nightmares of endless falling in space: he would wake up bedeviled by terror. He had seen actual out-of-control planes twist and spin as they fell. He knew how to right a plane for long enough to clamber from a biplane cockpit onto a wing and dive into space. He knew how to protect the ripcord, how to fall clear of an aircraft so parachute lines could deploy properly. He knew to carry a flashlight so he could check his canopy and his approach to the ground if an emergency jump was made at night. However, he did not know what an actual jump was like. He could only imagine. He could only wonder, and keep on having a bad dream now and then. Twenty-year-old Lindbergh decided he ought to make a jump to learn what to expect. He intently watched Charlie Hardin make a jump in June 1922. Lindbergh once wrote‘ The novice has a poet’ s eye. He sees and feels where the expert’ s senses have been calloused by experience,” and he eloquently described what he saw and felt: I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a white streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslin of a parachute a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments. A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of manwhere immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane, where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant. Once having made a jump under the tutelage of Charlie Hardin the experience rid Lindbergh’ s mind of dread that struck during sleep. He later wrote:“ I’ d stepped to the highest level of daring, a level above even that which airline pilots could attain.’’ He returned to Lincoln, Nebraska for more flight instruction, then spent until the end of October 1922 on a barnstorming tour, being a mechanic for another owner’ s plane and doing wingwalking and making exhibition parachute jumps, still without having soloed. The following year there were other long barnstorming trips, ranging from Wisconsin to Florida. With his wingwalking and parachuting, Lindbergh was gaining a lot of flying time, but still he had not made a solo flight. He remedied that situation after spending a winter at home in Minnesota with his father, who cosigned for a $ 900 bank loan so his son could buy a surplus army airplane. In March 1923 he spent $ 500 for Curtiss“ Jenny” with a 90-horsepower engine, a creaky, tattered plane that could fly only 70 miles an hour at top speed, and could only slowly climb to seventeen hundred feet. No flying license was required in those days, so making sure he had a full fuel tank, he lifted the rickety Jenny off the ground for his first solo. His lengthy passenger experience, all the while paying sharp attention to everything that happened to create flight, and his innate skills got him into the air and safely back to the ground on several takeoffs and landings. However, he once almost crashed the Jenny by lifting off too soon and then bounced so hard the landing
16 | FlyUAA | www. FlyUAA. org | November Issue