Spirit Of St. Louis

By Andrew Herd (4 June 2002)

ould you be prepared to fly solo, for 34 hours, in an aircraft with the most basic of instrumentation, which lacked any kind of forward view worth mentioning? If so, you have the makings of a legend within you; if not, join the club, because neither would I. But there was one man who was prepared to do precisely that - his name was Charles Lindbergh, and in 1927 he flew the Spirit of St. Louis into history.

The Spirit had its origins in Claude Ryan's mail plane. Claude was a very experienced pilot and mechanic turned entrepreneur, and when his passenger service between San Diego and LA ran into financial trouble, he decided to make a pitch for some US Postal Service contracts he knew were coming up. The problem was that he couldn't find a plane suitable for the job, so he set out to design one. The result was the M-1, a 36 foot span, open cockpit monoplane with a roomy fuselage and a 1200 pound payload, which cruised at what for the time was the astounding speed of 110 mph. After the first few flights, Ryan decided it could be improved on and he borrowed a couple of engineers from his friend Donald Douglas - Art Mankey and Jack Northrop. This was a plane with a pedigree.

Ryan's venture was profitable enough that he ended up building a total of 28 of the M-1 and its successor, the M2; but I doubt he ever imagined his name would be connected with trans-Atlantic flight. As it happened, Lindbergh wasn't the only pilot to cross the ocean in one of Ryan's planes, because an employee of his called Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan made a passage from New York to Ireland in a Curtiss Robin, after setting course on a reciprocal. Corrigan had intended to go to California. Corrigan's flight is all the more mystifying because he definitely had a better forward view than Lindbergh did. I guess these things happen to the best of us.

The Spirit shared many components with the Ryan M-2, in particular the wing ribs, fittings and spars, the Spirit's span being increased to 46 feet, with squared off tips and a broadly similar empennage. But that's where the similarities ended. Although the Spirit shared some fuselage components with the mail plane, Lindbergh replaced the passenger seat (in front of the pilot) with a fuel tank and associated streamlining that completely obliterated his forward view, but let him squeeze an extra 10 knots out of the airframe. He also altered the landing gear, which he copied from the Fokker Universal. Much of the instrumentation was identical to the M-2, barring a side-mounted periscope which provided the only forward view - when the periscope was retracted, Lindy couldn't see ahead at all. For most of the flight, the only view he had was out the side windows. Yeah, it makes my mouth go kind of dry thinking about it too.

Lindbergh built the Spirit when he heard about the $25000 Orteig prize offered to the first person to make a non-stop solo flight between New York and Paris. It had already proved a tough not to crack and several other pilots had been killed in the attempt, but, financed by a group of St. Louis businessmen and carrying four sandwiches, a couple of canteens of drinking water and 450 gallons of aviation spirit, Lindy took off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island at 07:52 on May 20th, 1927. I reckon he probably took something to pee into as well, but no-one ever seems to mention that.

It wasn't the easiest departure, something that will be all too easy to understand once you have flown the sim. The dirt runway was soft and the heavily loaded plane accelerated so slowly that Lindy must have considered aborting, but after missing a tractor by inches and a telephone line by only a few feet, the Spirit staggered into the air. Turning to avoid a low hill, Lindbergh slowly gained altitude and throttled back to 1750 rpm in order to conserve fuel. At Long Island Sound, the Curtiss Oriole that had accompanied him with a photographer on board turned back and Lindy flew on alone towards Cape Cod and Novia Scotia. He reached the Atlantic in a gathering fog, as night fell.

By this time the Spirit had struggled up to 10,000 feet, but although Lindbergh could see a few stars, vis was lousy and he started to have trouble with icing, forcing him to make the first of many detours. Before long, Lindy was following a hair-raising course at wave top height, zig-zagging around the worst patches of fog, while he desperately tried to keep a mental picture of his position. This was the pattern of the remainder of the flight; endless hours of nerve-wracking concentration, with his life forfeit on the slightest error. In his sober account of his epic journey, Lindbergh described his struggle against tiredness, how he began to hallucinate, and how, despite his best efforts, he kept falling asleep, waking up seconds, even minutes later.

At nine fifty two am, twenty six hours after take-off, Lindbergh was relieved to see a small group of fishing boats. It was the first sign that he was nearing land and he circled a while, trying to spot signs of life. He struck lucky with the second boat he found, spotting a white face peering incredulously up at him out of the wheelhouse. I can only imagine the emotions which went through the fisherman's mind when Lindbergh throttled right back, skimmed the waves only a few feet from his boat and yelled out the window, "Which way is Ireland?"

Flying on, Lindbergh made his landfall on the southwestern Irish coast about an hour later. Despite the doubt evident in his shouted question to the fisherman, his navigation turned out to be outstandingly good and his fix put him only three miles off course; so passing over Cape Valencia and Dingle Bay, he began a climb to 1500 feet and headed for Paris. Lindy reached Cherbourg as darkness fell for the second time during his long flight, but he was able to follow the beacons which lit the London to Paris airway and after flying the last two hundred mile leg, he circled above the Eiffel tower at 17:00 New York time.

Dog tired, Lindbergh found it hard to believe that the lights he had identified as Le Bourget were his destination - to his dulled mental processes, they seemed far too close to the city, so he flew on. By now, only instinct, iron will and the long experience Lindbergh had gained as a mail pilot were keeping him in the air, but after overflying Le Bourget, he realised his error and turned back. To his weary amazement, all the roads to the field were jammed with traffic. Making one low pass over the runway, he circled into wind and landed. As the Spirit slowed to a halt, the few cops trying to hold back the crowd gave up the unequal task and Lindbergh had to shut down real fast for fear of injuring someone with the prop. Apart from the Wright brothers, it is difficult to think of anyone who has made a more famous flight. Now we can all try it.

This freeware package is a 9 Mb download, which unpacks to yield an excecutable. From there on in, the installation is no problem and the routine automatically creates its own program group in the start menu, which contains an unistall script, a readme and a legend for the panel. There ain't much documentation, but you can be sure as hell that you are looking at more than Lindbergh got with his plane, so be grateful for it.

I guess we'd better start with the sound set, which is aliased to the Sopwith Camel. I had a quick check around FlightSim.Com and couldn't find a substitute, but maybe one of the freeware authors will oblige, because the rest of the plane is simply outstanding. By the way, if someone (this is a hint, guys) is interested in recording something suitable, the engine was a nine cylinder air-cooled Wright J-5C Whirlwind.

Roger Dial's visual model was based on authentic engineering and three view drawings and it conveys the Spirit's looks very well. This was an unattractive aeroplane and not even reflective textures can make it look like anything other than an industrial strength airframe built to survive a punishing trip. There are all the usual animations, plus a neat anemometer on top of the fuselage, which spins determinedly round and round. Get to love it; it is about the only moving thing you are gonna see for the next day and a half. Other than waves, that is. And sweat trickling down your nose.

The flight dynamics, by Steve Small, are the worst I have ever seen him produce - and so they should be, because the Spirit was a complete pig to fly. Steve has captured its crapulous nature so well that the Experimental Aircraft Association used this sim to recreate the crossing - and by all reports the EAA people were really taken by it, although I suspect Steve has pulled some of his punches and there is an even more realistic .air file out there that none of us could fly with. Getting it off the ground at full load took Lindbergh over 2500 feet, so choose the field you fly it from with extreme care unless you love talking to trees. The rate of climb at sea level is pathetic and gets worse as you go up, the problem being that you only have 223 hp up front, hauling 5135 pounds behind it. Not good.

The other problem with the Spirit was that Lindy was so worried about a forced landing that he decided to sacrifice longitudinal stability in order to improve safety, his aim being to make sure that the plane didn't nose over on landing - that was also why the fuel tank was up front. He didn't want to be crushed by four hundred gallons of gas if he ploughed in. The Spirit was a very finely balanced creation indeed and Steve's .air file reflects all its bad points - and probably the good ones too, not that I have been able to find any so far. All in all, it is one of the most enjoyable and individual FS add-ons I have flown.

If the visual and flight models are good, there is no doubt that Tim Dickens panel is a masterpiece. If anyone ever manages to develop a better Spirit panel than this, I will be interested to see it. As you can see, some of the gauges are a wee bit non-standard, the inclinometer (the green T) being a case in point. Just watching everything swirl around in those tubes drove me slowly mad and it makes me wonder what it did to Lindbergh's sanity. Nice shade of green, though. The mixture lever has an old ruler glued next to it, the magneto switch appears to have been taken off a power station and the fuel selectors are a law unto themselves. If you get forced down to ten feet in mid-ocean, be careful what you do with them. I was tempted to hang my sandwich packet on them and it turned out to be a big mistake. And if you are interested to know what the chalk marks are, the answer is that Lindbergh finally gave up on his logbook around the 21st hour and started making them so he could work out how long he had left before his tanks ran dry.

Chalk marks aside, you can forget the flight model, the visuals and the panel, because the real star of the show is the periscope. I spent a long while with one eyeball glued to my screen before I discovered that FlightOne had built in a special view - shown a couple of parargraphs above. You can click the periscope in and out on the main 2D panel view and the device is also animated on the visual model, but if you absolutely insist on having a forward view when you try to land, you only have to click just above the view port on the main panel to see as much as you can possibly want. But you aren't going to do that, are you? In Flight Simulator, everyone one of us is a kick ass pilot and we all fly curved approaches so we can look out the side windows. I reckon I got it down at Meig's about fifth go - next time I even plan to put it on the runway.

So what are you doing? Download it, then vote for it. If this one doesn't take some kind of an award, I'm going to eat my hard disk, because if it is good enough for the EAA, it is good enough for me.

You can download the Spirit of St. Louis direct from the FlightOne web site, by clicking here.