The air above the North Atlantic, so lonely half a century ago that Charles Lindbergh said he communed with ghosts and guardian spirits, is dense now with 747s, the flying auditoriums that are just beginning their summer trade. Passengers doze over their drinks, eat flash-frozen steaks, watch movies through a passage as passive as Muzak. The New York-to-Paris odyssey that took Lindbergh 33½ hours would be a 3½-hour streak for the Concorde.
The phenomenon of Lindbergh, the romantic soloist who dropped out of the darkness at Paris' Le Bourget Airport 50 years ago this week, may be difficult for the world of 1977 to understand. The minute he completed the first one-man flight across the Atlantic, the 25-year-old aviator, boyish yet reserved, became a hero of the world. He hated to be called "Lucky Lindy" — luck had nothing to do with it, he said, just skill. Yet he had intersected with history at precisely the right moment: technology and public mood conspired to endow Lindbergh with an almost primitive magic.
"Every historical change," wrote Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, "creates its mythology." Lindbergh was the mythic hero of early aviation. In 1927 flying shone with the innocence of its newness and possibility, with the untrammeled zest of lifting off from the earth. Aloft, wrote Lindbergh, "I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger." He was a sky lover; his was a rare moment: personal confidence and skill in partnership with a machine, not overwhelmed by it, as would happen later.
Now, of course, Lindbergh is more an item of receding Americana than a hero who engages the popular imagination. Yet the impulse that he represented — exploration and adventure, pressing toward new physical and psychic limits — remains lively in many different areas: in space, in the depths of the oceans, in the mysteries of spiritual phenomena.
Both the U.S. and France are celebrating the anniversary of Lindbergh's flight. At "Spirit of St. Louis" banquets in seven cities, the Charles A. Lindbergh Memorial Fund hopes to raise $500,000 for conservation, exploration and aeronautic research. His widow Anne Morrow Lindbergh, along with Sons Jon and Land and Daughter Reeve, is appearing at the dinners. The U.S. Postal Service is issuing a special stamp showing the Spirit of St. Louis in flight. In Washington, the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, where the plane is on permanent display, has assembled a collection of Lindbergh memorabilia — including his flying outfit, a $25,000 check he won as a prize for the flight, and his barograph, which recorded altitude changes and proved that he made no landings between New York and Paris.