Hardcover, 562 pages
English language
Published 1953 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
The Spirit of St. Louis
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In 1926, on a beautiful moon clear night, a young pilot of the airmail route between St. Louis and Chicago conceived the ambition to fly a plane nonstop from one hemisphere to an other, bridging the waste of water that separates continent from continent. This dream, the tiny seed of incalculable things to come, would not be denied. But how to fulfill it? Could a plane capable of carrying sufficient fuel for such a flight be bought? Would it be possible to get the necessary financial backing? Would business men believe in so seemingly foolhardy a project? The months that followed saw a very doter mined young man wrestling with these problems. On May 21, 1927, this same young man took off from New York and, after thirty-threw hours alone in the cockpit of his single-motored plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, hurtling through canyons of cloud and storm over …
In 1926, on a beautiful moon clear night, a young pilot of the airmail route between St. Louis and Chicago conceived the ambition to fly a plane nonstop from one hemisphere to an other, bridging the waste of water that separates continent from continent. This dream, the tiny seed of incalculable things to come, would not be denied. But how to fulfill it? Could a plane capable of carrying sufficient fuel for such a flight be bought? Would it be possible to get the necessary financial backing? Would business men believe in so seemingly foolhardy a project? The months that followed saw a very doter mined young man wrestling with these problems. On May 21, 1927, this same young man took off from New York and, after thirty-threw hours alone in the cockpit of his single-motored plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, hurtling through canyons of cloud and storm over 3,600 miles of Atlantic, landed on Le Bourget Aerodrome, Paris, thereby completing the first nonstop flight between the continents of America and Europe. The dream conceived on that moon-clear night in 1926 had found fulfillment. And what marvels it heralded! To-day, transatlantic air travel is a commonplace; one may dine in Paris and breakfast the next morning in New York!
The young man who had so large a part in bringing all this about was Charles Lindbergh. This is his autobiographical narrative of the planning and execution of the first nonstop air- plane passage between the continents of America and Europe, concluding with an hour-by- hour account of that momentous, desperate, triumphant first flight over trackless water.