One Summer: America, 1927 Read Free Page A

of which had been rolled smooth—a painful reminder of how imprudently over-hasty the entire operation was. As the Sikorsky jounced at speed over the second of the tracks, a section of landing gear fell off, damaging the left rudder, and a detached wheel went bouncing off into oblivion. Fonck pressed on nonetheless, opening the throttle and continually gaining speed until he was almost going fast enough to get airborne. Alas, almost was not good enough. Thousands of hands went to mouths as the plane reached the runway’s end, never having left the ground even fractionally, and tumbled clumsily over a twenty-foot embankment, vanishing from view.
    For some moments, the watching crowds stood in a stunned and eerie silence—birdsong could be heard, giving an air of peacefulness obviously at odds with the catastrophe just witnessed—and then awful normality reasserted itself with an enormous gaseous explosion as 2,850 gallons of aviation fuel combusted, throwing a fireball fifty feet into the air. Fonck and his navigator, Lawrence Curtin, somehow managed to scramble free, but the other two crew members were incinerated in their seats. The incident horrified the flying fraternity. The rest of the world was horrified, too—but at the same time morbidly eager for more.
    For Sikorsky, the blow was economic as well as emotional. The plane had cost more than $100,000 to build, but his backers had so far paid only a fraction of that, and now, the plane gone, they declinedto pay the rest. Sikorsky would eventually find a new career building helicopters, but for now he and Fonck, their plane, and their dreams were finished.
    With regard to the Orteig Prize, it was too late for other ocean fliers as well. Weather patterns meant that flights over the North Atlantic were safely possible for only a few months each year. Everyone would have to wait until the following spring.
    Spring came. America had three teams in the running, all with excellent planes and experienced crews. The names of the planes alone— Columbia, America, American Legion —showed how much this had become a matter of national pride. The initial front-runner was the Columbia , the monoplane in which Chamberlin and Acosta had set their endurance record just before Easter. But two days after that milestone flight, an even more impressive and vastly more expensive plane was wheeled out of its factory at Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. This was the America , which carried three powerful, roaring engines and had space for a crew of four. The leader of the America team was thirty-seven-year-old naval commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, a man seemingly born to be a hero. Suave and handsome, he came from one of America’s oldest and most distinguished families. The Byrds had been dominant in Virginia since the time of George Washington. Byrd’s brother Harry was governor of the state. In 1927, Richard Byrd himself was already a celebrated adventurer. The previous spring, with the pilot Floyd Bennett, he had made the first flight in an airplane over the North Pole (though in fact, as we will see, there have long been doubts that he actually did so).
    Byrd’s present expedition was also by far the best funded and most self-proclaimedly patriotic, thanks to Rodman Wanamaker, owner of department stores in Philadelphia and New York, who had put up $500,000 of his own money and gathered additional, unspecified funding from other leading businessmen. Through Wanamaker, Byrd now controlled the leasehold on Roosevelt Field, the only airfield in New York with a runway long enough to accommodate any plane built to fly theAtlantic. Without Byrd’s permission, no one else could even consider going for the Orteig Prize.
    Wanamaker insisted that the operation be all-American. This was a little ironic because the plane’s designer, a strong-willed and difficult fellow named Anthony Fokker, was Dutch and the plane itself had been partly built in Holland. Even worse, though rarely mentioned, was