[CHARLES LINDBERGH] An Airman, His Aircraft, and his Great Flights

In this, the seventieth anniversary year of Charles Lindbergh’s epoch-making flight of 1927, Paladwr Press marks the event with one of its books, in the style which has hitherto been restricted in subject material to the histories of various airlines. We did this not because anything new needed to be said about a man who was possibly the greatest pilot, measured by his achievements, in aviation history; but because we felt that too much emphasis has in the past been placed on that astonishing New York-Paris nonstop flight, and not enough on his other accomplishments in the air.

His solid planning work for the great airlines Pan American and TWA have almost been forgotten. His campaigning to popularize flying, by taking his spirit of St. Louis to every one of the 48 States is remembered only sporadically. In some otherwise authoritative books on his life, Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s flights around the northern Pacific and both the northern and southern perimeters of the Atlantic Oceans have been given insufficient emphasis.

In our book we have tried to restore the balance and at the same time to draw attention to the considerable lifetime achievement by some detailed maps that support the narrative and by Mike Machat’s customarily superb drawings of the most important aircraft associated with the great flights. We have described briefly his early life and the disciplined and largely self-taught training that made him into such an extraordinary aviator. We have not forgotten either that, in addition to the work for expanding the scope of air transport, he did an enormous amount of flying for pleasure and for other business-associated reasons. Also, during the Second World War, he crossed the Pacific once again, and did some imaginative flying and constructive analysis, in the face of the enemy.

This book concentrates on Charles Lindbergh, the pilot, and we have touched only marginally on other aspects of his life. But we could not ignore the reference to his child’s kidnapping; nor to his involvement with the isolationist movement in the United States in the immediate pre-war years. This latter could not be passed over as if it was unimportant, and we trust that readers will feel that we have dealt fairly with this controversial episode in a truly eventful career. Most of all, we hope that they will be entertained with a Lindbergh life presented in a manner that is both visually pleasing yet at the same time factually informative.