One Summer: America, 1927 Read Free

span in a single flight. As Alcock and Brown painfully proved, just flying half that distance was at the very bounds of technology and good fortune.
    No one took up Orteig’s offer, but in 1924 he renewed it, and now it was beginning to seem possible. The development of air-cooled engines – America’s one outstanding contribution to aviation technology in the period – gave planes greater range and reliability. The world also had an abundance of talented, often brilliant, nearly always severely underemployed aeronautic engineers and designers who were eager to show what they could do. For many, winning the Orteig Prize wasn’t merely the best challenge around, it was the only one.
    The first to try was the great French aviator René Fonck, in partnership with the Russian émigré designer Igor Sikorsky. No one needed the success more than Sikorsky did. He had been a leading aeroplane designer in Europe, but in 1917 had lost everything in the Russian Revolution and fled to America. Now, in 1926, at the age of thirty-seven, he supported himself by teaching chemistry and physics to fellow immigrants and by building planes when he could.
    Sikorsky loved a well-appointed aeroplane – one of his pre-war models included a washroom and ‘promenade deck’ (a somewhat generous description, it must be said) – and the plane he now built for the Atlantic flight was the plushest of all. It had leather fittings, a sofa and chairs, cooking facilities, even a bed – everything that a crew of four could possibly want in the way of comfort and elegance. The idea was to show that the Atlantic could not simply be crossed, but crossed in style. Sikorsky was supported by a syndicate of investors who called themselves the Argonauts.
    For a pilot they chose René Fonck, France’s greatest war ace. Fonck had shot down seventy-five German planes – he claimed it was over 120 – an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he had flown only for the last two years of the war. He spent the first two digging ditches before persuading the French airservice to give him a chance at flight school. Fonck was adroit at knocking down enemy planes, but even more incomparably skilled at eluding damage himself. In all his battles, Fonck’s own plane was struck by an enemy bullet just once. Unfortunately, the skills and temperament needed for combat are not necessarily the ones required to fly an aeroplane successfully across a large and empty sea.
    Fonck now showed no common sense in regard to preparations. First, he insisted on going before the plane was adequately tested, to Sikorsky’s despair. Next, and even worse, he grossly overloaded it. He packed extra fuel, an abundance of emergency equipment, two kinds of radios, spare clothes, presents for friends and supporters, and lots to eat and drink, including wines and champagne. He even packed a dinner of terrapin, turkey and duck to be prepared and eaten in celebration after reaching Paris, as if France could not be counted on to feed them. Altogether the plane when loaded weighed 28,000 pounds, far more than it was designed, or probably able, to lift.
    On 20 September came news that two Frenchmen, a Major Pierre Weiss and a Lieutenant Challé, had flown in a single leap from Paris to Bandar Abbas in Persia (now Iran), a distance of 3,230 miles, almost as far as from New York to Paris. Elated at this demonstration of the innate superiority of French aviators, Fonck insisted on immediate preparation for departure.
    The following morning, before a large crowd, the Sikorsky – which, such was the rush, hadn’t even been given a name – was rolled into position and its three mighty silver engines started. Almost from the moment it began lumbering down the runway things didn’t look right. Airfields in the 1920s were essentially just that – fields – and Roosevelt Field was no better than most. Because the plane needed an especially long run, it had to cross two dirt service roads,