In one of those serendipities of history, this May 21st saw two first solo crossings of the Atlantic by air: First, by Charles Lindbergh in 1927, from New York to Le Bourget field outside Paris. Then, five years later, Amelia Earhart accomplished the same daring feat, touching down in Derry, Ireland due to bad weather.
And ‘daring’ is the right word, for these were small planes, open to the elements, in which the pilots also had to navigate through fog and thick darkness, keep warm, eat and drink and relieve themselves, stay awake and alert. Lindbergh’s flight took 33 and a half hours, while Earhart’s, in a faster plan – technology almost always advances – and her accidentally shorter route, was just over 14 hours. They were often disoriented, and not entirely sure if they were going in the right direction, nor how far below the deep, dark, cold Atlantic frothed just below them. One wonders at the isolation, and their determination and course. Others had tried the crossing, and had never been heard from again.
Both Lindbergh and Earhart are rightly hailed as heroes. Their crossing that Rubicon, alone and unaided through that dark valley, now allows us to do so now with ease, with modern jetliners ‘hopping the pond’ in four or five hours, as my family did back and forth from Scotland. Those aluminum tubes we call ‘airplanes’ flying at 400 miles an hour at 35,000 feet do seem rather fragile and fraught – anyone experiencing major turbulence knows about that. But we should keep in mind that between 1500 to 2000 planes cross the Atlantic everyday, with mishaps are so rare as to be nearly non-existent. This, like Earhart and Lindbergh, must have something to do with angels, as does much more of life than may appear.
