The Spirit of St. Louis

Charles Lindbergh was twenty-five when he took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island at 7:52 a.m. on May 20, 1927. The runway was soaked with rain, men pushed on the wing struts to get the plane moving, and it cleared the telephone wires at the end of the field by about twenty feet.

He was flying for the $25,000 Orteig Prize, offered for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Ryan Airlines had built the Spirit of St. Louis in San Diego in about sixty days. It had a single Wright Whirlwind engine, and because the fuel tank sat in front of the cockpit, there was no forward windshield. Lindbergh turned down radio gear as heavy and unreliable, navigated by dead reckoning, and flew the whole way alone.

He landed at Le Bourget outside Paris at 10:22 p.m. on May 21, after about 33 and a half hours in the air and roughly 3,600 miles. A crowd estimated at 150,000 rushed the field. The plane is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

In the picture, the small silver monoplane flies alone over a calm sea lit by the moon, with towers of cloud piled to the right.