The Aviators

Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

By Winston Groom

The army was scheduled to begin flying the mail by February 20, By then, all of the commercial airlines had practically gone out of business, since carrying airmail had been their mainstay, and there wasn’t yet enough passenger traffic to keep the companies going. Staff and workers were laid off to cope with the Depression however they could. On that same morning, newspaper headlines announced that three army pilots had been killed the previous day flying in snow storms or fog, merely on their way to their airmail assignments.

Rickenbacker was having breakfast with several reporters when the newspapers were brought in, and he abruptly declared, “That’s legalized murder!” When the reporters asked if they could quote him, America’s Ace of Aces said, “You’re damned right you can!”

He had been scheduled to give a fifteen-minute nationwide speech on NBC several days later and had asked the Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler for help “from his best editorial writer” to weigh in on the airmail controversy. As he was leaving for the studio, Rickenbacker said, he received a call from a friend at NBC who informed him that “orders had come from Washington [i. e., presumably from the White House) to cut me off the air if I said anything controversial.”Rickenbacker toned down his speech, but not enough to keep from being cut off entirely several days later, he said, by orders of the president, when he was scheduled to make another speech via NBC’s national radio forum.

Just as Lindbergh and Rickenbacker had predicted, in the ensuing weeks there were sixty-six crashes and ten more army pilots were killed delivering the mail, provoking a public outcry that at last caused Roosevelt to reverse himself and put the airmail service back on commercial airline contracts. But the president, in a final fit of pique, decreed that no one who worked for any of the original companies that had traditionally carried the mail would be eligible to receive a government contract. This produced a charade of musical chairs in which all the airlines simply changed their names (e. g., United Aircraft became United Airlines), a solution that Lindbergh sourly characterized as “something to be found in Alice in Wonderland.”

(Groom 2013, 178-179)

That night, Lindbergh was astonished and angered to find that the Times reporter he’d been talking to had used Lindbergh’s information to create a first-person account of the transatlantic flight that ran all over the front page of the New York Times—under Lindbergh’s byline! He considered it a violation of trust, as well as blatantly dishonest, because the reporter had put words in his mouth in an ingratiating, hayseed style.The incident had a lasting effect on Lindbergh; he concluded that the press “had an agenda all its own” and would exploit him for their own ends. They were not to be trusted-even those publications with the stature of the New York Times.

(Groom 2013, 230)

Men from the fifteen other planes were having their own hard experiences. One man landed in a tree and was caught. Before freeing himself and climbing down he lit a cigarette, and when he tossed the butt he watched its orange glow descend into an unfathomable chasm.Luckily he decided to stay put in his tree, because dawn revealed he had landed on the edge of an enormous rock cliff. If he had cut himself free that night he would have plunged to his death. Here may be history’s only example of a cigarette saving someone’s life.

(Groom 2013, 332)

All the while Lindbergh brooded whether the fascinating life I’ve led, taking part in man’s conquest of air and space;” had not instead unleashed some Frankenstein monster upon the world. There was an “overemphasis on science,” he said, “that weakens the human character, and upsets life’s balance.” He went into the Rift Valley in Kenya and lived with a nomadic Maasai tribe to try and discover what kind of culture clash aviation had brought to these people. He became an officer with the newly formed World Wildlife Fund, which had begun publishing an “endangered list” of animals subject to extinction because of human intrusions. He flew around the world half a dozen times a year, visiting exotic places and gathering information for reports on imperiled species, and he became a conservation icon after he declared, “I would rather have birds than airplanes.”