On this day in aviation history, February 4, 1902, famed pilot Charles Lindbergh was born. Known in history as the first pilot to complete a solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh was at one point the most famous airman in the world, and one of its biggest celebrity figures. The scale of his fame from 1927 onward has, for many, eclipsed the multiple previous fliers who had crossed the Atlantic, setting previous, less exclusive records.
Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was born in Detroit as the only child of Swedish-born attorney Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., and Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh, a high school chemistry teacher. The Lindberghs lived on a farm near the banks of Mississippi River in Little Falls, Minnesota. Between 1907 and 1917, Charles Sr. was elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives.
After attending several schools across the country, Lindbergh graduated from Little Falls High School on June 5, 1918. Though tall in build, the young Charles was often quiet around others but was very much mechanically adept. Though he went to study mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1920, he dropped out during his sophomore year to pursue flying. Although he would later say he “had never been close enough to a plane to touch it”, he went to Lincoln, Nebraska to enroll in the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation’s flight school, where pilot Otto Timm took the tall Minnesotan up for his first flight on April 9, 1922, in a Lincoln-Standard biplane.
Over the next three years, Lindbergh did everything he could in flying: from being a barnstorming wing-walker and parachutist; to teaching himself to fly solo and cross country in a WWI-surplus Curtiss Jenny (that he bought for $500); to graduating Army Air Service flight training to become a reserve officer; and to fly the St. Louis-Chicago airmail route with the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri.
It was at this point that Charles Lindbergh’s life would change forever. In 1919, French-born New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig established the Orteig Prize, offering $25,000 USD (around $453,455 in 2025 currency) for the first aircrew to fly nonstop either from New York to Paris or from Paris to New York.
1919 had seen the first aerial crossings of the Atlantic shortly after Orteig’s prize was established. Among these were first aerial crossing of the Atlantic by the crew of the US Navy’s Curtiss NC-4 flying boat in stages such as New York, Newfoundland, the Azores, and Lisbon, Portugal, before flying further to Plymouth, England, the first nonstop crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland, made between June 14-15, 1919 by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown in a surplus Vickers Vimy bomber two weeks after the NC-4, and the Royal Air Force’s R.34 airship made the first east-to-west crossing from East Fortune, Scotland to Mineola, Long Island, New York and subsequently the first return crossing when it was flown back across the Atlantic to Scotland. By 1927, a total of 81 aviators had already flown across the Atlantic, but none directly from New York to Paris or vice versa.
The first attempt to win the Orteig Prize was made in 1926 by France’s highest-scoring ace of WWI, René Fonck. He had Ukrainian-born emigree Igor Sikorsky built him a huge trimotor sesquiplane called the Sikorsky S-35. On September 21, 1926, Fonck and his crew, consisting of copilot Lt. Lawrence Curtin, USN, French radio operator Charles Clavier, and Sikorsky Aircraft engineer Jacob Islamoff as mechanic attempted to take off from Roosevelt Field, New York. Overloaded with fuel and luxury items ranging from a sofa to a refrigerator, the Sikorsky S-35 crashed at the end of the grass airstrip and burst into flames. While Fock and Curtin managed to escape, Clavier and Islamoff burned in the wreckage of the S-35.
News of the fiery failure of Fonck’s attempt nevertheless inspired Lindbergh to compete for the prize with a smaller aircraft. However, the 25-year-old Midwestern airmail pilot was a virtual unknown compared to his rivals. These included the crew led by polar explorer and naval aviator Commander Richard E. Byrd in his Fokker Trimotor America; naval aviators Stanton Wooster and Noel Davis with their Keystone Pathfinder American Legion; while on the eastern side of the Atlantic was French WWI flying ace Charles Nungesser and his navigator Francois Coli, who would attempt to fly from Paris to New York in a single engine biplane called L’Oiseau Blanc (The White Bird).
Lindbergh needed funding. He had made some connections among St. Louis’ bankers, politicians, newspaper editors and businessmen, and secured funds from them to purchase the Wright-Bellanca WB-2 named Columbia, owned by the Columbia Aircraft Company in New York. Lindbergh, at this stage, thought this was the best airplane for the record attempt. However, the Columbia’s owner, Charles Levine, felt Lindbergh was unqualified, and wanted to select the Columbia’s pilot himself, angering Lindbergh. (Eventually Levine decided to hire endurance flight record holder Clarence Chamberlin.)
No sooner did Lindbergh return to St. Louis empty-handed than his backers informed him of a company in San Diego, California (Ryan Airlines) that was willing to build a plane to his specifications in 90 days or less, and almost before he knew it, Lindbergh was on the next train to San Diego.
In San Diego, Lindbergh worked alongside Ryan Airlines’ chief designer, Donald Hall, to design the airplane that would become the Ryan NYP (New York-Paris) but would be immortalized in aviation history as the Spirit of St. Louis (registration N-X-211). The team at Ryan worked around the clock, day and night, to build the Spirit, and on April 28, 1927, Charles Lindbergh took the Spirit of St. Louis for its maiden flight, 63 days after the design was drafted. Just two days earlier, however, on April 26, Wooster and Davis were killed in a disastrous test flight in the American Legion, and on May 8, Nungesser and Coli had successfully set off from Paris, and flew out west over England and Ireland, but they disappeared, as Lindbergh would “like midnight ghosts”, never to be seen again. On May 10, Lindbergh set off in the Spirit of St. Louis to Lambert Field, St. Louis to show the airplane to his backers, and on May 12, he flew from St. Louis to Curtiss Field on Lond Island, New York, where Commander Byrd, Chamberlin, and Lindbergh waited for a break in the weather over the Atlantic – the first to make it would win the Orteig Prize.
Early on the morning of May 20, 1927, upon receiving a last-minute weather report, Charles Lindbergh rushed to the Spirit of St. Louis, which had been brought from Curtiss Field to the adjacent Roosevelt Field. With Byrd wanting to conduct more flight tests and Levine’s team embroiled in legal troubles over contracts, Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field at 7:52 AM local time. He followed the Atlantic coast up to St. Johns, Newfoundland, to make his final bearing before nightfall. Already exhausted from staying up the night before, Lindbergh fought sleep deprivation, the build-up of ice on the Spirit’s wings, and thick layers of fog, using dead reckoning to plot his course. Twenty-seven hours after departing New York, Lindbergh saw seagulls and fishing boats, a clear sight that land was nearby. Soon, he was over Dingle Bay, Ireland, 2.5 hours ahead of schedule and less than 3 miles (5 km) off course from his planned route. The world that had waited with bated breath for news of Lindbergh, expressed joy and relief upon hearing the news from Ireland that Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic, and was on his way to Paris.
At sunset in Europe, Lindbergh crossed the English Channel from Plymouth, England to Cherbourg, France. Following the course of the Seine River, he reached Paris and after circling the Eiffel Tower, turned northeast for Le Bourget Airfield, landing at 10:22 PM local time, after 33 hours, 30 minutes in the air. As the roar of the Spirit of St. Louis‘ Wright Whirlwind engine died down, it was replaced by the roar of thousands of cheering Parisians.
Soon, the dazed American pilot was dragged from the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis and held aloft by a crowd in exuberant pandemonium. For that moment, no living man was more famous than Charles Lindbergh. Invited before European presidents, prime ministers, and royalty, Lindbergh was greeted as a hero not only in France but in Belgium and in Britain before his return to the United States, this time aboard the light cruiser USS Memphis.
In Washington, D.C., President Calvin Coolidge presented Lindbergh with the Distinguished Flying Cross, while New York City gave him a ticker-tape parade and a banquet in his honor. Later, Lindbergh was promoted from the rank of Captain to Colonel in the Army Air Corps, and through a special act of Congress, was awarded the Medal of Honor. Time Magazine made him their first Man of the Year (now Person of the Year), and his book “We” (referring to himself and the Spirit of St. Louis) became a bestseller.
Lindbergh’s flight had suddenly made many previously skeptical investors confident in going into aviation. Lindbergh’s sudden fame resulted in his being wanted for advice on a wide range of aviation matters. Lindbergh worked with companies such as the Ford Motor Company and Pan American Airways, where he mapped air routes from the United States to northern Europe and East Asia. During his tour of Latin America in the Spirit of St. Louis during the winter of 1927-28, Charles met Anne Morrow, the daughter of businessman and U.S. ambassador to Mexico Dwight Morrow, and May 27, 1929, they were married at the Morrow estate in New Jersey. Soon, Charles taught Anne to fly, and the two often flew together from Hong Kong to Greenland.
Additionally, Lindbergh was involved in the watchmaker Longines’ creation of a wristwatch designed with aerial navigation of pilots in mind. Lindbergh also invested in U.S. rocket pioneer Robert Goddard’s experiments in liquid-fuel rockets, convincing philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim fund Goddard’s research.
Lindbergh also made a breakthrough in the field of medicine. After his sister-in-law Elisabeth Morrow developed a fatal heart condition, Charles Lindbergh worked with Nobel Prize Laureate French surgeon Alexis Carrel. Together, they developed a glass perfusion pump called the “Model T” pump, which could keep human organs alive outside the body, a breakthrough that would lead to the development of the first heart-lung machines on humans decades later.
The 1930s would see the Lindberghs land back in the headlines under the most tragic of circumstances. On March 1, 1932, Charles Jr., their 20-month-old child was kidnapped from his crib on the upper floor of the Lindbergh’s house, with a ransom letter being left behind. Two months later, a truck driver discovered the body of Charles Jr. in a wooded area. Eventually, a German immigrant carpenter named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was convicted on the charge of kidnapping and murder. The result was a media sensation dubbed the “crime of the century”. Despite pleading his innocence, ransom money and other circumstantial evidence convicted Hauptmann, who was sentenced to death by electric chair. Already weary of public scrutiny, the Lindbergh couple would move to Europe in 1936, staying until 1939.
Lindbergh’s achievements were tainted by his political and racist beliefs. Like his father, Lindbergh believed that the United States should remain neutral from European affairs. Between 1936 and 1938, the Lindberghs visited Nazi Germany, and Charles was invited to fly several German military aircraft, such as the Junkers Ju 88 bomber and the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter, with Lindbergh sending reports back to Washington about the Luftwaffe’s capabilities. The benefit of such intelligence was compromised, however, by Lindbergh also being also convinced by the propaganda effort by his hosts of Nazi Germany’s supposed military superiority.
In October 1938, the US Ambassador to Germany, Hugh R. Wilson, hosted Charles Lindbergh for a dinner in Berlin. Among the attendees were Generalfeldmarschall Hermann Göring, and aircraft designers Ernst Heinkel and Willy Messerschmitt. During the dinner, Göring presented Lindbergh with the Order of the German Eagle, an honorary award typically given to foreign diplomats.
Just weeks later, the German pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) saw the looting and burning of Jewish synagogues, homes and stores throughout Germany, as well as in annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and the murder of over 90 Jews across the Third Reich. Lindbergh recorded his reaction to Kristallnacht in his diary: “I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans. It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem’, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” Controversially, Lindbergh never returned his medal to the Nazis, and a similar medal was also awarded to his friend Henry Ford.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting the Second World War. In the United States, a large majority of the country was firmly against going into what they saw as another costly European war. Among the most vocal of the isolationists, as they came to be called, was Charles Lindbergh, who became the spokesman for the America First Committee. From 1939 to 1941, Lindbergh spoke at rallies, over the radio waves, and wrote in the editorial columns of nationally syndicated publications.
Yet Lindbergh’s convictions were not simply rooted in geopolitics, as he still championed an America prepared to protect itself against any potential aggressor. At the root of Lindbergh’s outspoken neutrality was his belief in white supremacy and anticommunism. In an article published in Reader’s Digest in 1939, Lindbergh wrote, “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” In Nazi Germany, Lindbergh saw a potential ally for Western Europe and the United States to protect the racial strength of Europe against “a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown”. After Lindbergh opposed the enactment of the Lend-Lease Act in favor of neutrality, President Franklin D. Roosevelt quickly called Lindbergh a “defeatist and appeaser”, prompting Colonel Lindbergh to resign his commission in the US Army Air Force.
On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa for the America First Committee, saying, “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration. Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
But that all changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, followed three days later by Germany’s declaration of war against America on December 10. Almost overnight, the United States was in a fervor to defeat the Axis forces, and Lindbergh was attempting to re-enlist in the Army Air Force. Being denied in this request, Lindbergh became a technical advisor with Henry Ford to improve the production of Consolidated B-24 Liberators at the Willow Run assembly line before moving on to United Aircraft (now United Technologies) to advise the work on Chance-Vought products such as the F4U Corsair. Lindbergh made his first in the Corsair on January 6, 1943, after a briefing by Vought test pilot Boone Guyton.
In 1944, Lindbergh finally secured permission from United Aircraft to be shipped to the Pacific Theater as a noncombat advisor to study American fighters in combat conditions. There, he advised Marine Corsair pilots of VMF-216 and VMF-222 how to safely carry heavier bomb loads than the Corsair was rated for, and later demonstrated advanced long distance flying techniques to P-38 Lightning pilots of the 433rd Fighter Squadron, 475th Fighter Group, to extend the ranges of their P-38s by utilizing air-fuel ratios to improve fuel consumption at cruise speeds.
While flying both Corsairs and Lightnings, Lindbergh also unofficially participated in strafing and bomber escort missions, and on July 28, 1944, he was credited with shooting down the Mitsubishi Ki-51 ‘Sonia’ flown by Captain Shimada, having fired the final shots in a full-on dogfight with multiple other American participants. Shimada and his observer were killed. Lindbergh returned to the United States after six months in the Pacific, recording his experiences in the margins of a copy of the New Testament.
After his return to the United States, Lindbergh even got to fly a captured Mitsubishi A6M5 Zero at the Fighter Conference held at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. That Zero is the same one now in airworthy condition at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California (more in this article here: Planes of Fame’s A6M5 Zero: The Last Beating Heart of a Samurai)
At the end of the war in Europe, Lindbergh was sent to the war-torn continent to assist in evaluating German aviation technology. There, Lindbergh toured the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, near Nordhausen, Germany, where slave laborers were forced to build V-1 and V-2 missiles in underground facilities and were often worked to death or executed. Lindbergh wrote in his diary “Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?”
After WWII, Charles and Anne Lindbergh would raise a family of five surviving children (Jon, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve) while Charles continued to work as a consultant for the aviation industry while Anne continued her pre-war writing to become a noted author. In 1954, Charles Lindbergh was commissioned as a Brigadier General in the US Air Force Reserves and was on the Congressional advisory panel that selected a permanent location for the US Air Force Academy. That same year, Lindbergh won the Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’, which inspired a film of the same name released in 1957, with Jimmy Stewart portraying Lindbergh.
While Stewart was 47 years old the time of filming, he had a lifelong passion for aviation, that was in part inspired by Lindbergh’s flight back in 1927, when Lindbergh set out for Paris, coincidentally on Stewart’s 19th birthday (May 20), and Stewart was also a pilot in the US Army Air Force who retired at the rank of Brigadier General. Three Ryan Broughams, a 1920s design based on the Ryan NYP, were converted to resemble the Spirit of St Louis for the flying sequences of this film, which were shot by veteran Hollywood aviator Paul Mantz, using a surplus B-25 Mitchell for aerial camera work. Today, these Brougham Spirit replicas can be found at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York.
In the 1960s, as a NASA guest of honor, the former barnstormer lived to see mankind set foot on the Moon.
Yet during this time, Lindbergh’s outlook on life, and on the environment began to change. He feared the ever-increasing loss of natural habitats and technology’s impact on nature and previously uncontacted peoples. Lindbergh thus became an active environmentalist, traveling the world to preserve arctic foxes, humpback whales, and eagles, and encourage governments to protect tribal peoples such as the Maasai in Tanzania and Kenya and the Tasaday and Agta peoples of the Philippines. He also helped to establish Haleakalā National Park in Hawaii, and Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota.
Reflecting on time spent on his views of technology and environmentalism, Lindbergh wrote “Lying under an acacia tree, with the sounds of dawn around me, I realized more clearly, in fact, what man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird; that airplanes depend upon advanced civilization; and that where civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.”
As Lindbergh entered his retirement years, he found refuge on the Hawaiian island of Maui, alongside his friend Samuel F. Pryor Jr., a former vice president executive for Pan American World Airways. On August 26, 1974, Charles A. Lindbergh died of lymphoma at the age of 72. He was buried in a simple grave on the seaside grounds of Palapala Ho’omau Church in Kipahulu, Maui, which he and Pryor had restored in 1960s after the church fell into disrepair. On his tombstone is a quotation from Psalm 139 that reads “If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea”. On facing his mortality, Lindbergh wrote “After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and the sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.”
There would be one last Lindbergh controversy to emerge long after his death. During the 1950s and 1960s, while married to Anne Morrow, Charles Lindbergh had secret affairs with three German women: Brigitte Hesshaimer, her sister Mariette, and a third woman with the name Valeska, who was Lindbergh’s translator and private secretary. These relationships led to the birth of seven children, to whom Lindbergh had never revealed his identity. In fact, it was only after his death that his German children, particularly those of Brigette Hesshaimer, found the truth for themselves, and after Anne Morrow Lindbergh died in 2001, DNA paternity tests confirmed that Lindbergh was the father of the now adult children.
Where does that leave us in determining Lindbergh’s life? Ultimately, Charles Lindbergh’s story reminds us that even our greatest heroes can have fundamental flaws yet can still be recognized for their achievements. Despite his politics, Lindbergh’s impact on aviation remains indisputable, as he inspired countless others to go into aviation after his 1927 flight, and today, the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and continues to inspire even more people. It was donated by Lindbergh himself following a tour across the United States during the summer and fall of 1927 and a Latin American goodwill tour from December 1927 to February 1928. Lindbergh made the Spirit’s last flight on April 30, 1928, flying from Lambert Field, St. Louis, to Bolling Field, Washington, D.C. to hand over the aircraft that is now a prized possession of the National Air and Space Museum.
Today in Aviation History is a series highlighting the achievements, innovations, and milestones that have shaped the skies. All the previous anniversaries are available HERE
