The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight

ON FRIDAY, MAY 20, 1927, at 7:52 a.m., Charles A. Lindbergh took off in a silver-winged monoplane and flew from the United States to France. With this flight Lindbergh became the first man to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. log of flight 33 of The Spirit of St. Louis reads: Roosevelt Field, Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget Aerodrome, Paris, France. 33 hrs. 30 min. Thus was the fact of Lindbergh's achievement easily put down. But the meaning of Lindbergh's flight lay hidden in the next sentence of the log: (Fuselage fabric badly torn by souvenir hunters.) When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget he is supposed to have said, Well, we've done it. A contemporary writer asked Did what? Lindbergh no idea of what he had done. He thought he had simply flown from New York to Paris. What he had really done was something far greater. He had fired the imagination of mankind. From the moment of Lindbergh's flight people recognized that something more was involved than the mere fact of the physical leap from New York to Paris. wrote John Erskine, served as a metaphor. But what the metaphor stood for was not easy to say. New York Times remarked then that there has been no complete and satisfactory explanation of the enthusiasm and acclaim for Captain Lindbergh. Looking back on the celebration of Lindbergh, one can see now that the American people were trying to understand Lindbergh's flight, to grasp its meaning, and through it, perhaps, to grasp the meaning of their own experience. Was the flight the achievement of a heroic, solitary, unaided individual? Or did the flight represent the triumph of the machine, the success of an industrially organized society? These questions were central to the meaning of Lindbergh's flight. They were also central to the lives of the people who made Lindbergh their hero

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Enthusiasm · Meaning (existential · Metaphor · Aerospace Engineering and Energy Systems · Aviation History and Innovations · History · Philosophy

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