At exactly 10 24 pm on the night of May 21 1927 the wheels of the Spirit of St Louis touched down on the airfield of Le Bourget in Paris Hundreds of thousands of French spectators had flocked to the airfield to cheer the new hero in aviation history The crowd ran across the fences flooded the land ing strip and soon the whole world would cele brate the success of pioneering aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh a 25 year old Air Mail pilot and aerobatic aviator from the United States American President Calvin Coolidge even sent a battleship across the Atlantic to take the celebrat ed national hero home where the biggest tick er tape parade that New York City had ever seen awaited him Lucky Lindy as Lindbergh was nicknamed made it Solo non stop across the Big Pond From the Big Apple to the City of Love But how did he make it What was his success formu la To put it in a nutshell It meant doing without any superfluous in his view bells and whistles Even if that included a forward windshield Lindbergh s lesson was as valuable back then as it is today maximum weight reduction to mini mize energy consumption Plus he turned his ap proach into a win win situation across the board unlike his rivals including aircraft manufactur er Anthony Fokker who were able to invest more money in development projects Lindbergh had to rely on the technical means of aircraft engineering that were available in the nineteen twenties for his solo flight And those means were rather limited However his simple design single engine Spirit of St Louis fulfilled Lindbergh s maxim of less is more precisely less aircraft weight for larger fuel tank volume because he was clear about the fact that the leap across the Atlantic would require plenty of fuel Competition sparks Lindbergh s ambition Let s start by looking a few years back Charles Lindbergh is interested in technology even as a young boy That includes aviation although he per sonally had never been close enough to a plane to touch it as he later recalls in his book We Those are the early years of aviation in which his toric pioneering feats practically take place on a monthly basis Shortly before Lindbergh is born By Björn Carstens 23 PIONEERS

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