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Working round the clock, Ryan gets The Spirit of St. Louis built in 60 days. In the meanwhile, Flyers Clarence Chamberlin and Bert Acosta, preparing for a hop of their own, set a new endurance record, staying aloft 51 hrs. 11 min. 25 sec. Lindbergh frets, but death, accidents and delay soon begin to scratch the other entries. Two Navy pilots nose into a swamp on take-off and are killed. Chamberlin damages his Bellanca in a routine test flight. Commander Richard E. Byrd, with his Fokker and four-man crew all set, waits at Roosevelt Field for the word from the weatherman. On May loth, two days after Frenchmen Nungesser and Coli take off from Paris, Lindbergh hops from San Diego to St. Louis in the record time of 14 hrs. 25 min., takes off next morning, and by afternoon is in New York.
Dance of Doubts. The lone dark horse, unknown to the Eastern newspapers until his dramatic flight across the continent, found himself an overnight favorite with the tabloids. "Slim" or Captain Lindbergh to his St. Louis backers, he is dubbed the "Flyin' Fool." Photographers crash his hotel room at Garden City, L.I. for pictures of "Lindy" shaving, Lindy in pajamas. When reporters quiz his mother on how she feels about the suicidal risks of the flight, Lindbergh flares into a sharp resentment of the press which he never lost. With his plane grounded by storms on the Atlantic, doubts begin to dance across his mind. Can The Spirit of St. Louis carry the needed 450 gallons of gas weighing 2,700 Ibs.? He has never tested it with more than 300 gallons, for fear a tire would blow out on landing. Can he fly with the big gas tank in front of the cockpit, and no visibility ahead except for a makeshift periscope? Can he navigate a whole ocean with simple compasses? Even Nungesser and Coli have been lost over the Atlantic. Why should he succeed?
On the night of May 19th, he decides to forget about flying and see the Broadway musical, Rio Rita. But, by nightly custom, he checks on weather first. A surprise report: partial clearing over the Atlantic. He orders his plane readied for flight at dawn, and near midnight turns in for two hours' sleep, but only tosses and turns.
Before daybreak, May 20, Lindbergh arrives at Roosevelt Field to find a light, dismal drizzle falling. The field is mushy. The Spirit of St. Louis is shrouded and dripping. Reporters and a handful of onlookers shake their heads. "It's more like a funeral procession than the beginning of a flight to Paris." As the engine warms up, it is 30 r.p.m. low. The stick wobbles sluggishly in the taxiing run; water and mud spew from the tires, drum on the fabric. Lindbergh, at the head of the runway, opens the throttle. Three times he lifts his plane from the runway, three times touches it back down. The fourth time The Spirit of St. Louis is only 1,000 ft. from a web of telephone wires. Slowly it rises—"5,000 lbs. balanced on a blast of air." The telephone wires are skimmed by 20 ft. The plane is airborne.