Mere Coincidence?

   I love a good coincidence. Of course I knew that Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo transatlantic  flight on this day in 1927. But I just learned that Amelia Earhart completed the first solo flight acrsoss the Atlantic on the same day in 1932. Amazing.

   The dream of crossing the Atlantic by air began with hot air balloons. The first successful balloon flight was in France in 1783 with a sheep, a duck and a rooster as passengers. The dream got more serious with the development of coal gas for buoyancy and the discovery of the Gulf Stream that would carry aeronauts across the ocean from west to east.

  The first attempt left New York in 1857, but a windstorm brought the balloon down before it got over the ocean. The next attempt was interrupted by the Civil War. It wasn't till 1978 that someone succeeded in crossing the Atlantic in a balloon.

   When a London newspaper offered a prize of £10,000 for the first non-stop flight, no one thought the prize could be won. But World War I saw a tremendous development in aircraft, and people got serious in the attempt. A Curtiss seaplane made the trip in 1919, but stopped in the Azores along the way. The whole trip took 23 days. The newspaper contest stipulated the flight must take less than 72 hours.

   That same year an Australian two-man team shipped a plane to Newfoundland, put it together, and built a rough runway. Not long after take-off, they had to be pulled from the ocean when their engine failed. The next two-man crew also shipped their plane to Newfoundland, built a rough runway, and promptly crashed because their load of fuel was too heavy. 

   In June of 1919, the British aviators Alcock and Brown took off from their own rough Newfoundland runway and headed east in a Vickers Vimy IV bomber. The plane was powered by two 360 hp Rolls Royce engines and carried 865 gallons of fuel. They ran into fog and a snowstorm and almost ended up in the ocean, but after a 16 hour flight they landed in Clifden on the west coast of Ireland.

   Two weeks later, a British zeppelin went the other way from England to New York in four days. The next big prize was for flying from New York to Paris, a considerably longer distance than a flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. Several unsuccessful attempts had been made by various teams by the time Lindbergh made his solo flight in 1927. The prize did not require that it be solo, but Lindbergh liked working alone. While other teams argued, he took off. His flight took 33 hours, and there was some dozing which can be dangerous when flying over the ocean, or anywhere.

   I don't know if Amelia Earhart was trying to copy Lindbergh by choosing the same day he had taken off five years earlier. She too was headed to Paris, but took a shortcut by leaving from Newfoundland. Due to storms and engine trouble she landed near Derry in Northern Ireland.  After that, she started breaking aviation records one after the other. She was attempting to circumnavigate the globe at the equator when she and her navigator disappeared in the South Pacific. She was forty.

   Lindbergh lived till age 72, but he had his troubles. His infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932. He was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer for his opposition to U.S. involvement in WWII, which led to his resignation from the Army-Air Force. After the war he became involved in the developing aviation industry. He saw the negative effects of technology on nature and became a strong environmentalist. 

  Meanwhile he was fathering seven children with three German women while still married to his wife Anne Morrow. It wasn't till ten years after his death that one of his unacknowledged children was able to unravel the story. She said there had been "Byzantine layers of deception." It's no coincidence that even the best of us has his or her foibles.