May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST It was on May 20, 1927, that Charles Lindbergh, invariably referred to as an “aviator” in the press of the day, took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island in a single-engine plane, headed for Paris. He was so laden with fuel that he barely cleared the phone wires at the end of the runway. But 33 hours later he landed safely at Le Bourget airfield just outside Paris. To put it simply, the world went nuts. Overnight, the unassuming 25-year-old aviator became as famous as anyone on earth. Thousands greeted him at Le Bourget, even though it was 10:30 at night. The next day tens of thousands mobbed the U.S. Embassy in Paris in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. Awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the president of France, when he returned to the United States (like a conquering hero, aboard the cruiser USS Memphis, escorted by other warships), he received the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge. New York gave him one of the largest ticker-tape parades in its history, and Mayor James J. Walker gave him the city’s Medal of Valor. The following year he was given the country’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, by act of Congress, becoming one of the very few to receive it for actions not involving combat. (It is given only to members of the armed forces, and Lindbergh was eligible because he was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve.) Today, 80 years later, it is a little hard for us to understand what all the fuss was about. Writing this in the late afternoon, I’m confident that, should I take a mind to, I could easily be in Paris tomorrow in time for lunch. (And if anyone would care to finance the venture, I’d be happy to prove it.) Indeed, it was only 12 years to the day after Lindbergh’s flight, May 20, 1939, that Pan-American initiated trans-Atlantic air service, from Port Washington, N.Y., and anyone (with enough money—for it was very expensive) could do what Lindbergh had won world acclaim for, fly nonstop to Europe. The word aviator—a word of magical, romantic power in the 1920s—began to disappear from the everyday vocabulary. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all aviators now. A family story, if I may. My great aunt Mabel Stebbins (she was actually my great aunt’s sister-in-law, but she was Aunt Mabel to me, and I was very fond of her) flew just twice in her life. Married to an army officer, in 1910 she was living in the Panama Canal Zone when someone in the army’s infant air corps (it was called the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps then) showed up in a Wright Flyer and offered to take people, including, apparently, wives, up for a spin in the wondrous new technology. Aunt Mabel decided to do exactly that. I see her taking the hat pins out of her vast picture hat and handing it to a friend, tying a stout piece of twine around the hem of her long white summer frock, and climbing aboard. Off she went, becoming, probably, one of the hundred first women ever to fly. The next time she flew was 48 years later, in the fall of 1958. Eighty-eight years old and in failing health by then, she was too frail to make her usual three-day drive to her winter home in Florida, or even to take the train. Instead, she flew down and died peacefully there a few months later. Having flown for the first time in a Wright Flyer, Aunt Mabel’s second and last flight was in a Boeing 707.
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