One Summer: America, 1927 (3 page)

Byrd never liked Fokker, and on April 16, 1927, their enmity became complete. Just before six in the evening, Fokker and three members of the Byrd team—the copilot Floyd Bennett, the navigator George Noville, and Byrd himself—eagerly crowded into the cockpit. Fokker took the controls for this maiden flight. The plane took off smoothly and performed faultlessly in the air, but as the
America
came in to land it became evident that it was impelled by the inescapable burden of gravity to tip forward and come down nose-first. The problem was that all the weight was up front and there was no way for any of the four men onboard to move to the back to redistribute the load because a large fuel tank entirely filled the middle part of the fuselage.

Fokker circled around the airfield while he considered his options (or, rather, considered that he had no options) and came in to land as gingerly as he could. What exactly happened next became at once a matter of heated dispute. Byrd maintained that Fokker abandoned the controls and made every effort to save himself, leaving the others to their fates. Fokker vehemently denied this. Jumping out of a crashing plane was not possible, he said. “Maybe Byrd was excited and imagined this,” Fokker wrote with pained sarcasm in his autobiography. Surviving film footage of the crash, which is both brief and grainy, shows the plane landing roughly, tipping onto its nose, and flopping onto its back, all in a continuous motion, like a child doing a somersault. Fokker, like the other occupants, could have done nothing but brace and hold on.

In the footage the damage looks slight, but inside all was violent chaos. A piece of propeller ripped through the cockpit and pierced Bennett’s chest. He was bleeding profusely and critically injured. Noville, painfully mindful of the fire that had killed two of Fonck’s men, punched his way out through the plane’s fabric covering. Byrd followed and was so furious with Fokker that he reportedly failed to notice that his left arm had snapped like a twig and was dangling in a queasily unnatural way. Fokker, uninjured, stood and shouted back at Byrd, blaming him for overloading the plane on its first flight.

The episode introduced serious rancor into the Byrd camp and set back the team’s plans by weeks. Bennett was rushed to a hospital at Hackensack, where he lay close to death for the next ten days. He was lost to the team for good. The plane had to be almost completely rebuilt—and indeed extensively redesigned to allow the weight to be distributed more sensibly. For the time being, the Byrd team was out of the running.

That left two other American planes, but fate, alas, was not on their sides either. On April 24, eight days after the Byrd crash, Clarence Chamberlin was prevailed upon to take the nine-year-old daughter of the plane’s owner, Charles A. Levine, and the daughter of an official from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce up for a short flight above Long
Island. Chamberlin’s young passengers got a more exciting flight than they expected because the landing gear fell apart during takeoff, leaving one wheel behind, which meant he had only one wheel to land on. Chamberlin made a nearly perfect landing without injury to himself or his passengers, but the wing hit the ground and the damage to the plane was sufficient to set back the
Columbia
’s plans considerably.

Hopes now turned to two popular naval officers at the Hampton Roads Naval Airbase in Virginia, Noel Davis and Stanton H. Wooster. Davis and Wooster were smart, able aviators, and their plane, a Keystone Pathfinder built in Bristol, Pennsylvania, was gleamingly new and powered by three Wright Whirlwind engines. What the outside world didn’t know was that upon delivery the plane turned out to weigh 1,150 pounds more than it was supposed to. Davis and Wooster took it up in a series of test flights, each time cautiously increasing the fuel load, and so far had experienced no problems. On April 26, two days after Chamberlin’s emergency landing, they scheduled their final test flight. This time they would take off with a full load of seventeen thousand pounds, nearly a quarter more than the plane had attempted to lift before.

Among those who came to cheer them on were Davis’s young wife, their infant son in her arms, and Wooster’s fiancée. This time the plane struggled to get airborne. At length it rose into the air, but not enough to clear a line of trees at the far side of a neighboring field. Wooster banked sharply. The plane stalled and fell to earth with a sickening crash. Davis and Wooster died instantly. America, for the time being at least, was out of contenders.

To make matters worse, things were going rather well for foreigners. While the American fliers were investing all their energies in land planes, the Italians saw seaplanes as the way of the future. Seaplanes had much to commend them. They eliminated the need for landing fields since they could put down on any convenient body of water. Seaplanes could island-hop their way across oceans, follow rivers deep into jungly continents, stop at coastal communities with no clearings for airstrips, and otherwise go where conventional airplanes could not.

No one demonstrated the versatility and usefulness of seaplanes better than the Italian aviator Francesco de Pinedo. The son of a lawyer from Naples, Pinedo was well educated and headed for a career in the professions when he discovered flying. It became his life. In 1925, accompanied by a mechanic named Ernesto Campanelli, Pinedo flew from Italy to Australia and back via Japan. They did it in comparatively short hops, always sticking close to land, and the trip took seven months to complete, but it was still a voyage of thirty-four thousand miles, epic by any standards. Pinedo became a national hero. Benito Mussolini, who had come to power in 1922, showered him with honors. Mussolini was enthralled by flight—by its speed and daring and promise of technological superiority. All of those qualities were magically personified, in his view, by the stout little Neapolitan, who became his emissary of the air.

Time
magazine, four years old and enchanted with stereotype, described Pinedo in the spring of 1927 as a “swart Fascist ace.” (Almost anyone from south of the Alps was “swart” in
Time
.) Pinedo was in fact not especially swart and not at all an ace—he had spent the war flying reconnaissance missions—but he was indeed a loyal Fascist. With his black shirt, brilliantined hair, thrusting jaw, and habit of standing with his fists pinned to his hips, Pinedo was, to an almost comical degree, the very model of a strutting, self-satisfied Fascist. This was not a problem to anyone so long as he stayed in Europe, but in the spring of 1927 he came to America. Worse, he did it in the most heroic possible way.

While America’s Atlantic hopefuls were struggling to get their planes ready, Pinedo efficiently made his way to the United States via coastal Africa, the Cape Verde Islands, South America, and the Caribbean. It was the first westward crossing by airplane of the Atlantic Ocean, a feat in itself, even if it was not done in a single bound. Pinedo reached the United States in late March at New Orleans and began a lavish, if not always wholly welcome, progress around the country.

It was hard to decide what to make of him. On the one hand, he was unquestionably a gifted flier and entitled to a parade or two. On the other, he was a representative of an obnoxious form of government that was admired by many Italian immigrants, who were thus deemed to represent a threat to the American way of life. At a time when America’s air
efforts were suffering one setback after another, Pinedo’s prolonged victory lap around the country began to seem just a little insensitive.

After New Orleans, Pinedo proceeded west to California, stopping at Galveston, San Antonio, Hot Springs, and other communities along the way to refuel and receive ovations from small bands of supporters and a rather larger number of the merely curious. On April 6, en route to a civic reception in San Diego, he landed at a reservoir called Roosevelt Lake in the desert west of Phoenix. Even in this lonely spot a crowd gathered. As the observers respectfully watched the plane being serviced, a youth named John Thomason lit a cigarette and unthinkingly tossed the match on the water. The water, coated with oil and aviation fuel, ignited with a mighty
whoompf
that made everyone scatter. Within seconds, Pinedo’s beloved plane was engulfed in flames and workmen were swimming for their lives.

Pinedo, having lunch at a lakeside hotel, looked up from his meal to see smoke where his plane should be. The plane was entirely destroyed but for the engine, which sank to the lake bottom sixty feet below. The Italian press, already hypersensitive to anti-Fascist sentiment in America, concluded that this was an act of treacherous sabotage. “Vile Crime Against Fascism,” one paper cried in a headline. “Odious Act of Anti-Fascists,” echoed another. America’s ambassador to Italy, Henry P. Fletcher, made matters even worse by dashing off a letter of apology to Mussolini in which he described the fire as an “act of criminal folly” and promised that the “guilty will be discovered and severely punished.” For days afterward, a
Times
correspondent reported from Rome, the citizens of Italy talked of little else but this catastrophic setback to “their hero, their superman, their demigod, de Pinedo.” Eventually, all sides calmed down and accepted that the act was an accident, but suspicions simmered and henceforth Pinedo, his crew, and his possessions were guarded by menacing Fascisti armed with stilettos and blackjacks.

Pinedo left his lieutenants to haul the dripping engine from the lake and get it dried out while he headed east to New York to await delivery of a substitute plane from Italy that Mussolini promised to dispatch at once.

He could have no idea of it, of course, but his troubles, in life and in the air, had only just begun.

The world’s attention moved to Paris, where at dawn on May 8 two slightly aging men in bulky flying suits emerged from an administration building at Le Bourget airfield to the respectful applause of well-wishers. The men, Captain Charles Nungesser and Captain François Coli, walked stiffly and a little self-consciously. Their heavy gear, which was necessary because they were about to fly 3,600 miles in an open cockpit, made them look almost uncannily like little boys in snowsuits.

Many of their well-wishers had been out all night and were still in evening dress. The
New York Times
likened the scene to a garden party. Among those who had come to see them off were Nungesser’s pal the boxer Georges Carpentier and the singer Maurice Chevalier, with his mistress, a celebrated chanteuse and actress who went by the single sultry name Mistinguett.

Nungesser and Coli were war heroes who normally sauntered about with the smooth and cocky air of men at ease with danger, but today was a little different. Coli, at forty-six, was a venerable figure: not many airmen were still alive and flying at that age. He wore a rakish black monocle over a missing right eye, one of five wounds he had sustained in combat. This was nothing compared with Nungesser’s extravagant affinity for injury, however. No one in the war was injured more—or at least got up again afterward. Nungesser had so many injuries that after the war he listed them all on his business card. They included: six jaw fractures (four upper, two lower); fractured skull and palate; bullet wounds to mouth and ear; dislocations of wrist, clavicle, ankle, and knees; loss of teeth; shrapnel wound to upper body; multiple concussions; multiple leg fractures; multiple internal injuries; and contusions “too numerous to list.” He was also gravely injured in a car crash in which a companion died. Often he was so banged up that he had to be carried to his plane by crew members and gently inserted into the cockpit. Even so, Nungesser shot down forty-four planes (he claimed many more), a number
exceeded among French aviators only by René Fonck, and received so many medals that he all but clanked when he walked. He listed those on his business card, too.

As happened with many airmen, the Armistice left Nungesser at something of a loss. He worked for a time as a gaucho in Argentina, gave flying demonstrations in America with his friend the Marquis de Charette, and starred in a movie called
The Sky-Raider
, filmed at Roosevelt Field in New York, where the Orteig Prize competitors were gathering now.

With his Gallic charm and chestful of medals, Nungesser proved irresistible to women, and in the spring of 1923 after a whirlwind romance he became engaged to a young New York socialite with the unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker. Miss Hatmaker, who was just nineteen, came from a long line of lively women. Her mother, the former Nellie Sands, was a celebrated beauty who proved too great a handful for three husbands, including Mr. Hatmaker, whom she discarded in a divorce in 1921. This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter’s marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds—not unreasonable on the face of it—that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French. In this, however, Mr. Hatmaker was unsupported by his former wife, who not only endorsed the marriage but announced that she would at the same time marry her own latest paramour, Captain William Waters, an American of amiable anonymity who seems to have aroused the passing interest of the world just twice in his life: once when he married Mrs. Hatmaker and once when they divorced a few years later. So mother and daughter were wed in a joint ceremony in Dinard, in Brittany, not far from where Charles Nungesser would get his last glimpse of his native soil in the spring of 1927.

Consuelo and Charles’s marriage was not a success. She declared at the outset that she would not live in France, while he disdained to live anywhere else. They parted swiftly and were divorced in 1926. But Nungesser clearly had second thoughts because he mused aloud to friends that a heroic gesture might help reunite him with the luscious Consuelo
and her no less luscious fortune. Nungesser was aided in his ambitions by the misfortunes of Fonck, whose crash the previous fall had helped Nungesser persuade Pierre Levasseur, an aircraft manufacturer, to provide him with a plane, as a restorative to French pride. A prize endowed by a Frenchman and won by French fliers in a French machine would obviously be a boost to French prestige. Nungesser and Coli gladly joined the enterprise as navigators. They called their plane
L’Oiseau Blanc
(The White Bird) and painted it white so that it would be easier to find if it came down in the sea.