Retouched news photograph of Lindbergh's night landing at Le Bourget, Paris, 10:22 P.M., May 21, 1927.

Paris, May 21, 1927. At first he was confused. It didn't look like an airport. Charles Lindbergh could see a faintly illuminated perimeter, but there were no approach lights or revolving beacons like the ones they used in America, just some floodlights revealing the edge of a field with hardly enough space to land a plane. He wondered if he hadn't overshot his mark, so he circled round to have a closer look. Were those hangars or the buildings of a factory complex? Then there was the odd twinkling along the eastern edge of the darkness. Could that be factory windows? He'd been in the air for over 30 hours. Maybe his eyes were playing tricks. He tried signaling down with his flashlight but there was no response. He began a slow descent, leaving the line of unidentified lights well to his right. He didn't want to end his 3,610-mile flight by crashing into a smoke stack. Then he saw outlines of the hangars. "Yes, it's definitely an airport," he wrote. "I see part of a concrete apron in front of a large half open door... It's a huge airport. The floodlights show only a small corner. It must be Le Bourget."

Meanwhile, on the ground there was a mood of delirious expectation not seen in Paris since the end of the Great War. Lindbergh's plane had been spotted over Ireland, and then again over the fields of Normandy. Word of his approach was passed on to Paris by telegraph. A crowd of 150,000 people waited impatiently at the aerodrome. The longer they waited the more restless they became. More than 10,000 cars pressed down the narrow roads leading to Bourget. Traffic was backed up all the way to the city. The twinkling reflections that Lindbergh had mistaken for factory windows were the head lamps of the cars.

He circled again and came in low to learn the lay of the field before landing. "After the plane stopped rolling I turned it around and started to taxi back..." Thousands of spectators broke through the barriers and rushed across the field. They surrounded the plane and started to press their bodies against the fuselage as if it were a holy relic. The mob dragged him from the cockpit and carried him aloft for nearly half an hour. "Speaking was impossible," recalled Lindbergh, "no words could be heard in the uproar."

Cartoon, 1921

With his landing at Bourget, the airport became a place of ritualistic transformation. Lindbergh went from an unknown mail pilot to a 20th Century deity during that eery night scene captured by newsreel cameras positioned on the terminal roof. There he was, projected into a new time-zone, blinking his weary eyes. While not the first to fly across the Atlantic, Lindbergh's singular achievement was to do it alone, non-stop, between the new world and the old. His journey marked the beginning of a modern global consciousness, delivered by the mechanical integrity of his plane and its Wright Whirlwind engine, by the Pathé cameras, the radio telegraph and the other marvels of the modern age. Lindbergh was made world famous the instant his plane touched down. The lights that had so confused him were, in fact, confirmation of his celebrity.

As early as 1907, Rudyard Kipling, the English author and world-traveler, had written about the airplane with remarkable prescience: "The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week's--one hundred and sixty-eight hours'--travel; when the word 'inaccessible,' as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe, will cease to have any meaning." Lindbergh realized Kipling's prophecy: he not only linked two hemispheres, he redefined the concept of "arrival." Destinations would no longer be approached in the traditional perspective of Renaissance space, nor from the gradual, ground-view of trains, busses or ships, but rapidly, from the air, with the city appearing oddly splayed in abstraction. The gateways would no longer be harbors and railroad stations. Now it was the airport, a place of blinding lights and unexpected urgency.

Prologue | Friendship | Jet-Doric | Astroway | Epilogue