One Summer

The Dangerous Early Days of Transatlantic Flights

In the spring of 1927, New York City was a place of immense spectacle. When the wooden scaffolding atop the unfinished Sherry-Netherland Apartment Hotel caught fire, a crowd of one hundred thousand people gathered to watch the thirty-eight-story blaze. Among those watching from the sky were pilots Clarence Chamberlin and Bert Acosta, who were circling Long Island to break the world flight endurance record. They succeeded, staying airborne for over fifty-one hours and proving that airplanes could now carry enough fuel to travel the four thousand miles separating New York from Paris. This feat reignited a global obsession with crossing the Atlantic, a challenge that had remained largely unconquered despite the rapid technological leaps spurred by the First World War.

Before the Great War, aviation was a fledgling pursuit with only a handful of planes in existence. The conflict transformed the industry into a massive military machine, as nations poured billions into developing faster, more powerful aircraft for reconnaissance and bombing. By the end of the war, tens of thousands of pilots had been trained, and the world’s aircraft inventory had exploded from a few dozen to over a hundred thousand. However, when peace arrived, the aviation industry collapsed as military orders vanished. Experienced pilots, left with few prospects, turned to dangerous stunts and record-setting attempts to maintain their livelihoods and the public's fascination with flight.

Early attempts to cross the ocean revealed the staggering limitations of the era's technology. In 1919, the U.S. Navy attempted a crossing using three flying boats and sixty-six support ships; only one plane finished the trip, taking eleven days. Shortly after, British fliers Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown achieved the first nonstop crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy, a craft little more than a motorized box kite. They survived a harrowing sixteen-hour journey through snow, ice, and mechanical failure, only to be largely forgotten by history after their plane crashed into an Irish bog. Their achievement, while heroic, highlighted that flying half the distance to Paris was already at the absolute limit of human endurance and mechanical reliability.

The quest for a New York-to-Paris flight was formalised by Raymond Orteig, a French-born hotelier who offered a $25,000 prize for the feat. By 1927, the challenge had become a matter of intense national pride, attracting legendary figures like the French ace René Fonck and the American explorer Richard Byrd. These efforts were often plagued by tragedy and ego. Fonck’s attempt ended in a fiery takeoff crash that killed two crew members after he insisted on overloading the plane with luxuries and fuel. Byrd’s team suffered a setback when their designer, Anthony Fokker, crashed their plane during its maiden flight, leaving the lead pilot critically injured and the aircraft in need of a total rebuild.

As American efforts stalled due to crashes and mechanical failures, international competitors pressed forward. The Italian aviator Francesco de Pinedo toured the Americas in a seaplane, though his journey was marred by an accidental fire in Arizona that sparked a diplomatic row between the United States and Mussolini’s Italy. More tragically, French heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli vanished in May 1927 while attempting the crossing in their plane, The White Bird. They had lightened their craft by discarding life jackets and rafts to carry more fuel, and despite numerous unconfirmed sightings, no trace of them was ever found. By the time the search for the French aviators began to fade, the Atlantic had claimed eleven lives in just nine months. The dream of a nonstop flight between New York and Paris seemed increasingly like a suicide mission. It was against this backdrop of failure and mourning that an unknown, solitary pilot named Charles Lindbergh arrived from the west.