Atlantic Fever by Joe Jackson

Author:Joe Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t Richard Byrd who ferried America from Fokker’s shop to Roosevelt Field, but Bernt Balchen. He sat in the cockpit with Leroy Thompson of Colonial Air Transport and looked down at the sleek silver gull resting on the grass at Curtiss. With all the gawkers swirling around it, he knew the mail pilot from San Diego must have arrived. He landed at Roosevelt and taxied to the main hangar.

Balchen had not left Uncle Tony’s factory for eleven days. After leaving Bennett’s hospital room, he had hurried to Fokker’s shop, where the Dutchman hired him on the spot as his test pilot. Balchen lived, ate, and slept there, working around the clock with the others to make the America airworthy again. He had a cot in the factory and grabbed meals at a quick-lunch counter across the field. To overcome the nose-heavy condition that had caused the crash, they relocated the navigator’s compartment behind the main fuel tank, thus redistributing weight more evenly fore and aft. They built a catwalk connecting the cockpit to the back cabin; it led under one side of the oval tank, so that a man could slide back and forth on his belly. Day and night the work continued. On May 12, the America rolled out the factory doors for the first time since the crash and Balchen made a couple of short takeoffs and landings. They made some minor adjustments and then he flew her to Roosevelt Field.

Balchen had rarely seen Byrd during the refitting. Acosta sometimes dropped by to inspect the plane, and Bernt liked the man. He seemed a decent guy, if a little reckless. With that olive skin and close-cropped black moustache, Acosta reminded Balchen of a Hollywood sheikh, and he could see why women fell for him. Acosta’s addition to the team was no longer a secret, though it hadn’t yet been made official. Now, as Balchen rolled to the hangar, he saw Byrd dressed in full flying regalia. The commander had come over from Hasbrouck Heights in an earlier plane. He looked “slim and handsome in his flying clothes,” Balchen later wrote, “high-topped boots and regulation breeches, and his dark curly hair is unruffled by the wind.” George Noville stood behind him, dressed the same way. George, as always, was a sphinx—his eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses rarely gave away his feelings; the straight line of his mouth was expressionless.

This was a photo shoot to introduce Acosta officially as the newest member of the team. Whereas Byrd and Noville wore their aviators’ pants and boots for the photographers, Acosta was more casually dressed, in a gray tweed suit and tweed cap. He looked like an English lord going for a Sunday drive. The cameramen posed Byrd and Noville in front of the America, and Byrd called Acosta over to join them. But Lindbergh had stolen their thunder, and few could stop talking about the newcomer parked in the next field.

Though Byrd looked as picture perfect as ever, Balchen knew that something in him had changed.

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