really beautiful airplane that will carry seventy people at thirty thousand feet at nearly four hundred miles an hour for three thousand miles. The big leap forward will come when they come up with a reliable jet engine. With jets, transport aircraft will actually approach the speed of sound.”
Canidy, who had heard only the most vague references to jet engines, said so, and was astonished to learn from Lindbergh that both the English and the Germans had test-flown jet-powered aircraft.
Lindbergh had already rejected Donovan’s notion that a seaplane, one of Pan American’s Sikorskys, be borrowed for the long-distance cargo flight he wanted. And Lindbergh also had quickly deduced where that flight was headed.
“Bill Donovan won’t tell me where this flight is going,” Lindbergh said, “and if you know, I suppose you can’t tell me either. But unless you tell me it’s a waste of my time, I’m going to work on the idea that it’s probably some place on the west coast of Africa.”
“I really don’t know,” Canidy had told him.
Lindbergh shrugged. “And since there is some question about where my sympathies lie in this war, I don’t suppose I’ll be asked to fly this mission. That means, I suppose, that you will.”
“I don’t know that, either,” Canidy said.
“Huh!” Lindbergh snorted, and then went on: “Well, we’ll proceed on the notion that you’ll be flying it.”
“I really don’t know, Colonel,” Canidy pursued. “I’ve never flown anything but fighters—and a Beech D18S.”
“They’re sending kids with a hundred twenty hours’ total time to Europe as B-17 aircraft commanders,” Lindbergh said. “How many hours did you say you have, Ace?”
Canidy didn’t reply. He had more than 2,000 hours in the air, more than twice 120 hours in combat, but he was reluctant to say so.
Lindbergh chuckled, then went on: “Far down the west coast of Africa. Perhaps as far as South Africa. The way to do that is with a Curtiss.”
“Why?” Canidy asked simply.
“Because it can fly faster and higher than a Sikorsky, and when we solve the problem of auxiliary fuel tanks, maybe a thousand miles farther.”
Lindbergh had arranged for a Pan American Stratoliner, the civilian version of the Commando, to be flown to Newark. The story was let out that it had been requisitioned by the Air Corps. While one crew of workmen stripped the seats, the carpets, and the sound-deadening material from the cabin, another crew removed the glistening white paint and Pan American insignia from the outside skin. Then Hangar 17 was isolated and placed under guard by Air Corps military policemen. Canidy came to understand that isolating aircraft and cargo was a routine procedure these days.
Whenever a crew from Pan American was doing something that did not require his expertise, Lindbergh talked to Canidy at length about long-distance, high-altitude flight. In the course of these discussions, Lindbergh and Canidy prepared more than a dozen flight plans, all based on the idea that the departure point would be either the Azores or one of the American air bases in England. Though they didn’t know where they were going, or even where they would leave from, Lindbergh seemed determined to have a flight plan prepared for every possibility.
Lindbergh also spent long hours showing Canidy around the Curtiss’s cockpit, familiarizing him with the controls and the peculiarities of the aircraft, while delivering conversational lectures on how to milk the most mileage from its twin 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines. He gave no consideration to the fact that Canidy had never flown the Curtiss. Lindbergh seemed to believe that little problem could be solved in an hour or two in the left seat, going around the pattern shooting touch-and-go landings.
Although Canidy was by no means modest about his flying ability—he was, after all, a pretty good fighter pilot— flying the Curtiss when the time came made him more than a little nervous.
And—there being no question in his mind that Lindbergh had correctly deduced where the plane was headed—what he had come to think of as the African flight wasn’t all Canidy had to deal with.
His primary duty was still the baby-sitting of Admiral de Verbey at Summer Place, and there were always other problems with that—most of them small but time-consuming ones with the guards. They developed colds. One of them fell over a piece of driftwood on the beach, dislocated his shoulder, and nearly died of exposure before he was found. And then disputes between the guards over the duty roster had to be resolved.
Canidy and the admiral had