The Flight by Dan Hampton

Author:Dan Hampton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062464415
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods.

—CHARLES LINDBERGH

EIGHT

CROSSING THE BRIDGE

I’VE FINALLY BROKEN the spell of sleep.

Sun beams through the skylight, heating the cabin and reflecting off the gauges, but he doesn’t mind. Maybe this is a second wind, or perhaps the sight of death has drawn out the last reserves of strength. The clock reads 7:49 A.M. New York time, so he’s been airborne now for nearly twenty-four hours. Others have been up longer; France’s Maurice Drouhin and Jules Landry’s 1925 record of 45 hours stood until Chamberlin and Acosta remained aloft for more than 50 hours just last month.* But Lindbergh is solo and no one else has flown alone for so long.

The sun is bright, the sky is clear, and he figures the wind is dead astern at about 30 miles per hour. Now is the time to figure out where the Spirit actually is, or as close as he can anyway. Slim believes he’s far off course to the south. Backtracking to avoid the thunderheads didn’t help, and he figures the cumulative effect of all those 10- and 20-degree deviations probably added up to, what, 50 miles? Slim has also been using the stars, when they are visible, and because in this hemisphere they rotate counterclockwise around the pole this naturally draws a navigator south. How far south? Maybe 20 miles? What about the heading? Departing St. John’s he’d offset 5 degrees north to correct back to the plotted course, but that should have happened a thousand miles later.

Spirit left Newfoundland more than twelve hours ago, and if he had updated his course as planned then Ireland should be 600 to 700 miles ahead. Yet he hadn’t flown the plotted course, nor had there been any navigation updates for at least seven hours, so is Spirit too far north? Several degrees every hour would add up to . . . 50 miles north? Wouldn’t that pretty well offset the errors to the south caused by his flying?

The real wild card is the wind.

If it had remained off his left quarter all night the Spirit would have been pushed to the right, or southeast, and he would still be south of course. But suppose it had been from the other side of the tail and was blowing him north? Combined with his northeast heading the Spirit might be hundreds of miles off to the north. Or vice versa: he could be hundreds of miles south and miss Ireland or England altogether. Certainly, though, a tailwind had pushed him along through the night, so at least Spirit was that much closer to land.

But which land?

Supposing that at 10,000 feet, the wind had been stronger and more constant than he’d anticipated? Working his mind again felt good, so with the engine set for 1,575 revolutions and the compass steady on 120 degrees he is free to concentrate. The airspeed has remained fairly constant at 90 miles per hour, but that is indicated airspeed, displayed on his cockpit gauge, not his actual speed over the water.

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