Cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, flown by Charles Lindbergh during his 33½-hour solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, 1927[500X628].

The Spirit of St. Louis is, a fabric-covered, single-seat, single-engine high-wing monoplane, designed by Lindbergh and Ryan Airlines’ chief engineer, Donald A. Hall. It carried 450 U.S. gallons of fuel (about 1,700 liters) stored in five tanks and was powered by a 223-horsepower, air-cooled, nine-cylinder Wright J-5C Whirlwind engine. The cockpit was so cramped that Lindbergh couldn’t fully stretch his legs, and because the main fuel tank sat directly in front of him, he had no forward-facing windshield, he relied on side windows and a small periscope to see ahead.

While it was not the first transatlantic flight, that milestone came in 1919, Lindbergh’s solo, nonstop 33½-hour journey from New York to Paris in 1927, battling ice, exhaustion, and sleep-deprived hallucinations, made the 25-year-old one of the most famous and celebrated men in the world.

If interested, I write about the complex life of Charles Lindbergh here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-64-charles?r=4mmzre&utm\_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay