They Almost Grounded Lindy

New light on old crackups

Was Charles Lindbergh a reckless flyer who should have been grounded for his own good? Or was he a skilled pilot who prevailed, with a bit of his famed luck, over the hazards of poor aircraft and sloppy maintenance of the 1920s? These questions are raised in an intriguing exchange of letters between Lindy and William P. MacCracken Jr., the first head of the Commerce Department's former aeronautics branch. The letters, written in 1968, have only recently been disclosed by MacCracken's widow (he died in 1969 and Lindbergh in 1974).

Lindbergh readily agreed with MacCracken that he had to parachute from planes no fewer than four times in his barnstorming and mail-piloting days before his solo flight to Paris in 1927. But he explained to MacCracken that he had been flying Army salvage aircraft with "rotting longerons, rusting wires and fittings, badly torn fabric, etc." Once, he wrote, "my rusted rudderbar post broke while I was instructing a student during a low-altitude turn in an OX5 Standard." Another time, "my wooden propeller threw its sheet-metal tipping on a southbound mail flight from Chicago." Again, "my DH throttle mechanism broke and closed a hundred feet above ground over Illinois." The only lighting equipment his planes had in those days consisted of "a pocket flashlight (pilot furnished) and a compass light attached to a button on the end of the stick."

So Lindbergh did not consider it unusual when he had to bail out for varied reasons: colliding with another plane in a sham combat attack over Texas; running out of fuel in a fog near Chicago when no one told him that his 120-gal. gasoline tank had been replaced with an 80-gal. tank; losing sight of the ground in a storm in those preradio years and finding his only field-illuminating flare had failed. He wrote that he had accepted his job as chief pilot on the St. Louis-Chicago mail route "with the understanding that each pilot be furnished with a new seat-type silk parachute and that no criticism be made if the parachutes were used."

In the letters, MacCracken revealed to Lindy that after his fourth jump in 1927, "I was thinking of grounding you so you wouldn't be taking so many chances." He did not do so only because Bill Robertson, one of the owners of the mail service for which Lindbergh was flying, "came into my office in the Department of Commerce while I had on my desk the report [on that last bailout]. Bill persuaded me not to do it because he said they were still trying to get the last $2,000 or $3,000 to build the plane for you and if you were grounded for any reason they would never get the rest of the money." The plane that MacCracken referred to was the Spirit of St. Louis. MacCracken said Robertson had "assured me that there would not be another repeat performance and that he would phone St. Louis and give instructions that you were not to take off for Chicago if there was the slightest doubt about the weather at that end of the route."

In reply, Lindbergh wrote MacCracken that "if we had stayed on the ground when there was doubt about the weather in 1927, I'm afraid the airmail would have just about stopped moving!" But he added, "Naturally, I'm deeply grateful to you for not having grounded me after that fourth jump." Indeed if MacCracken had done so, there might never have been a Spirit of St. Louis, a hero's welcome in Paris, a ticker-tape parade in New York, or a legend that inspired a generation.

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