Lindbergh’s historic flight, and what led to it

Book Review

August 11, 2011|By David Shribman, Globe Correspondent

THE BIG JUMP: Lindbergh and the Great Atlantic Air Race By Richard Bak Wiley

325 pp., $27.95

It was a contest. Be the first to fly from New York to Paris. Win the $25,000 Orteig Prize, named for a French shepherd turned Manhattan hotelier. Gain celebrity beyond measure. Pilot yourself into history, and mythology. We know who won that contest, of course. But the winning was only part of the story. The competition may be the most compelling chapter.

That’s the topic of Richard Bak’s latest book, “The Big Jump,’’ which sets out how and why the westerly winds were won by magnificent men in their flying machines, a phrase invented for an earlier time (1910) for an earlier prize (set by Lord Rawnsley) and an easier task (just London to Paris) but oddly appropriate for the characters crowding this volume.

This was no simple feat, especially for Americans, for US aviation at the time was primitive, especially when compared with that of Europe. There was no regularly scheduled commercial traffic, no aeronautical schools, no licensing policies or agencies, no tables to place in an upright, locked position. There was also no policy on carry-ons. More on that later.

The romance (and technology) resided mainly in France, where les chevaliers de l’air and what Bak calls the “cult of the poet-pilot’’ prevailed. But even there, aviation was the province of dreamers of great daring … on the precipice of inevitable disaster.

Gradually America developed a cult of its own, and some of the names (Eddie Rickenbacker, Igor Sikorsky) endure even today, in an era of regional jets and fees for soda pop. But aviation of this earlier period is suffused with great plans, great feuds, great disappointments, and, in the case of one promising 1926 effort Bak chronicles, a runway fatefully bisected by a rutted service road, which caused an auxiliary wheel to break off, setting in motion a series of mishaps leading to a tragic explosion.

The arc of this story naturally bends to Charles Lindbergh, who possessed skill, loved adventure, and had the breezy insouciance that we attribute to the early flyboys, and that the world, at least in that period, attributed to Americans. He understood not only the mechanics of flight but also the meaning of it. “There was the earth spreading out below me, a planet where I had lived but from which I had astonishingly risen,’’ he would write.