The Man Who Wasn’t Lindbergh

Charles A. Levine, born in Brooklyn in 1897, went to work in his father’s scrapyard after completing elementary school. Later he was an apprentice aviation mechanic and a used-car dealer. After World War I he formed a company to process war-surplus shell casings for sale in South America. This return to his junkyard roots made him a millionaire.

In the mid-1920s Levine started thinking about the Orteig Prize—$25,000 offered by Raymond Orteig, a hotel magnate, to the first person or team to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. His first step was to buy the WB-2, a prototype Wright-Bellanca monoplane. The innovative Sicilian immigrant Giuseppe Bellanca had built it for the Wright Company to demonstrate Wright’s brand-new Whirlwind J-5 radial engine. After the WB-2 had won efficiency prizes at the 1926 National Air Races, Levine bought it for $25,000. The price included the rights to Bellanca’s designs, though Levine had no intention of manufacturing any aircraft until he had won the Orteig Prize.

Levine wasn’t the only one interested in the WB-2. Charles A. Lindbergh, an accomplished airmail pilot, also hoped to fly across the Atlantic and saw the J-5 engine as his best bet. He was impressed with Bellanca’s airframe ideas as well. In February 1927 he offered Levine $15,000, raised from his backers in St. Louis, for the plane. Levine would lose $10,000 on the resale, but he would make it back in publicity if the flight was successful. Lindbergh was shocked to hear Levine say, “We will sell our plane, but of course we reserve the right to select the crew that flies it.”

Lindbergh responded by having Ryan Airlines, a San Diego aircraft maker, build a similar plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, around a Wright J-5C nine-cylinder engine. When Lindbergh flew it to New York, with an overnight stop in St. Louis, he set a new cross-country speed record. On his arrival, on May 12, 1927, he found two other teams chasing the Orteig Prize. One was headed by Levine, who had renamed his plane Columbia. The other, generally considered the favorite, was headed by the polar explorer Richard Byrd, who planned to fly a Fokker tri-motor called America.

On May 19, while Byrd’s plane was being prepared for final tests and Levine’s was grounded by a lawsuit (the irascible promoter had fired one of his pilots, who obtained an injunction against being replaced), Lindbergh gambled on the weather and took off from Roosevelt Field. Some 33 hours later he landed to a tumultuous welcome at Le Bourget Airport in Paris. The next day Levine announced that his Columbia would outdo Lindbergh by flying all the way to Berlin, 400 miles farther (the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce had offered $15,000 for such a flight), while carrying a “mystery passenger.” On June 4, when Columbia took off from Roosevelt Field, piloted by Clarence Chamberlin, the passenger turned out to be Levine himself, who jumped in suddenly as Columbia was idling; his wife fainted and his children cried at the sight.

With Levine taking an occasional turn at the controls, Chamberlin flew for more than 43 hours until Columbia ran out of gas about 40 miles from Berlin. They landed at Eisleben, refueled, got lost, and finally arrived at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport the next day to a welcome as large as the one that had greeted Lindbergh in Paris.

Soon, however, Levine lost both fame and fortune. Bellanca severed relations with him at the end of 1927, and following the 1929 stock-market crash, he became involved in a series of shady and sometimes illegal ventures, eventually landing in prison. By the time of his death in 1991, the man who might have beaten Lindbergh to Paris if not for his own stubbornness was a forgotten figure.

Richard Sassaman is a freelance writer in Bar Harbor, Maine.