Word: lindbergh
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...lawyer named Ezra Fitch and a sportsman named David Abercrombie, A & F made its name catering to the outdoor elite. It outfitted Theodore Roosevelt's African safaris and Admiral Richard Byrd's expedition to Antarctica, and counted among other famous customers Flyer Charles Lindbergh, Fisherman Herbert Hoover, Golfer Woodrow Wilson and aground Sportsman Ernest Hemingway. Yet, while it eventually expanded into a chain with branches in nine cities, A & F never adapted to modern-style retailing or to a younger, more budget-conscious generation of activists who preferred to buy from department stores and discounters...