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the
Atlantic Strikes Back
During the five years of Raymond Orteig’s challenge,
there were no serious contenders for the
prize, so he renewed the
challenge for another five years. The first
serious entrants into the
contest (fliers wishing to be
considered had to first register with the Aero Club of
America) were, as Orteig
had hoped, French. Two veterans of
the war wounded in action, French ace Paul
Tarascon and François Coli, outfitted a Poletz
biplane for the flight during the
summer of 1925.
The ill-fated Sikorsky S-35 at Curtiss Field, 1926
They planned to drop the wheeled
undercarriage after taking off and
land on skids on a golf course in
Rye, just north of New York City.
Racing against them was another French
team flying a Farman
Goliath bomber that had set an
endurance record of forty hours in the air. The Poletz,
trying to duplicate the endurance record of the
Goliath, crashed and exploded; the
crew just barely escaped with
their lives. In the United
States, a captain of the Air Service
Reserve, Homer M. Berry,
decided he would take a crack at
the prize, and he organized a company for that purpose,
Argonauts, Inc., with the help of New Hampshire
paper magnate Robert Jackson. Berry
and Jackson then contracted
with the recent émigré Igor Sikorsky to build a
plane that could make the
trans-Atlantic flight.
Fonck was frequently photographed in
the cockpit
of the S-35 wearing anything but flying togs.
Sikorsky had just fled the Russian
Revolution and, with the help of
some illustrious refugees (like Sergei Rachmaninoff),
was establishing an aircraft manufacturing
business on American soil.
By the end of 1925, Sikorsky had constructed for the
Argonauts the S-35, a huge biplane
with a 101-foot (31m) wingspan and
weighing nine tons (8t) when fully
fuelled (but without crew and cargo); it was
at first powered by two Liberty engines, then by
three Gnome-Rhone Jupiter 450-hp
engines.
Sikorsky built and
serviced the plane—now named New
York-Paris—at Roosevelt Field on Long Island,
New York, and all of New York (it seemed),
including the flamboyant
mayor, Jimmy Walker came out to
watch the plane put through its
paces. Berry no doubt thought
that he would pilot the plane, but late in 1925 the
legendary French ace René
Fonck visited the hangar where the
S-35 was being built.
The favourites to win the Orteig Prize in
1926 were Igor Sikorsky
(far left) and Captain René Fonck (far right), who are
seen
here being visited by the
assistant secretaries of war,
Trubie Danison and (to his left) William McCracke
He made it clear to the
Argonauts that he would welcome an invitation to fly
the plane, and the Argonauts
happily obliged, making Berry
the co-pilot. Fonck made all sorts of demands on the
design of the plane itself,
including insisting that the
fifteen-foot (4.5m) cabin be decorated in red satin, gold
fittings, and mahogany and
leather panelling. All this irked
Sikorsky, who was depending on the S-35 to
make his reputation, but Fonck,
aside from being a hero of the war, had been instrumental in
procuring the Jupiter engines. The crew had grown to five,
and at the last minute Berry was forced out in favour of a
navigator supplied by the U.S. Navy. Finally, after
anticipation had risen to a fever pitch, the date for the
take-off was set for September 21, 1926, if weather
permitted.
Thousands of New Yorkers lined the field
to witness this historic moment. Fonck led the grand
procession to the plane, and all the crew had baggage and
gifts loaded onto the plane. Fonck was given a basket of
croissants by Orteig, which he cheerfully tossed into the
cabin. Sikorsky watched nervously and estimated that the
gross weight of the plane was well over fourteen tons
(12.5t)—more than ten thousand pounds (4,540kg) over
specifications.
The S-35 was among the most advanced
aircraft of its day, and in
the opinion of most experts would
be able to make the
trans-Atlantic flight to Paris with little difficulty. And
yet....
Later there would be some question
whether Sikorsky said anything to
Fonck, but at the time it probably
would not have mattered. Fonck and
the others were completely caught
up in the moment.
During take-off, a wheel on the undercarriage came
loose when the plane passed over a
rough service road that
crossed the runway. Jacob Islamov, a friend of
Sikorsky and the plane’s
mechanic, was in charge of
releasing part of the landing gear once the plane was
airborne (to reduce the load).
Thinking the entire plane would
roll over, Islamov released the landing gear,
sending the plane hurtling over the hill at the end
of the runway. The crowd watched
in horror as the plane
disappeared silently over the hill; then a great
explosion erupted and shook the
ground and lit up the sky.
Sikorsky ran the length of the field and found Fonck
and another crewman crawling away from
the burning wreckage;
Islamov and the radio man were trapped
inside. Fonck stood dazed,
watching the fire and the frantic, but futile, efforts of
rescuers. “It is the fortunes of the
air,” he pronounced, and
Sikorsky eyed him poisonously. At
the inquest, Fonck was accused by many
(including, naturally,
Berry) of not being competent to fly so large a
plane and of not aborting the
take-off when the wheel fell
off.
Sikorsky was mildly reprimanded for not carrying
out the complete regimen of
flight tests with full loads
(though the problem, it was determined, had not
been with the plane, but
with the runway and undercarriage),
and the navy man, a former aide to
Admiral Moffett, vouched
for Fonck’s abilities. The coroner, possibly bowing to
political pressure, exonerated
Fonck and ruled the crash “an
unfortunate accident.” Most amazing of all,
perhaps, is that after
the inquest Sikorsky and Fonck
announced that they would build a
new plane and try again the next
year.
The S-35 was only the first casualty to be claimed by the
Atlantic; before Lindbergh’s
flight, there would be others.
Following his successful flight over the North Pole,
Richard Byrd persuaded a
young Norwegian flier, Bernt
Balchen, to join him, Floyd
Bennett, and George Noville, as a
ground-crew member in an
attempt to cross the Atlantic.
Byrd placed his plane, the
Josephine Ford, on display
in department stores owned by
Rodman Wanamaker, which led to
Wanamaker’s enthusiastic backing
of the trans-Atlantic flight. Byrd
ordered a new Fokker
Trimotor, and Wanamaker
sentimentally named it the America
(after the Curtiss boat
plane he financed before the war for a trans-Atlantic
flight). During a test flight in Teterboro, New Jersey, with
Fokker himself at the controls and the three crew members
aboard, the plane flipped over during landing. Byrd
had a broken arm, Bennett a fractured leg, and Noville was
most seriously hurt with internal injuries; only Anthony
Fokker walked away from the crash unhurt.
Seen here in 1926 is Floyd Bennett, pilot
of Commander Richard E. Byrd’s
Josephine Ford,
a Fokker triplane, which flew over the North
Pole.
The flight of the
America would be delayed until craft and crew mended.
Another entrant was Noel Davis, commander of the Naval
Reserve Station in Boston, who had tried to get support
since 1925 for a try at the Orteig prize. In January 1927,
he filed that he would be flying a tri- motor manufactured by
the Keystone Aircraft Corporation. Keystone called the model
the Pathfinder (only one was built), but he called the plane
the American Legion because most of the funding was coming
from the Legion, which hoped that a successful flight would
publicize the convention it was having in Paris that summer.
During trials out of Langley Field, Virginia, in April 1927,
the plane lost power and dove into a marsh, killing Davis
and Stanton Wooster, his co-pilot.
Meanwhile, the French made
another attempt at the prize. Charles Nungesser, France’s
second highest ranked war ace (second only to Fonck, and
considered a better flier), teamed up with Francois Coli and
the two prevailed upon the airplane builder Pierre Levasseur
(of Antoinette fame) to equip a plane he was building for
the French Navy for a trans-Atlantic flight.
Levasseur PL 8
The plane, the
PL-8, was an open-cockpit biplane with a detachable
undercarriage and a watertight fuselage that could float on
water. It was Nungesser’s plan to eject the undercarriage
after takeoff and land in New York Harbour on the
fuselage. Nungesser painted the plane white and called it
L’Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird), putting his trademark
skull-and-crossbones-in-a-black-heart emblem on the side of
the plane.
Charles Nungesser, heroic aviator of World
War I, was
known as the “Prince of Pilots.” His disappearance over the
Atlantic
was a tragedy that was deeply felt by the entire aviation
community.
Nungesser and Coli took
off from Le Bourget Field (they claimed they were flying the
more difficult east-west direction out of patriotism, but
the simple fact was that they had no money to transport the
plane to New York) on May 8, 1927, Joan of Arc Day and the
anniversary of the beginning of the flight of the NC boats.
Candles were lit all over France and prayers were uttered in
churches as the entire nation turned out to watch the plane
fly over the coast of Normandy toward America.
The weather reports were
discouraging—at Roosevelt Field, Clarence Chamberlin,
engineer of the Wright engines, heard reports of Nungesser’s
takeoff and of the weather over the Atlantic, and muttered,
“I don’t see how Nungesser can make it.” A report was sent
to Paris, resulting in a detailed front-page story, that
Nungesser and Coli had landed safely near the Statue of
Liberty. France erupted in joyous celebration, but the
report proved false, which made the later disappointment
even greater. The White Bird was never seen again, and it
was all the U.S. State Department could do to dispel rumours
that American weatherman had withheld weather information
that would have delayed the flight. No part of the wreckage
of the White Bird has ever been found.
The deaths did not end
even after Lindbergh’s flight in May 1927. Before the end of
the year, three other planes set out to cross the Atlantic
and did not make it. The first, an east-west flight in a
single engine Fokker called the St. Raphael, took off from
England on August 31, bound for Ottawa. The plane was
piloted by two experienced RAF pilots, Leslie Hamilton and
Fred Minchin, and had an illustrious passenger: Princess
Anne Lowenstein-Wertheim. Wertheim was well known as an
intrepid aviator with several records to her credit. She
kept her involvement in the flight secret (mainly because of
her aristocratic family’s objections to her flying career)
until just before boarding. The plane was spotted en route
by an oil tanker, and then disappeared into the Newfoundland
fog. For years, searchers combed the Canadian wilderness for
wreckage, but found nothing.
The Fokker F.VIIA "Old Glory" that James DeWitt Hill and
Lloyd Bertaud used for their attempted transatlantic flight
On September 6, a Fokker
single-engine called Old Glory took off from Old Orchard
Beach, Maine, for Rome, attempting the first nonstop
U.S.—Rome flight. The plane was sponsored by William
Randolph Hearst, who, ever sensitive to publicity, had
Philip Payne, editor of the New York Daily Mirror, one of
his newspapers, go along on the flight to drop a wreath over
the Atlantic that read, “Nungesser and Coli: You showed the
way. We followed. (Lloyd) Bertaud and Payne and (James D.)
Hill.” The next day, an SOS was received and rescue ships
raced to the spot 600 miles (960km) off the Newfoundland
coast. They found the plane bobbing in the water, but there
were no bodies and no indication of what had happened. Even
before the wreckage of the Old Glory was found, another
plane took off to cross the Atlantic, the Sir John Caning,
with a British crew of two.
It disappeared without a
trace over the Atlantic, without so much as an SOS. On
September 9, 1927, the U.S. Department of State and the
Navy, in response to public revulsion at all the lost
fliers, called a halt to further transoceanic attempts.
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