"About Midnight"

The atmosphere at a big airport is always charged with some excitement. Even a little sport plane whizzing in from a pleasure hop makes visitors stand still and watch. At night, the red obstruction lights on outlying buildings and poles, the lower amber lights stretching around the field to mark it for invisible arrivals from the sky, and the beacon revolving like a spotlight groping for the actor, make a big airport such as Floyd Bennett Field into a gigantic theatre where mass drama can take place. There were easily 50,000 people in the audience at Floyd Bennett one night last week, waiting in the stage-like dark for Wiley Post to come back from around the world, whither he had set out just one week before.

He had said he would get there from Edmonton, Alberta, 2,000 mi. away, "about midnight," but the field manager had not yet snapped on the field floodlights when Harold Gatty, who flew the world with Post two years ago, heard a faint drone from the Northwest. Another minute and Post's manager, standing near pretty little Mrs. Post in her car. shouted: "It has no lights! It must be Wiley!" and the hazy white form of a ship roared about the field, turning to land.

The dazzling floodlights burst on. Down into the gleaming sea of light glided the purple & white Winnie Mae, dancing lightly up the runway at precisely midnight. It was more than the crowd could bear. Thousands and thousands of excited men & women climbed through, under and over the fences, surged toward the taxiing plane, behaved much as another historic crowd behaved one night in 1927 at Le Bourget.

For 15 minutes the grimy pilot was held prisoner in Winnie Mae's cockpit by the railling, shouting mob. Post's Manager Lee Trenholm fought his way through, managed to hand Pilot Post a jug of ice water which he drained at a gulp, and a white handkerchief to cover his empty left-eye socket (he had lost his white patch in Alaska). Radio announcers all but jammed microphones down his throat. ''Where have you been since last Saturday?" Manager Trenholm asked obligingly for the benefit of radio's millions of listeners. "Damned if I know," Pilot Post drawled wearily. "I'm mighty tired."

In a brand new automobile--the only pomp requested by simple Pilot Post--pilot & party sped to Manhattan, police sirens shrilling through the late city crowds. General Italo Balbo, who had been caught in a traffic jam while trying to reach the field, waved from his car as they shot by. At the Hotel Roosevelt a physician found Post's condition good, noted that his hand was steady as a rock.

Wiley Post said he was ''disgusted'' that he had broken his and Gatty's old 8 1/2-day record by only 21 hr. (his record time for 15,596 mi.: 7 days 18 hr. 49 min.). His "slowness" he blamed on inept Berlin mechanics who, instead of fueling Winnie Mae in 20 min., had held him there more than three hours, so that he got caught in storms over East Prussia and had to turn back. He raged: "I'm still burning up about that, and I won't soon forget it."

The race against time was nip & tuck in places, with Winnie Mae actually falling behind her own record in Siberian storms. By cutting his scheduled stops to nearly nothing, where he & Gatty had lost hours, tough Pilot Post won out despite a minor crack-up at Flat, Alaska, where his ship nosed over and bent her propeller. All told, he slept about 20 hr. but he said:* ''Don't think . . . that I am dead for sleep. . . . I am much fresher than I was when I finished the trip with Gatty two years ago. . . . I could have done without nearly as much sleep as I had.

"I had only three hours of good weather all the way around the world. . . . Half way from Fairbanks to Edmonton, where I was flying over the Canadian Rockies, I had to fly blind for three hours at 20,000 ft. The mountains there have an elevation of 15,000 ft. ... ice began to form on my wings. It got heavy enough so I mushed down some. . . .

"People have been asking me what a pilot thinks about when he has a robot to do his work. . . . He doesn't think about anything much. . . . Once in a while, though. I would find I was talking to myself, saying: 'You've got to get through somehow. May [his wife] and those guys from Oklahoma City are waiting for you.' "

* To North American Newspaper Alliance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.