fuselage of a Curtiss Wright CW-20 airplane (military designation C-46 Commando) wearing oil-stained mechanic’s coveralls. He had come up to Newark from Summer Place in Deal on a New Jersey Central Railroad commuter train in a business suit, taken a Public Service bus to the airport, walked to Hangar 17, and changed into the coveralls. He had made the same trip every day for the past four days.
Two men, also wearing grease-stained overalls, were with him inside the cavernous main compartment of the C- 46—there was room, in addition to general cargo, for 40 fully equipped troops, or 33 stretchers, or five Wright R- 3350 engines, or their equivalent weight of other goods. One of them was an airframe mechanic on loan from Pan American Airways, and the other was Colonel Charles Augustus “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh, U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, Inactive, the first man to have flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Lindbergh and the airframe mechanic were trying to come up with a simple, reliable means of augmenting the C- 46’s fuel-carrying capacity with auxiliary tanks that could be jettisoned in the air. The normal range of the C-46— 1,170 miles at 180 knots—was not going to be enough for the mission planned.
Canidy no longer felt as awed as he had been initially in the very presence of Lindbergh. For one thing, Lindbergh didn’t act like a colonel, much less like one of the most famous and admired men in the world. The lanky aviator Lindbergh had made it almost immediately plain that since Canidy was another flier, he was thus a brother.
He had then proved, in a number of small ways, that he meant what he said. Canidy had shared a dozen cold and soggy hot dogs with the tall, shy hero. Twice, wearing Pan American coveralls, Lindbergh had walked the half mile to the terminal to buy them himself. He had not been recognized. He looked like just one more airplane mechanic trying to fix a broken bird.
That was not to say that Canidy had grown entirely comfortable around Lindbergh. He hadn’t been sure what to call him, for one thing. He certainly couldn’t call him Slim, and—considering President Roosevelt’s refusal to call Colonel Lindbergh to active duty—he wasn’t sure how Lindbergh would react to being called Colonel.
Finally, toward the end of their first day together, he had gathered his courage and asked him what he would like to be called.
“How about Slim?” Lindbergh said.
“I don’t think I could do that,” Canidy said.
“Well, then, Major, call me Colonel if that’s more comfortable for you.”
“Colonel,” Canidy blurted, “I’m not a major. I’m not really in the Air Corps. I’m just wearing the uniform.”
Lindbergh hadn’t liked that.
“It was Colonel Donovan’s idea,” Canidy said.
“I see,” Lindbergh said.
After the first day, Canidy had not worn the major’s uniform. And two days later, when he walked into the Pan American hangar at Newark Airport, he knew from the look on Lindbergh’s face that he had offended him.
“Mr. Canidy,” Lindbergh greeted him, “as someone who will probably never again wear a uniform, who has never heard a shot fired in anger, I feel a little foolish being called Colonel by the first ace in the American Volunteer Group. Why didn’t you tell me about that?”
Canidy shrugged uncomfortably.
“Well, from now on it’s Slim and Dick,” Lindbergh said. “All right?”
“Yes, Sir,” Canidy said.
He still could not bring himself to call Lindbergh Slim. Connecting one casually dropped fact with another, he learned that Lindbergh had personally laid out, then flown himself, most of Pan American’s long-distance flight routes in South America and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and that he had an awesome amount of experience with all of the Sikorsky amphibians and seaplanes Pan Am used.
But Lindbergh had already concluded that large commercial seaplane transports had outlived their usefulness.
“I think,” he told Canidy over a hot dog and a Coke, “that we’ve already reached the point of diminishing return in seaplane design. The engines—to avoid ingesting water on takeoff or landing—have to be placed very high. To mount them that far above the water, we can’t use aerodynamically efficient wings and engine locations. And if we make these planes any larger, we will have to make their hulls correspondingly stronger, and the weight penalty there is too high.
“There’s no question in my mind that the next step in transoceanic flight is going to be an aerodynamically efficient airframe, designed for flight at very high altitude. Howard Hughes showed me some preliminary drawings of a