen. James Fechet authorized the use of Mitchel Field on Long Island and detailed two pilots, including Lieutenant James H. Doolittle, and a mechanic to work on the problem. Then just 31, Jimmy Doolittle was the archetype of the scientific test pilot, possessing both extraordinary piloting skills and an MIT Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering.

The fund spent $26,000 to purchase two small biplanes: a Consolidated NY-2 trainer and a Vought O2U-1 Corsair observation plane, the former for research and the latter for fast transport.

Mitchel already had a 125-mile-range radio beacon, and in January 1929, Bureau of Standards technicians installed two others: a short-range “localizer” indicating the landing flight path, and a “marker” designating the airfield’s boundary. By month’s end, the Full Flight Laboratory was ready to begin its work.

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zon and indicate whether a plane was flying noseup or -down. Perhaps Hunsaker had been right after all, and flight science had reached an insurmountable technology barrier.

The fund had previously awarded study grants to encourage new instrument development. But Doolittle himself proved to be the catalyst in finding experts who could actually do the work.

Learning of a new altimeter concept submitted to the Bureau of Standards, Doolittle arranged to meet the designer, Paul Kollsman, and they immediately bonded. Just 29, Kollsman was a German native who had come to America in 1923, briefly working for the Pioneer Instrument Company before leaving in 1928 to found his own firm.

The secret to his design was extremely precise and fine gearing far beyond that of conventional altimeters. Tests showed Kollsman’s altimeter was 20 times more precise than others.

But what about indicating course, bank and pitch? Doolittle believed a gyro-stabilized comThe NY-2’s instrument panel included soon-to-be essentials such as an altimeter pass superimposed over an artificial horizon (top left), a gyrocompass (top center) and an artificial horizon (bottom center). could furnish all that data. He turned to the masters of the gyroscope, the Sperrys. Elmer Sperry and his sons Elmer Jr. and Lawrence had demonstrated the world’s first practical autopilot in 1914. Elmer had a tle experienced firsthand the threat posed by fog. After a day of special interest in bad-weather flying, having written Lawrence in meetings he left Buffalo in the Corsair, flying to Albany, then turn1920,“We have absolutely got to solve this problem; if we die in the ing down the Hudson River valley. By the time he reached New York attempt and could have registered a single notch in advance, it City, fog shrouded the East River, making a return to Mitchel imseems to me that it would be well worth while.” Sadly, his words possible. Nearing Elizabeth, N.J., he crash-landed in a small clearturned out to be all too prescient: Lawrence died just four years ing, where trees tore off the wings. If Doolittle was not immune later, crashing while crossing the Dover Straits in bad weather. from such danger, what chance did an average pilot have?

The elder Sperry recommended separating the artificial horiSome sort of extremely precise, perhaps gyro-stabilized instruzon from the directional gyrocompass. After convincing Doolittle ments were clearly vital to any solution. Pilots flew primarily by that two instruments would do what one alone could not, he asmeasuring airspeed, altitude, direction and turn rate. In 1921, pisigned Elmer Jr. to work with the fund. The younger Sperry brought loting a DH-4 equipped with a turn indicator, Lieutenant John in company engineer Preston Bassett. They soon created an artifiParker Van Zandt had crossed the Allegheny Mountains from West cial horizon, using a movable airplane symbol superimposed over Virginia to Washington, completing a 90-minute flight in weather a gyroscopically stabilized horizon bar. If the plane banked, the bar so foul that two other aircraft not so equipped turned back. But a remained horizontal while the plane symbol rotated to indicate the turn indicator could lag by at least several seconds behind what a bank angle. If the pilot climbed or dived, the horizontal bar deplane was actually doing, potentially misleading a pilot. Moreover, scended below the symbol or rose above it. Young Sperry next deit only indicated turning motion, not angle of bank—little use if a signed a directional gyrocompass, attaching a compass card to a pilot was fighting vertigo, which was common in fog or clouds. gyroscopically governed gimbal. The pilot would use a magnetic Doolittle’s baseline flights revealed equally serious deficiencies compass to establish the course, then set the directional gyro, with altimeters and magnetic compasses. The former lagged badly which—unlike the lagging magnetic compass—would immedienough to prevent his accurately knowing the airplane’s height ately show any off-course deviation. above ground, very dangerous when flying in fog at low altitude.

Together with radio navigation, these three instruments promThe latter lagged too, particularly during gentle turning, sometimes ised to make blind flight both practical and safe. Thanks to the arindicating a false course for many seconds and rarely an exact tificial horizon, the pilot would know precisely what the plane was course unless the pilot held to the same one for several minutes. Fidoing, without relying on “feel.” Radio navigation enabled precise nally, no instrument existed that could furnish an artificial hori34

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cross-country flight, and the directional gyrocompass gave the pilot a means of precise navigation. The precision altimeter allowed a pilot to let down with assurance even in the most extreme weather.

But as promising as each new device seemed, only when they were evaluated in actual flight, as an integrated navigational and flight safety system, could their true worth be evaluated.

The fund outfitted its NY-2 with all the instruments plus nearly 80 pounds of communications equipment, consisting of radio beacon receivers, small ear “phonettes” permitting the pilot to hear signals, visual signal indicators, two radio transmitters for voice and Morse transmission, a tall radio mast sprouting from behind the cockpit and a trailing antenna that could stream a thin wire some 60 feet behind the plane. The pilot had a “visual course indicator” with rapidly vibrating reeds that showed if the plane was left or right of the equisignal or flying down it. Thus equipped, the NY-2 could fly to the limits of the Mitchel Field beacon—approximately 125 miles—then make its way back safely.

Much of the testing could be accomplished in good weather, since technicians installed a foldable canvas hood to cover the aft cockpit, simulating blind flight. Thus Doolittle could make“blind”flights while Lieutenant Ben Kelsey, a fellow MIT graduate, rode in the front cockpit as safety pilot, ensuring Doolittle didn’t stray into another flier’s path. Over the summer of 1929, Doolittle made literally hundreds of blind-flying approaches. With practice, he found he could also land blind. He and Harry Guggenheim agreed that the next step was to wait for a truly foggy day and then try out the system for real.

On Tuesday, September 24, 1929, dense fog rolled in from Long Island Sound, producing perfect conditions for testing a blowtorch heater that a gravel pit owner had proposed as a way to disperse fog. But as Doolittle, a mechanic and the pit owner watched, the heater failed to do any good. At that point, almost casually, the pilot ordered the NY-2 warmed up. As excitement spread, technicians manned the radio network and localizer beacon. Doolittle’s wife, Josephine, and young Sperry arrived at the field. Harry Guggenheim and other fund trustees also made their way toward Mitchel.

Doolittle strapped himself into the cockpit. Then the trainer accelerated across the wet grass, lifting into the murk and quickly disappearing from view. Doolittle concentrated on radio navigation.

He followed a racecourse pattern at 500 feet, following the localizer beam west for five miles before turning south and continuing around to the east, then flying along the localizer for seven miles. As he passed the field, the little biplane remained invisible to those on the ground, its presence obvious only from the engine’s drone. He turned back two miles east of the field, beginning his descent. Ten minutes after takeoff, the NY-2 dropped out of the fog and landed safely.

Later that same morning Guggenheim had Doolittle make a “for the record” flight, this time with the hood, as the fog was lifting; Ben Kelsey rode as safety pilot. Doolittle flew and landed safely, observed by a small crowd. “Actually,” Doolittle recalled years later, “despite previous practice, the final approach and landing were sloppy.” Well, perhaps—but his two short hops that morning were

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the most technically influential flights since the Wright Flyer left its monorail at Kitty Hawk.

Over the next decade, engineers in Europe and America would refine many other blind flying techniques and tools, particularly in Germany. Six decades later, with a remarkable career behind him, Doolittle would tell historian C.V. Glines that his flights at Mitchel Field constituted “my most significant contribution to aviation.”

The great confluence that made possible the jet age’s mass air transportation—the joining of the aeronautical revolution with the electronic revolution—began with the intensive work of the Guggen-

Doolittle’s two short hops on the morning of September 24, 1929, were the most technically influential flights since the Wright Flyer left its monorail at Kitty Hawk.

heim Fund on airways and blind flight. In the interest of air safety, the fund integrated developments from multiple agencies, organizations and companies, linking many different people in a quest to achieve reliable and routine all-weather air transportation. Certainly it was just a beginning: The radar revolution emerging over the next decade expanded and transformed flight safety and aircraft operations in ways the Guggenheims could hardly have imagined.

But the Guggenheim Fund, the inventiveness of Bureau of Standards radio engineers, the creative insight of Elmer Sperry and Paul Kollsman, and the skill and courage of Jimmy Doolittle combined to usher in the age of instrument flight—to the benefit of all the passengers and aircrews who have since traversed the world’s skyways. ★

The canvas hood on the NY-2’s rear cockpit could be raised to simulate blind flight.

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Flight Officer Yeager poses with his P-51B. He scored his first victory in this Mustang on March 4, 1944, but was shot down in it the following day.

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There were higher-scoring fighter aces and other hotshot test pilots, but nobody did both quite like Chuck Yeager

Interview by Carl von Wodtke and Jon Guttman

The Voice of

Experience

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ew, if any, individuals are as well-known in the annals of aviation history as Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager. An 11½victory fighter ace in World War II and a renowned test pilot, Yeager took his place alongside the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh on October 14, 1947, when he became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound. On October 2, 1997, as the 50th anniversary of his historic flight approached, Brigadier General Yeager visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to mark the occasion with a speech. Earlier that day, he had been hoisted into the cockpit of the Bell X-1 that is suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s main lobby. It was the first time he sat in the plane that took him through the sound barrier since he had personally delivered it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1950.

Ever opinionated and never inclined to mince words, Yeager talked that day with Aviation History about his storied career.

AH: In your book, you mentioned that you didn’t think there

was any such thing as natural pilot.

Yeager: Well, no, in my opinion there’s no such thing as a natural-born pilot. A pilot’s ability depends on experience, and the more experience a pilot has, the better he is. It’s that simple.

AH: Why did you get into flying in the first place?

Yeager: I had no knowledge of airplanes and I could care less about them. Until 1941, I’d never seen an airplane on the ground, or looked at an airplane, so it didn’t mean anything to me. But when I enlisted, like a lot of the high school kids did in ’41, I was put into aircraft maintenance when we were mobilizing because of my mechanical aptitude and was made crew chief. I served in October and November at Moffett Field as crew chief on T-6s. I couldn’t get into pilot training then, because I wasn’t 20 years of age and I didn’t EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE

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have two years of college. That was the requirement up until about November of ’41. Then, since the Army Air Corps was not getting enough applicants for pilot training, they lowered the requirement to 18 years of age and a high school diploma. But you would not be an officer; you had to go through under the flying sergeant program.

You went through as an enlisted trainee, enlisted pilot, and then made staff sergeant. So I applied, and the only reason I applied was, number one, the 150 bucks a month that the pilots were getting was a lot more money that the 30 dollars a month that I was getting.

AH: So at that time it was the money.

Yeager: And the fun of flying, I suppose. The pilots seemed to have a lot more fun. They didn’t work like we did, busting our knuckles. So I applied, and then I served about six or seven months, waiting to be called up for pilot training, because they were setting up pilot schools, and in the meantime I got my first ride in an airplane. About February of ’42, I took my first ride in an AT-11 that I was crew chief on at Victorville. I was deathly sick and puked all over the airplane, and I said to myself after the flight,“You’ve made a big mistake.” After that, I never flew anymore ’til I was called up to the flying school. Then, once I got into a PT-21—a little lowwing Ryan—with the instructor, on the first flight I was a little woozy, but when I started flying the airplane it all went away.

AH: At what point did you feel comfortable in an airplane?

Yeager: Probably when I soloed.

AH: When did it get to be fun?

Yeager: Well, there’s always fun. Probably after my second flight it began to be, when you found out that you could do a good job, then it got to be fun.

AH: One gets the impression that at a certain point you got so into flying that you could barely see doing anything else.

Yeager: The reason was, you weren’t allowed to do anything else.

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You trained as a fighter pilot, you went off to war. What’s your job?

Fly in a fighter and shoot down airplanes. Or fly escort missions.

You weren’t allowed to do anything else. And that’s probably been the whole story of my life; I was always faced with a job to do where duty became paramount. In combat you learn real quick that if you don’t have any control over the outcome of a situation, forget it.

Concentrate on what you’re doing. Just stay out of that death arena, and that’s exactly the way we went through it, and I was disciplined that way. Sure, guys were getting killed on missions, but you never gave any thought to it ’cause you don’t have any control over it. And then when I came home and was assigned to Wright Field as a main-

In combat you learn real quick that if you don’t have any control over the outcome of a situation, forget it.

Concentrate on what you’re doing.

Just stay out of the death arena. . . .

tenance officer, not as a test pilot, I used to put on shows. Well, obviously, being a fighter pilot in combat, you’re pretty sharp at doing aerobatics, because that’s your lifeblood, so I used to do airshows there at Wright Field in the P-80s. The test pilots weren’t trained like Bob Hoover and I were, ’cause we were fighter pilots, and knew airplanes and flew them very well. Test piloting was a little different arena, you know; it’s a little more precision-type flying, and the Old Man [Colonel Albert G. Boyd] liked the way I put on the shows.

Here I’m a maintenance officer, and he offered me the opportunity to go to the test pilot school. There I learned what precision flying was, and then when I got in the X-1, a lot of people said,“Well, what was your attitude toward the airplane?”And it didn’t make any difference what my attitude was. Duty is paramount. You don’t give any thought to the outcome. They said,“Did you think you’d be able to break the sound barrier?” It didn’t make any difference whether I thought I could or not. I had to try, because that’s my duty. And consequently, it was easy for me to transition into research flying because of my discipline in combat. It was easy for me, probably easier than anyone else who was available to fly the X-1.

AH: Could we talk a little bit about your combat experience?

Yeager: Basically, when we first got over there, with the Mustang’s capability, it opened up the possibility of taking the escort fighters all the way to the targets with bombers, bring them all the way back to the Channel, and then go back into Germany for targets of opportunity. It was a tremendous eight-hour airplane. Also, it was a tremendous high-altitude airplane, and it surprised the Germans very quickly. Now, initially we were required to stay around the box of bombers that we were charged to escort. That’s a bad deal, because the Germans just merely set back and would 38

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hit and get away. Then when [Major] General [James H.] Doolittle came over, probably in March or April ’44, he said,“OK, let’s get these fighters away from the bombers and let ’em get out and tangle with the German fighters.” And that’s what we started doing then, ranging out 50 to 70 miles in front of the bomber stream to hit the fighters that were forming up to hit the bombers. That’s when the Mustang really started taking off. And on my eighth mission, the first daylight raid on Berlin on March 4, 1944, I was sitting over Berlin by a box of B-17s. If you look at the history, they try to give the first daylight raid on Berlin as March the 6th, but there was a recall on that [March 4] mission, when the whole force was going to Berlin. And this one box [31 B-17s of the 95th and 100th Bomb groups] didn’t get it; it went, we went with it, ’cause we didn’t get the recall either.

The Germans sent the 109s up and we tangled with them. I shot down my first airplane that day, a 109. First I overshot the guy ’cause I was doing everything wide open, and he was not as fast as I thought.

I overshot and pulled up to do a big roll, then come in under him.

It was just like in the films, you know, the pieces just fly off and they explode, and you just make damn sure none of the pieces hit you.

Then I found a Heinkel 111 and I got a few hits on it before it got in the clouds, and I came home and that was my first airplane that I shot down. The next day we went to Bordeaux with the B-24s and tangled with some 190s. I tried to make a hit on passes with some 190s and got hit and that’s when I bailed out and evaded. And see, people are surprised, like they read about Scott Grady’s experience of escape and evasion [in Bosnia]—hell, that’s a way of life for a fighter pilot. It was not unusual at all. It was just blown out of shape by the White House and the press. ’Cause we were trained in escape and evasion. When I got shot down, it was easy for me to evade.

AH: Your experiences growing up in West Virginia, hiking and hunting, must have helped.

Yeager: It wasn’t in the Germans’ training to catch a West Virginian in the woods.

AH: Taking a wounded man across the Pyrenees rather complicated matters a bit, though.

Yeager: Well, that’s just the way of life; that’s the way it goes. That worked out good. Then being interned down there [in Spain] was really a piece of cake. They put you up in the best hotel, gave you money and cigarettes. I didn’t smoke so I sold the cigarettes on the black market for a tremendous amount of money. It was a soft life.

AH: You know Franco was ideologically closer to Hitler than to the Allies, though he played a careful game to stay out of the war.

Yeager: Spain was a neutral country and it complied with the international regulations. The American consul came up to Lierda, where we had gotten to, and put us up in a hotel, and gave us money and came to see us every week. We had the life of Reilly there; it was really neat. Then, finally, they gradually worked us down [south], then they made arrangements to deal with the Spanish government. Spain didn’t have any gasoline and no way of getting it, so the U.S. government traded gasoline for the airmen that were interned in Spain. They turned us over to the British at Gibraltar.

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AH: But then came the tough part, trying to get back into combat.

Yeager: We went back to England, and the system was really good

because they kept you isolated in a house there at 63 Brooks Street and interrogated you: “What’s your outfit? When did you get shot down? How did you get into Spain?” They were very meticulous about nobody infiltrating the system. And then they called a guy down from your outfit to identify you and then, after they’d satisfied their requirements to make damn sure nobody was trying to infiltrate the system, then you went back to your outfit and you went home. I didn’t want to go home, so I worked my way up through all these colonels and generals. The Old Man, General Eisenhower, the only reason he saw us was just, I think, because he thought it a compliment to see somebody who didn’t want to go home. He was a nice guy. He said,“I can’t give you permission to go back on combat, because if you’re shot down again, you compromise the underground system, but you go on back to your outfit and I’ll go on back to the War Department, and ask for permission for me to make a decision.” He did, and a week later the invasion started, the Maquis surfaced, the underground surfaced, and I got right back to the front.

AH: Did you feel it was your duty to get back in there and give it another shot?

Yeager: Well, thing is, I felt like all my buddies were still in this squadron, those who hadn’t been shot down, and I just felt I hadn’t done my job. I’d been taught to do my job, and that’s the reason when I went back I felt good about it. And I said, “Hell, if I come home as a flight officer, with one airplane, I’ll be a flight officer the rest of my life.”

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AH: Can you tell us about the day you shot down five airplanes [October 12, 1944]?

Yeager: By then, I was still a really low-ranking officer in the [357th Fighter] Group, but I was one of the old hands and had a lot of experience and could see probably better than the majority of the guys in the group. So they let me lead the group, and hell, that really puts you in an excellent position. They had three squadrons, had a couple of lieutenant colonels leading the other squadrons, and here I was, a lieutenant leading the whole damn group. We were fragged [given an additional fragment order to the day’s operational order] to escort two boxes of bombers, so I put the 362nd Squadron on one box and the 364th on the other box, and took my squadron, the 363rd, and went out in front of the stream about 80 to 100 miles. There were Germans reported and there were broken clouds around and I spotted these 22 109s. I think the 109s probably thought we were 16 190s trying to join up, because after the fray I ran into 16 190s, but they got in the weather on me so I couldn’t get any more. But when I spotted them, I moved around into the sun and they didn’t see us. We came in behind them and just overtook them, and hell, they let us crawl right in behind them. I know they saw us, we were so close, and when I opened up this guy broke in midair collision with one of the others.

That’s when the crap hit the fan and we dropped our tanks and they all broke. As I remember—you tell it the way you remember it, and that’s not necessarily the way it happened—I pulled in behind a 109 and was hammering him, and his wingman cut the power back. I caught it out the corner of my eye, and about the

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time my target blew up, I broke full right, cut the power way back, slapped the flaps down about 20 degrees and came around. I was really about 50 feet from that guy, I was decelerating, and all I did was move off his right wingtip, kick right rudder and open up. And man, that sawed that airplane in two. I’m sure I killed the pilot.

AH: You sawed him, you mean, with your machine-gun fire?

Yeager: Yeah—we were so close. Then I followed another guy down with my wingman, and I blew him up. And then there were clouds and there were airplanes starting to go into clouds. We were climbing back up through the clouds, trying to stay VFR [visual flight rules] so we could see what was going on, and that’s when I

I was really about 50 feet from that guy, I was decelerating, and all I did was move off his right wingtip, kick right rudder and open up. And man, that sawed that airplane in two.

saw this flight of 16 190s down below. They had tanks on them, and we started down after them, and they went in the weather and we could never find them. We came home, and then you sat down with the intelligence guys, wrote up an encounter report and they took your gun camera film. Then your wingman would write up an encounter report to confirm, and they’d send the package in and they’d come back with confirmed kills. I didn’t shoot down five. I hammered one guy, and there was a midair collision, but I claimed those two anyway.

AH: Later on [November 6], you got a Messerschmitt Me-262 and damaged a couple of others.

Yeager: Yeah, the 262s—we’d been briefed, been shown pictures of them and knew their performance capability. We knew they were 100 mph faster, straight and level, than we were. The first time that I saw the airplane I was at about 15,000 feet with a flight of four.

We’d escorted bombers in and came back out, and then we went back in—we were just fooling around over Bremen. I looked down and at about 1 o’clock there were three 262s coming 180 degrees to us. I recognized them, probably after I saw they were moving so damn fast, so we went wide open, up to 3,000 rpm, and went down, trying to get a deflection shot. We rolled up behind them and got a hit or two on the wingman, then they just disappeared into the haze. We had no chance in the world. Then we saw two more, same thing—I climbed back up to 8,000 feet, they were down around 5,000, so we got a few hits on another one. Finally, we found the field they were all working out of, evidently, and there was one on the final approach, gear down, and so that was easy. I just rolled over, left my guys up for top cover and went on down. I overtook the guy fast—I was going 500 mph and he was going about 200— 40

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and just opened up at about 200 yards. I sawed his right wing up and the guy crash-landed short of the base.

AH: Didn’t you get a chance to fly a 262 later?

Yeager: Yeah, at Wright Field. But I’d also flown P-80s. Looking at the 262, had they dedicated it to air defense, it probably would have caused the war to last six months longer. But Germany was pretty well going down the tubes by the time they got the 262 in the fall of ’44. Now the P-80 had about the same performance and the same duration as the 262—both were Mach .8 airplanes. The P-80 had a little less armament, but we had three P-80s in England in January 1945, and had we needed the P-80s to match the 262, we could probably have had them into England in squadron strength by the summer of ’45, but then the war ended.

AH: In your book you described the Fw-190 as the most formidable opponent.

Yeager: It depends a lot on the pilot capability, but in my opinion, having equal pilots, the 190 was a little more superior than the 109. And the day I got four 190s [November 27], that was really a classic late-war dogfight, when either the Germans didn’t come up, or they sent every damn thing they had up—one of the two. You’d go for days and never see a German airplane, then all at once, man, they were thicker than hornets. On that particular day, our group had 48 planes up in three squadrons, 16 each. We were tasked to escort another P-51 group of 48 airplanes that each had one 500pound bomb and one 170-gallon drop tank, to an underground fuel storage site somewhere in Poland. They were doing the navigating—they knew their target; we were just escorting. And so we had two drop tanks and eight hours of fuel initially. We were on longrange cruise setting up at 36-37,000 feet, and they were setting at about 33,000, and evidently the Germans misinterpreted our force as a box of B-17s, not an escort, and they scrambled 150 190s and about 50 109s to intercept us.What we saw first was they were pulling cons [contrails] at about 33-35,000 feet. Looked like a cumulus cloud, then pretty soon it’d get dots in it. Andy [Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson] was leading the squadron, and then white flight, blue flight and green flight. I was in green flight, hidin’ high left at about 38,000, and when we saw them and they saw that we were fighters, they were very surprised probably. Anyway, when we broke into ’em that put me in the lead. Something like that only lasted about four or five minutes, total, and then you’d find yourself alone, without a wingman or nobody around and all the enemy going, either shot down or running home. It happens very quickly. I was climbing out to come home and I got the four 190s on that flight. That’s pretty much as I remember it, just a mass of airplanes going every way, every direction. You had to really be careful and watch your tail.

AH: That was an interesting story about your last flight [on January 15, 1945, during which he and Bud Anderson peeled off from the group and took a grand tour of the European sites Yeager had visited as an evadee].

Yeager: When Andy and I were down in Switzerland and Spain and Italy and France. Yeah, that was a good flight.

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Left: Yeager sits in the cockpit of the Bell X-1 he took supersonic on October 14, 1947. Above: That day the X-1’s mach number indicator (top row at right) climbed above 1.0 for the first time.

AH: Then to come back and find out that…

Yeager: The group had shot down 57 enemy planes. We might’ve

got shot down, too, that’s the way we thought about it. That’s the way it goes.

AH: So how did you end up at Muroc [Army Airfield in California, now Edwards Air Force Base]?

Yeager: Well, I came back home, made basic instructor in the summer of ’45. The war ended in Europe, all of the POWs were released and all of the airmen, pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners who had been shot down and either evaded or were prisoners of war could select any air base in the United States and the Air Force would assign you there. That was a gift. And I said, man, that includes me, ’cause I was an evadee, and I was an instructor in

T-6s at Perrin Field, Texas. The closest air base to my home was Wright Field, and I asked for it. They assigned me there. When I reported in, the personnel guys looked at my records. I was a 22year-old fighter pilot, I had about 1,200 hours in P-39s and P-51s, but the thing that caught their eye was that I was a maintenance officer—had a maintenance Air Force specialty code. There was an opening in the fighter test section for a maintenance officer, and that’s where they assigned me. It was just pure luck. I got there and started flying functional test flights on all the airplanes they made.

You know, when the crew chief worked on them, you’d fly them, just to check the systems out, and then you’d turn them over to the test pilots. Like I said, the Old Man liked the way I flew, and I put on airshows, and he selected me for test pilot school. Then Bell got in a big flap with the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor]. You see, the military had never been allowed to do research flying. Never. But the Air Force had conceived and paid for the X-1, which Bell then was managing. The NACA used civilian pilots, and there was bonus money involved.

Well, old Colonel Boyd, chief of the flight test division, told the Air Force, since we were footing the bill, “Hey, goddamn, if you take that airplane over, we’ve got pilots that are a hell of a lot better than NACA has.” And by God, he was successful in getting it.

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Above: The first (foreground) and second X-1s await their next test flights at Muroc Army Airfield in 1947. Right: The 74-year-old pilot gets ready to go supersonic in an F-15 50 years later.

Yeager: I had a maintenance background, and understood systems, and that little airplane hanging out there was a very dangerous little airplane. You had to really stay on top of the systems, in addition to flying it. I was the right guy for it, because I was a maintenance officer, and could obviously fly an airplane. That opened up Pandora’s box. Everything the NACA did was [aimed at] trying to keep the military out of this arena of research flying, and it was reflected in their attitude. In spite of them we got above Mach 1 in 93 days, and that got the military involved in research flying from then on with the X-1, X-1A, X-2, X-3, X-4, X-5, X-15. The military got into the arena and it opened up Pandora’s box.

AH: So for you it was never a situation of,“Gee, it would be nice to be a test pilot”?

Yeager: I trained, went to the test pilot school, and flew experimental planes from there on out. A lot of people don’t realize— they think that I was only flying the X-1. Hell, the X-1 was one of about 10 different test programs that I was working on at that time.

You worked seven days a week, and about 18 hours a day, and it was really a hard job.

AH: What was the X-1 like to fly?

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AH: Why were you selected for the X-1 program?

Yeager: I only flew it a couple times a week, but it was a fun airplane to fly. It got you out of the grind of the other test programs.

The day we got it above Mach 1 was the ninth powered flight. The way I looked at it, I finished that one, I’ve got nine more [test programs] to go. It didn’t mean anything, you know, breaking Mach 1.

Yeah, it had been a barrier all of my flying life up until that time.

Once we got the airplane through Mach 1 and found out that we needed a flying tail to control it, it took the rest of the world five years to find that out—how we got above Mach 1. Not the fact that we had got above Mach 1; the Air Force admitted that seven months after we did it, but not how. And it took the British and the French and the Soviet Union five years to find out that little trick.

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AH: On that flight, did you have any expectations about what might happen at all?

Yeager: No, we weren’t planning on going Mach 1; we didn’t know we could go Mach 1.We were just increasing the Mach number and whatever happened, happened.

AH: What was the first thing you heard when you came out?

Was it Bob Hoover [flying chase in a P-80] talking?

Yeager: No, we knew we’d got the airplane [through], ’cause we got a jump in the Mach meter, all the buffeting seemed quiet on the airplane, we had supersonic flow over the airplane. And when we got down the Air Force classified the whole program. You couldn’t say a goddamn word, but everybody knew it anyways.

AH: Did it bother you any that you didn’t receive recognition for it right away?

Yeager: No. That wasn’t the reason I flew the X-1. I did it because it was my duty. It didn’t make a rat’s to me what happened. Like I said, that was one test program finished, I got nine more to go now.

We were doing test programs, working with flight test engineers.

We were working on a lot of airplanes—P-84s and weapons management systems we were developing and things like that.

AH: Did you try to get out into Korea at all?

Yeager: No, I was tied up at Edwards in research flying. I only went out there to fly the MiG-15 that the guy defected with in January or February of ’53.

AH: So again, it was a case of doing your duty.

Yeager: We were doing research flying on the airplanes like the X-3, X-4, X-5 and the X-1A. On December 12, 1953, I got the X-1A out to 2.5 Machs.

AH: In Europe, you’d already had the challenge of leadership, and got better at that, but as a wing leader in Vietnam, what did you consider the real challenges there?

Yeager: Well, they were bigger. I had five squadrons, three different kinds of airplanes. As you mature from a flight leader, a captain, to a squadron commander, a lieutenant colonel, you no longer concentrate on being a flight leader. You gotta start delegating authority. Then, when you move up to wing commander, you’ve got a bigger outfit. Then you have to look at the big picture, you’ve got more support. That’s the way you mature in the Air Force. Like in Vietnam, I had my first wing. You gotta learn, you gotta know a lot about maintenance, which was easy for me because I’d been a maintenance officer and a crew chief and a GI. AH: You’ve talked about combat as being really the ultimate experience for a pilot and how it gives you that edge over a civilian pilot. Where do you think that puts today’s military pilots, where combat is a rare experience?

Yeager: Well, it’s a specialized thing. Here again, capability depends on experience. If a pilot has experience in a modern fighter, like the F-15 or F-16, obviously he’s the best. I think one of the big things that’s happening, especially in the Reserve or Guard, is in the F-16 squadron, taking an airline pilot and letting him serve duty in an F-16. The airline experience he has doesn’t help a damn bit in

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the F-16. When he gets in the F-16, what do you have? Midair collisions and accidents. That’s stupid in my opinion.

AH: Is it possible for a pilot who’s good in one type of airplane to cross-train himself into another?

Yeager: Listen carefully. Experience makes the best pilot. Obviously, if the pilot’s going to fly an F-16, he’s got to have experience in fighters.

AH: What do you think of today’s Air Force?

Yeager: I think it’s highly capable. An airplane today is 10 times more effective than it was 10 years ago, and it’s a platform that goes Mach 2. Period. The big improvement: weapons systems, precisionguided munitions—boy, [they’re] lethal. It’ll do a beautiful job.

AH: How do you think that’s changed the nature of a fighter pilot, or do you think fighter pilots are still the same?

Yeager: The same, only thing is, you can’t tangle close in anymore. Some guy on the periphery blows you out of the sky with a missile. Look at Iraq—33 airplanes shot down, every one of them beyond visual range with F-15s, F/A-18s.

AH: So you think the day of the dogfight is gone?

Yeager: Well, a close-in dogfight is becoming a thing of the past.

It’s standoff weapons systems. Like I say, in Iraq, 33 airplanes shot down, every one beyond visual range. Wasn’t a gun used.

AH: If you look back over your career, is there a time you felt was the most exciting for you?

Yeager: Combat. World War II, obviously. The most useful thing I ever did was fly the X-1.

AH: It’s certainly what made you a household name.

Yeager: Right place at the right time.

AH: To what do you attribute your survival over the years?

Yeager: A knowledge of egress systems and a feel for machinery, and also some luck.

AH: Do you have any advice for the youth of today who might want to take up flying?

Yeager: Hey, man, get a job you like and you’ll probably be quite good at it. And make your lifestyle fit your income. Don’t try to make your income fit your lifestyle. It’s that simple. Guys who like their job, they’re very good at it. I don’t care what it is.

AH: You don’t seem like the sort who would have any, but are there any regrets at all?

Yeager: No. And the same way, if I had it to do it all over again, would I? Sure. Naturally. It’s kind of a stupid question. ’Cause you have no control over something so you don’t cry about spilled milk—that’s a good SOP. AH: You just grab the moment and make the most of it.

Yeager: Hey, you live from day to day and you learn the three— you honor your flag, and your country and by God, duty is paramount. That’s the way you live your life in the military, and that’s the way it should be. That’s the facts of life. ★ This is an abbreviated version of a two-part interview that originally appeared in the May and July 1998 issues of Aviation History.

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In a career replete with innovative designs, Burt Rutan (left) considers SpaceShipOne (above, shown with its White Knight carrier) his greatest accomplishment. The rocket-powered spaceplane was the first privately funded craft to make a manned suborbital flight when Scaled Composites’ chief test pilot Mike Melvill took it above 100 kilometers on June 21, 2004.

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Maverick airplane designer Burt Rutan doesn’t just think outside the box; he completely destroys it and starts anew By Peter Garrison

Top Pencil

O

n June 21, 2004, the crowd at Mojave, California, cheered as an ebullient Mike Melvill wriggled out of the little winged capsule in which he had just made a brief, violent trip to the fringes of outer space. Burt Rutan, the guiding genius of the project, later stood before a blaze of press cameras and compared the emotion of Melvill’s return to what they both had felt long ago when, searching in darkness over the Pacific, they had glimpsed the lights of another of Rutan’s creations, Voyager, with Burt’s brother Dick at the controls and barely a sip of fuel left in its tanks, as it returned home from its nine-day nonstop circumnavigation of the globe.

Three decades earlier, this same Burt Rutan had been a lone entrepreneur selling plans from which hobbyists could build tiny foam-and-fiberglass airplanes in their garages. Today, by the force of his ambition, a messianic personality and the brilliant originality of his engineering, he had cast himself as an upstart rival to NASA. His tiny hot rod, SpaceShipOne, consisting essentially of an airtight cabin glued—literally—to the front end of a homemade rocket motor, had gone to space. And this had been accomplished for a piddling $25 million or so, less than the price of one or two of sponsor Paul Allen’s private jets.

Under the distorting stream of hype, which flowed as freely as champagne, the outlines of what had actually been accomplished were briefly indistinct. But this was unquestionably the first private manned space flight, if you accepted—as the FAA did when it ceremonially pinned its first civil astronaut’s wings on Melvill—that a few seconds spent coasting above 100 kilometers belongs in the realm of “space flight.” Rutan’s populist hostility to the slowness, the myopia and the timid and self-serving bureaucracies of “big government” was on display, and fed the zeal of his admirers. He fanned the flames with funny stories of the absurd obstacles with which the FAA’s new office of commercial space transportation littered his way, including the demand that he ensure that no desert tortoise would be harmed by SpaceShipOne’s flight. Presumably, none was.

Likening the day’s events to Wilbur Wright’s 1908 demonstrations of his Flyer in France, Rutan looked ahead to a future—not

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far off, he implied, now that the energies of private enterprise had finally been uncorked—when ordinary people would spend their vacation nest eggs on hops outside the atmosphere, and ride “transfer vans” to unwind in orbiting hotels.

Burt Rutan was born in 1943 near Portland, Ore., but he grew up in Dinuba, a farm town in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His real name is Elbert. He used to take some pleasure in noting that E. Rutan is Nature spelled backwards, but the dorkiness of Elbert bothered him, and by persistent misspelling he has become Burt (as in Reynolds)—not Bert (as with Ernie). His late father George, a dentist who had been a schoolmate of Richard Nixon’s in Whittier, and mother Irene, who predeceased her husband at 84, had two boys and a girl. Burt was the youngest. His sister Nell was an American Airlines flight attendant. His brother Dick, a Vietnamera F-100 pilot and part-time adventurer who once ran for Congress (he lost to a professional politician), has been sufficiently newsworthy for people occasionally to confuse him with Burt. Dick, who most likely considers global warming a liberal hoax, once made the papers when an airplane in which he was traveling landed at the North Pole, broke through unexpectedly thin ice and sank.

As a kid, Burt was entranced by airplanes. He built models, competed in contests, regularly won. He married at 19, had two children, and at 20 started building his first full-size aircraft in his garage. He found the airplane project more absorbing than his family—a not uncommon hazard of aircraft homebuilding—and his marriage ended after eight years. He used to say that when it came to choosing between his wife and the plane, “There was no doubt in my mind which I wanted to keep.” But one forgets; he married again two years later.

Burt Rutan is a solitary enfant terrible in a field—aerospace engineering—where sober, mature, methodical plodders and committee decisions are the rule. Designers of airplanes and spacecraft seldom make the papers; to ordinary mortals their work is incomprehensible sorcery, to be practiced in obscurity. Rutan, on the other hand, gets his name in the papers sufficiently often to be suspected of liking it. In fact, one or two of his detractors have suggested that LEGENDS OF AVIATION

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his sometimes fantastic designs are motivated more by a desire to attract attention than by careful analysis or painstaking optimization.

Rutan denies it; each design, he says, is optimal for its intended use.

Rutan does like publicity, but his credentials are no less sound for that. After graduating from California Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo, he went to work at Edwards Air Force Base analyzing the aerodynamics of McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighters, which were crashing in Vietnam from in-flight loss of control more often than from enemy fire. He won the prestigious Air Medal for his work.

From Edwards Rutan jumped, in 1972, into a completely different world, moving to Newton, Kan., to become chief engineer of Bede Aircraft. James R. Bede, an aeronautical engineer who sometimes let his enthusiasm get the better of him, had promoted a kit airplane, the BD-5, with claims of fantastic performance coupled with an extremely low price and dizzying ease and rapidity of con46

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struction. Thanks to a great deal of uncritical publicity, including a spread in Playboy, Bede had sold thousands of delivery positions, and had turned cash deposits into a prototype that flew reluctantly when it flew at all. Bede hired Rutan to make a usable airplane out of the BD-5, and, to the extent it was possible, he did.

In the meantime, Rutan had gotten his own homemade airplane flying, testing models with a “wind tunnel” on the roof of his 1966 Dodge Dart. Its unusual configuraStarship tion was based on that of a Swedish fighter, the Saab Viggen. Whereas most airplanes have a principal lifting wing somewhere around the middle of the body and a smaller stabilizing surface behind, the Viggen reversed the pattern, placing the main wing in the rear and the smaller surface in the front.

The arrangement is called a “canard” because, like a duck’s (canard means duck in French), its nose sticks out far ahead of its wing. The canard arrangement did not originate with the Viggen; it had been used from time to time, beginning with the Wright brothers, with mixed success. Making it work properly required the right distribution of weight and lifting characteristics between the front and rear wings. Once that was achieved, the canard worked as well as the conventional layout in most respects. In some ways it was better; in others, worse.

Most aeronautical engineers had concluded Proteus that, all in all, the conventional arrangement possessed one or two decisive advantages.

Rutan was not most engineers, however, and he saw two things in the canard arrangement that attracted him. One was safety: It could be made resistant to stalling (a loss of lift due to flow breakdown over the wings that has nothing to do with the engines). The other thing was its look. Engineer or not, Rutan was as susceptible to a cool look as the next guy. He would make this one his trademark.

The airplane that Rutan based on the Viggen—he called it the VariViggen—flew well and looked cool, and he sold several hundred sets of plans to amateur builders. He and his wife Carolyn left Kansas and Bede in 1974 and moved to California, setting up shop in a disused Army barracks at the Mojave airport. Mojave had been a training field during World War II, but in 1974 it was a hot, windswept wasteland whose main recommendations were its cheap rents, usually cloudless flying weather and long runways. Burt and Carolyn styled themselves the Rutan Aircraft Factory and handed out business cards bearing the motto “Proud Birds for your Pleasure.”

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VariEze

Mindful of the millions of dollars that had flowed into Bede’s coffers, Rutan had already been dreaming up a new project of his own. It would be smaller than the BD-5, would seat two people rather than one and would be powered by a cheap Volkswagen engine readily available from automobile wrecking yards. He called this one the VariEze, a name that combined a nod to the VariViggen with a hint that the airplane would be very easy to build. After starting to construct it in aluminum out of modified BD-5 parts, he abandoned that material and switched to a surfboard-like combination of plastic foam and fiberglass. The new construction medium was light and strong, could be easily sculpted into streamlined shapes and, most important, allowed for very quick fabrication of simple structures.

The long list of Rutan designs includes (opposite) the ill-fated Beech Starship and high-flying Proteus research plane; the VariEze (above), beloved by homebuilders and tested in NASA’s Langley Research Center wind tunnel (below); and SpaceShipTwo (page 49), which will soon offer short suborbital flights to well-heeled customers.

T

he VariEze made Rutan’s name. He sold thousands of sets of plans—not conventional blueprints, but a sort of comic-book-style narrative of construction. The slender, sweptwing VariEze and a slightly larger successor called the Long-EZ became the vanguard of a new era of innovation in aircraft homebuilding. It sparked an interest in canards that took 20 years to cool to ambient temperature.

Soon “canard guru Burt Rutan” became a stock phrase in the aviation press, requiring no further explanation.

Rutan moved fast. During the late ’70s he produced one design after another, building them of plastic foam and fiberglass at an incredible rate. Almost all were canards. There was an STOL airplane, the Grizzly; a sailplane, Solitaire; an 18-hp single-seat runabout, Quickie; and a racing biplane. On the side he experimented with windmills and solar collectors. He and Carolyn eventually divorced.

Except for the cost of the settlement, he didn’t mind; he was rising, rising meteorically. He built a couple of prototypes under contract to other firms, then secured half a million in venture capital and set up a new company he called SCALED, an acronym of Scaled Composites: Advanced Link to Efficient Design. The business plan TOP: RYAN COULTER; ABOVE: NASA

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was to use the rapid foam-and-fiberglass construction techniques to build reduced-size prototypes of new designs. The idea caught on, and SCALED had soon built a jet trainer for Fairchild and a scissor-wing proof-of-concept vehicle for NASA. SCALED got a huge break in 1982 when Beech Aircraft Company, a subsidiary of defense behemoth Raytheon, became so enamored of the VariEze/Long-EZ look that it hired Rutan to build a five-eighths-scale prototype for a 10-seat, 350-mph canard with two 1,000-hp turboprop engines. The Starship, as the new project was called—normally staid Beech had cast stodginess to the winds—looked just like a huge Long-EZ. Rutan, suddenly scaling dizzying corporate heights, became a Beech vice president, married the daughter of a Beech executive and took up golf.

Thinking about the SpaceShipOne project, Burt Rutan seemed in awe of his own good fortune. It was a reaction that he might forgivably have had to his entire career.

The whole Starship affair—except the golf—was a disaster.

Hundreds of millions were spent on certifying and tooling up for the new airplane, which was built not of the traditional aluminum alloys but of epoxy-stabilized carbon fiber, like a fancy fishing pole or golf club. By the time it had been scaled up and the certification demands of the FAA had been met, its performance fell below expectations. Beech engineers privately blamed the debacle on Rutan, and Rutan blamed it on the FAA. Beech sold or leased only 24 of the airplanes, and eventually bought most of them back from their owners in order to sever the “liability tail” that might otherwise wag the company dog for years to come.

The marriage, Rutan’s third, hardly fared better, lasting 20 months. The relationship with Beech continued for several years and produced, besides the ill-fated Starship, a prototype of a small twin jet with engines mounted above the wings—a very light jet (VLJ) before its time—called Triumph. But the independentminded Rutan was not made to be a vice president of somebody else’s company. In 1988 he left Beech, taking his company, which he now simply called Scaled Composites, with him. The Triumph project did not get beyond the proof-of-concept prototype, which ended up impaled on a pylon outside the Scaled office at Mojave.

Until he turned his attention to spaceflight, Rutan’s most famous accomplishment was Voyager, the first airplane to fly nonstop around the world without refueling. His brother Dick, along with Dick’s inamorata, Jeana Yeager (no relation to right-stuff-embodying Chuck), and an unsung craftsman named Bruce Evans hand-built the huge airplane—its wingspan was that of a medium-sized air48

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liner—in a hangar at Mojave. Late in 1986 Dick and Jeana, who by that time were barely on speaking terms, rode in the cramped cabin for nine days to accomplish the feat. (Small world footnotes: The original scheme for a nonstop round-the-world flight came from Burt’s old boss Jim Bede; and before coming to Mojave Jeana had worked for a retired Navy captain, Robert Truax, on a project to shoot fun-loving people into suborbital space on surplus rockets.)

In the early 1990s Rutan created two asymmetrical airplanes.

One, ARES (Agile Responsive Effective Support), was a singleengine ground attack jet with its engine air intake on one side and a Gatling gun on the other. The other, Boomerang, was a remarkable five-seat twin powered by two 200-hp Lycoming engines. With its lopsided, forward-swept wing and one-fuselage/one-boom design, the Boomerang resembled nothing else that had ever flown.

The right-hand body contained a pressurized cabin and one engine in the nose. The left boom carried the other engine, plus fuel and baggage. The two engines, closely spaced laterally to prevent thrustasymmetry problems in case of an engine failure, were staggered, the left one five feet behind the right. At the ends of the two body/booms were two vertical tails and a horizontal stabilizer that stopped at the boom on the left but extended several feet beyond the fuselage on the right.

The Boomerang was a remarkable performer with docile engineout characteristics, but ironically it was in that airplane that Rutan came closest to being killed by one of his creations. The unconventional twin appropriately had little conventional instrumentation; an Apple laptop served as its instrument panel. Rutan and one of his engineers, Jon Karkow, took off from Montrose, Colo., in marginal weather, became disoriented and recovered from a dive at what Rutan later guessed was 400 mph, breaking the landing gear out of its up-locks from the sheer force of the pull-out.

An abortive attempt was made to turn the Boomerang into a production airplane (a similar effort had been made, years earlier, on Rutan’s tandem-engine Defiant). The Starship remains the only Rutan design to achieve certification and series production.

By the 1990s Rutan had severed his ties to the amateur airplane builders who had been his original votaries and increasingly focused his attention on space. Scaled Composites had been building wingsets and payload supports for Orbital Sciences Corporation, which was sending small satellites into orbit with a rocket plane launched from beneath a modified Lockheed L-1011 airliner. Late in the decade, Rutan designed and built Proteus, a big dragonflylike tandem-wing airplane originally intended as a sort of atmospheric communications satellite—a plane that would circle in one place for long periods, relaying telephone calls or broadcasts. The communications application never materialized, but the single prototype has gone on to a remarkably successful career as a highaltitude research aircraft.

The announcement in 1996 of the $10 million X Prize competition set Rutan to thinking about how to achieve a minimalist extraatmospheric flight. Rival contenders for the prize proposed various

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methods, including simple vertical-takeoff rockets and rockoons (rocket/balloon combinations) and more exotic mongrel aircraft incorporating both jet and rocket propulsion. But Rutan saw that the energetics of the problem pointed to the same solution that NASA had used in the X-15 program: air launch of a rocket plane at an altitude of nine or 10 miles from a jet-propelled mother ship, followed by a zoom climb, a ballistic ascent into space and an unpowered glide back to the airport.

Besides avoiding extreme performance demands on either vehicle, this approach had the advantage of limiting the design uncertainties to the portion of the flight between airdrop and the completion of reentry.

Not that those problems were minor. The propulsive energy expended in lifting the spaceplane out of the atSpaceShipTwo mosphere would have to be dissipated—that is, turned into heat—during reentry. This was always the great problem for the space shuttle, and, although an X Prize flight in- in spite of some harrowing moments, had come through safely. volved much lower altitudes and velocities, the challenge of using Thinking about the project—the spaceplane is now in the Smithatmospheric friction to slow a fast-moving object without burning sonian—Burt Rutan seemed in awe of his own good fortune. It was it up remained the same. In one respect it was worse: Rutan’s vehi- a reaction that he might forgivably have had to his entire career. cle would be built of composite materials having much less resistEngineers come in various types, but if they were to be divided ance to heat than any metal. into only two, a few would be creators and the rest executors. ExRutan’s solution exemplified the ingenuity that he has brought ecutors design, often with great skill, new iterations of existing to many design challenges. Returning—without, he later said, con- ideas. Creators do what executors do, but something else as well: sciously thinking about it—to a technique familiar from his teenage They design things that don’t already exist. Rutan is a creator. modeling experience, he tested variations on the principle of a “de- Dreamer, designer, builder, pilot and salesman, he has always been thermalizer”—a mechanism, operated by a timer or a radio signal, able to weigh all aspects of engineering choices—to exploit synerthat flips the horizontal stabilizer of a model glider upward, stalling gies among seemingly unrelated features of an aircraft, to see how the wing and holding the craft in a stable, slow descent. He built one part can be made to do the work of two or three and to instincseveral large balsa and Mylar models that he dropped from a tower tively sense how a small loss in one place can lead to a large gain in in order to assess the stability of various “feathered” configurations. another. In the VariEze, driven to the complication of a retractable All were as stable as shuttlecocks at low speed; only one, however, nose wheel by the empty airplane’s unconventional weight distriwould be stable at supersonic speed—a critical determination for bution, Rutan found in the nose-down parking attitude a convenwhich Rutan was obliged to rely on a computer simulation, because ient alternative to chocks. The exaggerated anhedral of the Quickie’s no practical testing method was available. foreplane allowed him to dispense with landing gear legs. By copying the cabin of SpaceShipOne into its carrier airplane, White few years ago I spoke with Rutan at length. He had had Knight (named, by the way, after a couple of X-15 pilots), he turned a heart attack several years earlier and a close brush the mother ship into a training simulator.

Melvill, who has worked with Rutan for more than 30 years and with death from another heart problem, constrictive pericarditis, in 2008. At the urging of his wife Tonya, has test-flown most of his designs, speaks of his uncanny insight he had cut down on the time he spent at Scaled Com- into aircraft behavior. “Before a first flight,” he said, “the engineers posites and upped his time on the golf course. I asked him which would brief me. Then Burt would take me aside and tell me what milestone, in a career cluttered with them, stood out in his memory would really happen.‘You’ll notice this as you accelerate, watch out as the most satisfying. With visible emotion he said, “It has to be for that…’ And he was always right! He just knew intuitively everySpaceShipOne.” That, he went on, had been an extraordinarily ef- thing the airplane would do, before it had flown.”

Rutan left Scaled in 2011, retiring to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He ficient and successful program, one that, after verifying flying qualities with several gliding flights, had progressed from subsonic to has not quit designing, and it’s hard to imagine that he ever will. supersonic flight and on to space in just six powered flights. Talk- He plays his cards close to the vest, but Burt Rutan still has some ing about it, he radiated amazement afresh. His close friend and surprises up his sleeve. The most famous aeronautical engineer of chief test pilot Mike Melvill had risked his life in SpaceShipOne and, his time, he will never allow himself to fade quietly away. ★

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