Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Flight 20170618 : comparemela.com

Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Flight 20170618

Cspan2 with top Nonfiction Book developers every weekend. But Tv Television for serious readers. Hi everyone, thank you for coming to the Tattered Cover and thank you for joining us for tonights author event. Thank you for coming out to support your local independent bookstore, we greatly appreciate it. Tonight we have dan hampton, most of you probably know hes the author of hunter killers and wards of the sky among several others. Hes a decorated pilot and a historian of, okay. A noted historian. Tonight hes going to be discussing the flight, his recounting of Charles Lindberghs famous transatlantic flight from new york to paris. So without further ado, im going to go ahead and turn it over to dan. Lets give him some big applause. [applause] i also tap dance and sing badly. Well, thank you jennifer. And michael, and the Tattered Cover crowd as well as my cspan buddies mark and steve whove done this with me several times before. Probably tired of looking at me. And its good to be back in colorado, nice sunny warm may. Whats up with that . Every time i think im now i can reenergize my sprinkler system, plant grass, it snows. This time it waited till after mothers day, had all that done, went away and thought i was safe and guess what happens . Many of you are looking for a time of day to do that, at a weekend you will be all right. So, may 20. Can i roam . Can you hear me all right . May 20, 1927. Roosevelt still in long island. When we say sealed, we dont mean like fairfield, chicago, ohare. It is truly a field. Sit on it, most of its parking lot right now but back then, what lindbergh was going to use to take off on this epic flight was more like a golf cart path. A little pack sort of roadway and that was the good part. Thats why he chose to have the plane pulled over for from curtis field to Roosevelt Field because roosevelt was improved. Hayes, whatever. No its defenders packed into clay and hes in this tiny little airplane with a steel frame but its covered with cotton. Ive never been in the original spirit of st. Louis causes hanging from the season ceiling at the Aerospace Museum and my good friend doctor bob benjamin would not take it down for me. However, i was into flyable replicas which was an experience in hostile and theres another one in new york. And i can tell you that even the singleseat fighter that i flew in china thought was small was pretty spacious compared to this thing. It was verybasic. Wicker seat, closed panels, you can see the cables every time you moved the stick or moved the runners you can see cables move. That would be disconcerting as a pilot butthere is as he sitting in this thing , relatively, not really cold, its wet, its raining, its smitty, anybody thats been to long island in the spring or summer time knows what im talking about. The air is a lot heavier and thicker than what he was used to because he tested his plane in california. Now hes sitting close to the Atlantic Ocean and its just now occurring to him that maybe those test figures and data and airspeed that came up with in california might not really apply so much in long island. Too late now may 20, its in the morning. Over curtis feel , richard byrd and chamberlain are waiting with their respective airplanes that they can take off anytime and they know that so he made the decision the night before to go based on a clearing Weather Forecast over the atlantic. He came in from watching rhea rito open at the majestic theater, they stop on the way back to the field to get five horses for him to take with him which he wrapped up in a paperback. And that one canteen water, sitting there trying to see a stick with a little white handkerchief that he had tied and stuck at the Halfway Point about 2500, 3000 feet down this runway and i use that term loosely. They cant see it because of the low hanging farm in hayes. Way at the end just above the haze he can barely make out a line of trees. Thats what hes got to get over. Hes thinking, no problem, its over a mile away, i know this plane will do, i can do it and they say do you want to go . He says lets go. The rpm was a little bit low because again, its west wet and moist see air as opposed to california heat but he goes, knives alongside just like in that wonderful movie made in 1957, guys are helping him push this plane through the mud and clay. And he gets off. And one thing the movie took a little liberty with was flipping the tree line, he didnt really do that. It was very dramatic and made for a great scene but he cleared very well, maybe 50 feet or so and he was startled there was a country club and a golf course on the other side of the tree line. He was too busy at that point to care and to relieve that he had gotten off the ground which was the hard part. He had a nine foot propeller that was, could be fixed so you could vary the angle the propeller cut through the air with based on take off or cruising. Water propellers do it automatically. You had to sit either on the ground or you had take some on the ground, is it going to be the maximize for take off or is it going to be maximized for cruising and he made the right decision that hey, i got 3600 miles to go, if i can get off the ground i think thats probably the bigger challenge so even the propeller wasnt optimized for this hairraising takeoff that he made. The takeoff itself, he cant see out of the front which any pilot will tell you probably isnt that big a deal because we usually look out the side anyway but he had a fuel tank in front of this nice plywood Instrument Panel in front of him. A fuel tank and another fuel tank. He had have as much fuel as he could carry because he had 3000 miles to go so be screening out the left side of this rectangular window trying to keep the airplane on this path that is on and manages to get up and get airborne. As soon as he does he takes a deep breath and looks out of the other window and sees an oriole airplane filled with reporters. Out there to take pictures of him crashing and dying on take off. He didnt like reporters very much, this didnt help. So he shot the throttle forward and cranks the stick, when you sit in that airplane the stick comes out your mid chest, its a really flexible broomstick, cranks the stick to the left and heads out toward Long Island Sound. This was something he was looking forward to because it was the biggest piece of water he ever flown over in his brief career. 30 miles between Long Island Sound and the coast of connecticut. He was a midwestern guy as most of you know. He flown the mail, he flown for the army air service, never flown over water before, this was it. He was excited, turbulence aside. Got himself across the connecticut, relieve one little milestone past, studied up on northeast heading and then flew over new england on his way to nova scotia and beyond. How did he get here . How did he get here . He was probably the least known of any of the pilots trying for the prize. The prize was offered by raymond norton, a hotel yea born in france but hes an americanwho became enamored with Fighter Pilots , go figure and flying during the First World War when they would come to his hotel and bar. So he offered 25 thousand dollars which in 1927 was worth about 350,000 of our dollars for the first person to either fly from new york to paris or paris to new york. Had to be nonstop and it had to be between those two cities. The atlantic, most people dont know had been crossed, anybody know when it had been crossed the first time . No . 1918, a british airship came from scotland to Roosevelt Field in long island, got all the way there after i think 108 hours or something, i cant imagine drifting across the north atlantic in a blend but they did. And it got there and realized theres nobody on long island that knows how to more and airship so the american observer, a guy named zach lansdowne said ill take care of this and he strapped on a parachute, jumped out of the blimp, pulled the cord, drifted down, took off the parachute, drew him a mooring line and he tied the blimp. In 1919, the u. S. Navy decided what would be a good idea to prove that we could cross the atlantic so in typical military fashion they overdid it a little bit. They had three airplanes instead of one and they stationed warships at 50 mile intervals across the north atlantic with searchlights so that the flying boats they were seaplanes could see at night. It would work one time, probably not something commercially viable in the long term that they figured we will do it this one time and out of the three flying boats that took off from newfoundland , one of them made it. Nobody died, some of them crashed at sea and the crew was picked up, one of them came down at sea and taxi 200 miles across the waves into the as auras. The other one made it to the azores and then to portugal and england. He atlantic had been crossed in bits and pieces but never from city to city before and thats what this was all about. If somebody could do it and prove that hey, technology has taken a giant leap forward and commercial air travel is in fact possible, and in lindberghs case he had another motive. Money. He likes the dollar as much as the next guy but he wasnt adverse to that. But he also was a Firm Believer in peace. And he thought that if communications between peoples were improved and continents were linked, then with that sort of road would come better tolerance and understanding. It didnt work out that way but those were his motivations. There he was then, now hes over new england. All these things are behind him. Hes ready to go. He hits provincetown near plymouth and massachusetts and it occurs to him thats where the pilgrims landed. With any luck within a day or so he be over the original plymouth where they left them. Took the pilgrims what, 60, 90 something days to cross in that horrible little hundred foot boat of theirs and he was going to do it in less than a day, he was excited about that. And he looks up and sees the first big expense of water between the massachusetts coast and newfoundland ahead of him and it put a damper on his spirits but he kept going. To make a long story short, he crossed newfoundland, his navigation was spot on, better than he had help for, better than he had anticipated, probably a little bit lucky there. He was navigating when a magnetic compass, he had to read it backwards. It was noted above his head and they havent realized it until right at the end that theres no way to read this while flying so in fact they did get a mirror from a girl , stuck some gum on it and stuck it on the plywood Instrument Panel in front of him and hes reading it backwards in a mirror. Probably feasible during the day, i dont know how he did night. A magnetic compass under the best circumstances is hard to read because it waivers and jobs but he did. He had another new invention, a compass which i wont go too much into accept the idea behind it sounds promising but in practice it was absolutely wacko. So he really doesnt have much to go on except for a course, on that in time. When he reaches st. Johns, off the coast of newfoundland, he is on course . These relatively on time. Fuel consumption is good and hes excited as hes ever going to be until he looks at it again and sees nothing but the north atlantic in front of him. Hes got 1900 miles to go. The sun is going down behind him. Ive done this as i said in a jet. And its disconcerting even under those circumstances. For him to do that at 100 Miles Per Hour 100 feet above the waves, im not sure where hes going to end up. Its phenomenal. This was before satellites, before the weather channel. The best guess he had was a report from the Weather Bureau that was at least 24 hours old. It was mostly long because you ran into 1000 miles on that night in this tiny basically cotton covered box he was in. Its astounding. Ran into a couple other surprises along the way he had thought of. Ice was one of them. Every anybody know what the great circle is . If you think of europe as a sphere which it is, fears are wider at the middle and narrower at the top, therefore the closest direction from pointtopoint is not to go around the middle but to go over the top. Thats what he was doing, going further north over these shorter, narrower end of the speech here to minimize his time in the air. This disadvantage was he was well north of all the shipping lanes so if you went down, nobody would find him and it was colder out there which didnt occur to him until he saw the ice and he wondered not for the first time how am i going to land . Whats going to happen, the ice looks kind of rough. Fortunately he didnt have to. He also ran enticing with the aircraft area think that is determined to happen in thunderstorms even in the summertime and he began to have to deviate and changed out the altitude, he would turn around and try to avoid the bigger thunderstorms that he could see and the end result is the next morning when the sun finally came up, he really didnt have a clear idea where he was. Had to ask something that he could not have foreseen, it was about 100 mileperhour tailwind. Which had been blowing him all night. So hes 300 miles closer to europe than he thinks he is. Hes also been hallucinating a little bit which can happen. And when he picks up ireland for the first time, hes utterly confused because he thinks hes 300 miles further out under the ocean. He doesnt really know where he is. He had always read if you flew long enough he would hit europe which is true but he also thought it could be anywhere from norway to spain so where in the hell am i . Being 300 miles further along didnt help and he was very puzzled by this. Flew up and down the irish coast, finally ascertained his position based on, i picked up the max, ive been to see them in misery. Theyre not really detailed. But they were detailed enough for him to realize he was over valencia bay within about 20 miles of where he planned to be which astounded him. Then he got his second wind and he was happy. I survive. Now he began to think, i might actually make this. Crossing ireland, crossing the English Channel after 1900 miles over the ocean was a cakewalk to him. When he hit share board in the french coast, now he began to worry about details that frankly are kind of funny only to you and i, work funny to him. His biggest concern was he forgotten to get a visa in his passport and he thought, are they even going to, will they let me into the country western mark that he thought ive figured out that im three hours early, will there even be anybody there at the airfield . This is 1927, radios were fairly common but therewas no map. His communications life where you soon, he didnt realize that all along his route over nova scotia and newfoundland and england and ireland, that people had followed him and they had of course called in and the newspapers were running updates, continuous updates. Young guy back in america named Jimmy Stewart, 19 years old. Had a map. And every time he got update, he would run upstairs, run upstairs and stick attack in the map to chart lindberg process which is kind of interesting and intriguing since Jimmy Stewart and up playing Charles Lindbergh in a movie. Anyway, it occurs to lindbergh now after some 32 hours or sothat hes angry. So he takes out one of his greasy, nasty ham sandwiches that he got back in long island , keeps half of it and decided not to appetizing. Doesnt want the litter so he doesnt throw the paper out the window, takes a drink, eels pretty good, finds the river. You can see at night because of the boat traffic which is what he did, he followed that in paris. Now it gets a little dicey. If one already. And i can appreciate this because the longest i ever flew in my jet was 15 hours which damn near killed me. Hes now that this for twice that time, more than that. 33 hours by the time he gets to paris. He doesnt know where portia is. There are no flight information handbooks, no charts, airport terminals, Everything Else that we have today. All anybody could tell him was that divorce was five or six miles north of the tower so he gets there, find the eiffel tower, flies around the eiffel tower and find the biggest, darkest five or six miles north thats where it goes. Another problem and i was unaware until i researched the book, he never landed the spirit of st. Louis at night before. Which was probably an oversight that could have been corrected. A lot of what happened to him he couldnt have foreseen. This one you might have foreseen. He flown it at night from california to the coast, set a record doing it but he never landed at night. Now he has the land at night after 33 and a half hours on a field hes never seen before and remember, its not an airfield like you and i know. Its a field. He flies up and around this dark spot, seeing anything thats recognizable. It continues a little further thinking, maybe its further out hereand its not. He flies over the present position of Charles De Gaulle airport. Turns around right over where it is now and comes back to where he thinks abortion is. Theres a spotlight on one corner they are waving around but its the only Lighting Except for the main roads out of paris. Theres thousands oflights on the road and he thought god, i didnt know the traffic was that bad in paris. Is it dangerous . He doesnt realize and he doesnt realize that all the tourists are waiting for him and theyve all been trying for hours to get up to le bourget and thats a huge traffic jam on the road. He does what most pilots do and circled around, drop down low in figures out well, it may not be le bourget but its someplace and landed his parents so i probably won the prize. I got to paris, even if its not and he sets himself up to land finally. And about the time and i can appreciate this, you cant really he cant really feel his legs and its almost like hes forgotten how to land because hes been flying basically straighten level for so long and he completely waffles the approach once, runs back around to do it again. And picture driving or flying if you can into a big black hole and theres only waving like at one end. Past those lights when they go past you your back in the black hole again. Thats what happened to him. He came in over the hangers and hes

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