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c-span2 with top nonfiction book developers every weekend. but tv: television for serious readers. >> hi everyone, thank you for coming to the tattered cover and thank you for joining us for tonight's author event. thank you for coming out to support your local independent bookstore, we greatly appreciate it. tonight we have dan hampton, most of you probably know he's the author of hunter killers and wards of the sky among several others. he's a decorated pilot and a historian of, okay. a noted historian. tonight he's going to be discussing "the flight", his

recounting of charles lindbergh's famous transatlantic flight from new york to paris. so without further ado, i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to dan. let's give him some big applause. [applause] >> i also tap dance and sing badly. well, thank you jennifer. and michael, and the tattered cover crowd as well as my c-span buddies mark and steve who've done this with me several times before. probably tired of looking at me. and it's good to be back in colorado, nice sunny warm may. what's up with that? every time i think i'm now i can re-energize my sprinkler system, plant grass, it snows. this time it waited till after mother's day, had all

that done, went away and thought i was safe and guess what happens? many of you are looking for a time of day to do that, at a weekend you will be all right. so, may 20. can i roam? can you hear me all right? may 20, 1927 . roosevelt still in long island. when we say sealed, we don't mean like fairfield, chicago, o'hare. it is truly a field.sit on it, most of its parking lot right now but back then, what lindbergh was going to use to take off on this epic flight was more like a golf cart path. a little pack sort of roadway and that was the good part. that's why he chose to have the plane pulled over for from curtis field to roosevelt field because roosevelt was improved. hayes, whatever. no its defenders packed into

clay and he's in this tiny little airplane with a steel frame but it's covered with cotton. >> i've never been in the original spirit of st. louis causes hanging from the season ceiling at the aerospace museum and my good friend doctor bob benjamin would not take it down for me. however, i was into flyable replicas which was an experience in hostile and there's another one in new york. and i can tell you that even the singleseat fighter that i flew in china thought was small was pretty spacious compared to this thing. it was verybasic . wicker seat, closed panels, you can see the cables every time you moved the stick or moved the runners you can see cables move. that would be disconcerting as a pilot butthere is as he sitting in this thing , relatively, not really cold,

it's wet, it's raining, it's smitty, anybody that's been to long island in the spring or summer time knows what i'm talking about. the air is a lot heavier and thicker than what he was used to because he tested his plane in california. now he's sitting close to the atlantic ocean and it's just now occurring to him that maybe those test figures and data and airspeed that came up with in california might not really apply so much in long island. too late now may 20, it's in the morning. over curtis feel , richard byrd and chamberlain are waiting with their respective airplanes that they can take off anytime and they know that so he made the decision the night before to go based on a clearing weather forecast over the atlantic. he came in from watching rhea rito open at the majestic theater, they stop on the way back to the field to get five horses for him to take with him which he wrapped up in a paperback. and that one canteen water, sitting there trying to see a

stick with a little white handkerchief that he had tied and stuck at the halfway point about 2500, 3000 feet down this runway and i use that term loosely. they can't see it because of the low hanging farm in hayes. way at the end just above the haze he can barely make out a line of trees. that's what he's got to get over. he's thinking, no problem, it's over a mile away, i know this plane will do, i can do it and they say do you want to go? he says let's go. the rpm was a little bit low because again, it's west wet and moist see air as opposed to california heat but he goes, knives alongside just like in that wonderful movie made in 1957, guys are helping him push this plane through the mud and clay. and he gets off. and one thing the movie took a little liberty with was flipping the tree line, he didn't really do that.

it was very dramatic and made for a great scene but he cleared very well, maybe 50 feet or so and he was startled there was a country club and a golf course on the other side of the tree line. he was too busy at that point to care and to relieve that he had gotten off the ground which was the hard part. he had a nine foot propeller that was, could be fixed so you could vary the angle the propeller cut through the air with based on take off or cruising. water propellers do it automatically. you had to sit either on the ground or you had take some on the ground, is it going to be the maximize for take off or is it going to be maximized for cruising and he made the right decision that hey, i got 3600 miles to go, if i can get off the ground i think that's probably the bigger challenge so even the propeller wasn't optimized for this hair-raising takeoff that he made. the takeoff itself, he can't

see out of the front which any pilot will tell you probably isn't that big a deal because we usually look out the side anyway but he had a fuel tank in front of this nice plywood instrument panel in front of him. a fuel tank and another fuel tank. he had have as much fuel as he could carry because he had 3000 miles to go so be screening out the left side of this rectangular window trying to keep the airplane on this path that is on and manages to get up and get airborne. as soon as he does he takes a deep breath and looks out of the other window and sees an oriole airplane filled with reporters. out there to take pictures of him crashing and dying on take off. he didn't like reporters very much, this didn't help. so he shot the throttle forward and cranks the stick, when you sit in that airplane the stick comes out your mid chest, it's a really flexible broomstick, cranks the stick to the left and heads out

toward long island sound. >> this was something he was looking forward to because it was the biggest piece of water he ever flown over in his brief career. 30 miles between long island sound and the coast of connecticut. he was a midwestern guy as most of you know. he flown the mail, he flown for the army air service, never flown over water before, this was it. he was excited, turbulence aside. got himself across the connecticut, relieve one little milestone past, studied up on northeast heading and then flew over new england on his way to nova scotia and beyond. how did he get here? how did he get here? he was probably the least known of any of the pilots trying for the prize. the prize was offered by raymond norton, a hotel yea born in france but he's an americanwho became enamored with fighter pilots , go

figure and flying during the first world war when they would come to his hotel and bar. so he offered 25 thousand dollars which in 1927 was worth about 350,000 of our dollars for the first person to either fly from new york to paris or paris to new york. had to be nonstop and it had to be between those two cities. the atlantic, most people don't know had been crossed, anybody know when it had been crossed the first time? no? 1918, a british airship came from scotland to roosevelt field in long island, got all the way there after i think 108 hours or something, i can't imagine drifting across the north atlantic in a blend but they did. and it got there and realized there's nobody on long island that knows how to more and airship so the american observer, a guy named zach

lansdowne said i'll take care of this and he strapped on a parachute, jumped out of the blimp, pulled the cord, drifted down, took off the parachute, drew him a mooring line and he tied the blimp. in 1919, the u.s. navy decided what would be a good idea to prove that we could cross the atlantic so in typical military fashion they overdid it a little bit. they had three airplanes instead of one and they stationed warships at 50 mile intervals across the north atlantic with searchlights so that the flying boats they were seaplanes could see at night.it would work one time, probably not something commercially viable in the long term that they figured we will do it this one time and out of the three flying boats that took off from newfoundland , one of them made it. nobody died, some of them crashed at sea and the crew was picked up, one of them came down at sea and taxi 200 miles across the waves into

the as auras. the other one made it to the azores and then to portugal and england.he atlantic had been crossed in bits and pieces but never from city to city before and that's what this was all about. if somebody could do it and prove that hey, technology has taken a giant leap forward and commercial air travel is in fact possible, and in lindbergh's case he had another motive. money. he likes the dollar as much as the next guy but he wasn't adverse to that. but he also was a firm believer in peace. and he thought that if communications between peoples were improved and continents were linked, then with that sort of road would come better tolerance and understanding. it didn't work out that way but those were his motivations.

there he was then, now he's over new england. all these things are behind him. he's ready to go. he hits provincetown near plymouth and massachusetts and it occurs to him that's where the pilgrims landed. with any luck within a day or so he be over the original plymouth where they left them. took the pilgrims what, 60, 90 something days to cross in that horrible little hundred foot boat of theirs and he was going to do it in less than a day, he was excited about that. and he looks up and sees the first big expense of water between the massachusetts coast and newfoundland ahead of him and it put a damper on his spirits but he kept going. to make a long story short, he crossed newfoundland, his

navigation was spot on, better than he had help for, better than he had anticipated, probably a little bit lucky there. he was navigating when a magnetic compass, he had to read it backwards. it was noted above his head and they haven't realized it until right at the end that there's no way to read this while flying so in fact they did get a mirror from a girl , stuck some gum on it and stuck it on the plywood instrument panel in front of him and he's reading it backwards in a mirror. probably feasible during the day, i don't know how he did night. a magnetic compass under the best circumstances is hard to read because it waivers and jobs but he did. he had another new invention, a compass which i won't go too much into accept the idea behind it sounds promising but in practice it was absolutely wacko. so he really doesn't have much to go on except for a course, on that in time. when he reaches st. john's, off the coast of newfoundland, he is on course ! . these relatively on time. fuel consumption is good and he's excited as he's ever going to be until he looks at it again and sees nothing but

the north atlantic in front of him. he's got 1900 miles to go. the sun is going down behind him. i've done this as i said in a jet . and it's disconcerting even under those circumstances. for him to do that at 100 miles per hour 100 feet above the waves, i'm not sure where he's going to end up. it's phenomenal. this was before satellites, before the weather channel. the best guess he had was a report from the weather bureau that was at least 24 hours old. it was mostly long because you ran into 1000 miles on that night in this tiny basically cotton covered box he was in.it's astounding. ran into a couple other surprises along the way he had thought of. ice was one of them. every anybody know what the great circle is? if you think of europe as a sphere which it is, fears are wider at the middle and

narrower at the top, therefore the closest direction from point-to-point is not to go around the middle but to go over the top. that's what he was doing, going further north over these shorter, narrower end of the speech here to minimize his time in the air. this disadvantage was he was well north of all the shipping lanes so if you went down, nobody would find him and it was colder out there which didn't occur to him until he saw the ice and he wondered not for the first time how am i going to land? what's going to happen, the ice looks kind of rough. fortunately he didn't have to. he also ran enticing with the aircraft area think that is determined to happen in thunderstorms even in the summertime and he began to have to deviate and changed out the altitude, he would turn around and try to avoid the bigger thunderstorms that he could see and the end result is the next morning when the sun finally came up, he really didn't have a clear idea where he was.

>> had to ask something that he could not have foreseen, it was about 100 mile-per-hour tailwind. which had been blowing him all night. >> so he's 300 miles closer to europe than he thinks he is. he's also been hallucinating a little bit which can happen. and when he picks up ireland for the first time, he's utterly confused because he thinks he's 300 miles further out under the ocean. he doesn't really know where he is. he had always read if you flew long enough he would hit europe which is true but he also thought it could be anywhere from norway to spain so where in the hell am i? being 300 miles further along didn't help and he was very puzzled by this. flew up and down the irish coast, finally ascertained his position based on, i picked up the max, i've been

to see them in misery. they're not really detailed. but they were detailed enough for him to realize he was over valencia bay within about 20 miles of where he planned to be which astounded him. then he got his second wind and he was happy. i survive. now he began to think, i might actually make this. crossing ireland, crossing the english channel after 1900 miles over the ocean was a cakewalk to him. when he hit share board in the french coast, now he began to worry about details that frankly are kind of funny only to you and i, work funny to him. his biggest concern was he forgotten to get a visa in his passport and he thought, are they even going to, will they let me into the country western mark that he thought i've figured out that i'm three hours early, will there even be anybody there at the airfield? this is 1927, radios were fairly common but therewas no map . his communications life where

you soon, he didn't realize that all along his route over nova scotia and newfoundland and england and ireland, that people had followed him and they had of course called in and the newspapers were running updates, continuous updates . young guy back in america named jimmy stewart, 19 years old . had a map. and every time he got update, he would run upstairs, run upstairs and stick attack in the map to chart lindberg process which is kind of interesting and intriguing since jimmy stewart and up playing charles lindbergh in a movie.anyway, it occurs to lindbergh now after some 32 hours or sothat he's angry . so he takes out one of his greasy, nasty ham sandwiches that he got back in long island , keeps half of it and decided not to appetizing. doesn't want the litter so he doesn't throw the paper out the window, takes a drink, eels pretty good, finds the

river. you can see at night because of the boat traffic which is what he did, he followed that in paris. now it gets a little dicey. if one already. and i can appreciate this because the longest i ever flew in my jet was 15 hours which damn near killed me. he's now that this for twice that time, more than that. 33 hours by the time he gets to paris. he doesn't know where portia is. there are no flight information handbooks, no charts, airport terminals, everything else that we have today. all anybody could tell him was that divorce was five or six miles north of the tower so he gets there, find the eiffel tower, flies around the eiffel tower and find the biggest, darkest five or six miles north that's where it goes. another problem and i was unaware until i researched

the book, he never landed the spirit of st. louis at night before. which was probably an oversight that could have been corrected. a lot of what happened to him he couldn't have foreseen. this one you might have foreseen. he flown it at night from california to the coast, set a record doing it but he never landed at night. now he has the land at night after 33 and a half hours on a field he's never seen before and remember, it's not an airfield like you and i know. it's a field. he flies up and around this dark spot, seeing anything that's recognizable. it continues a little further thinking, maybe it's further out hereand it's not. he flies over the present position of charles de gaulle airport . turns around right over where it is now and comes back to where he thinks abortion is. there's a spotlight on one corner they are waving around but it's the only lighting except for the main roads out of paris.

there's thousands oflights on the road and he thought god, i didn't know the traffic was that bad in paris . is it dangerous? he doesn't realize and he doesn't realize that all the tourists are waiting for him and they've all been trying for hours to get up to le bourget and that's a huge traffic jam on the road. he does what most pilots do and circled around, drop down low in figures out well, it may not be le bourget but it's someplace and landed his parents so i probably won the prize. i got to paris, even if it's not and he sets himself up to land finally. and about the time and i can appreciate this, you can't really he can't really feel his legs and it's almost like he's forgotten how to land because he's been flying basically straighten level for so long and he completely waffles the approach once, runs back around to do it again. and picture driving or flying

if you can into a big black hole and there's only waving like at one end. past those lights when they go past you your back in the black hole again. that's what happened to him. he came in over the hangers and he's happy because he saw the wind flux and he saw le bourget written on one of the. but as he passes andthe lights go behind him, all that perception goes away, that's what happens and you can't really see the ground . there's not much of the moon and he basically just kind of drops the plane onto the dirt. fortunately nobody can see it. >> he walked away from that which any pilot will tell you is probably a good landing and he's rolling into the darkness here . no begins, no runway or nothing. and if the grass field, he's rolling into the darkness. and he realizes well, for better or worse, i'm down. turns around, he ground loops

the airplane, spins it around and he sees the blackness, the darkness that he's moving, and he realizes that there aren't in the hand and he realizes there's a surge of people coming towards him. he can't really grasp that i landed somewhere i shouldn't have landed, i'm on a military field, i'm not allowed here. and i pissed off the french so bad they're coming to get me? i don't know. i got to shut off the engine and barely gets the engine shut down and the plane is surrounded and mobbed in paris. the reception that he got was not anything he had planned for. contrary to popular belief, the french actually had a plan. they had a double, the us ambassador to france was concerned because he didn't

know lindbergh and relations between america and france were too good at the time. he didn't know what lindbergh was going to say so he wanted to get lindbergh away from the plane until he could figure out what he's going to talk about and let's not do anything worse so the problem was the mob got to the plane right about the same time the french air force officer and the double got to the plane. he started to get out, lindbergh did and was basically yanked out by frenchmen that were just overjoyed to see him. the double was trying to get into position but the crowd pulled lindbergh's coat off in his helmet and somehow it got thrown in the air and the guy clinic. a guy named harry wheeler who happens to be an american student walking through france. thought he would go see lindbergh land. unfortunately he was about six feet tall and blonde and didn't speak any french who he catches this thing and says something in english and everybody thinks that's lindbergh. >> that's him and they grab this poor guy. he says no, i'm not him, they don't care.they grabbed him and he's the guy that they

put up on their photos and carried away which turned out to be good because the french air force officers grabbed the real lindbergh and got him out, took him over to the military side and kept in there. harry wheeler got drawn up to the reception, the formal reception they had planned for him and dropped down in front of the ambassador, he was missing at that point his coat. one shoe, no tie and he kept telling everybody i'm not lindbergh and the ambassador look at him and said of course you are, wealth would you be. they finally worked out and in fact he wasn't lindbergh. and lindbergh's biggest concern at that point was my airplane. because he's seen people try to tear off pieces. the french assured him that in fact it's being taken care of and in fact the hanger they put that airplane and is still there at le bourget.

always interested to find the same hanger. >> it was locked up and secured so it was all right in the french army officers then drove lindbergh into paris to stay at the ambassador's residence. >> a bunch of other things happen to him, he didn't have any pajamas and had to borrow the ambassador's pajamas. fell asleep in his bed and woke up the next morning and the world was not the same. his life would never be the same after that. that takes you through the book , more or less. i wanted to concentrate specifically on the flying because nobody besides lindbergh had ever written this before from the cockpit. lots of books have been written about his life, biographies, etc. but scott berg probably wrote the best one about lindbergh but out of that particular book only nine pages are devoted to the flight because he wasn't a pilot so i wanted to take you through it, have you sit in the cockpit with him. feel the controls, push the rudder pedals, feel them

fight off fatigue and dizziness and hallucinations and everything that happened and then take you all the way through the landing instrument. >> i didn't put enough in there about his early life, you know where he came from. dispelled submits about the man, he was not raised for, the son of a lawyer and a us senator. of course, has been lost everything so he wasn't raised that way.>> i talked a little bit about some of the things that happen to him later in life. just so that people would know that as much as i admire the man, he had his faults. like all of us. he had some shortcomings. but i posed the question in the book who of us having all that thrust upon us at age 25 could have done better. >> so i will leave you to read the epilogue and what happened to him after this flight.

and decide for yourself. a lot of it i think is very interesting because it kind of parallels our own times. the 1920s in our decade had a lot of similarities, it's pretty frightening and one reason why is lindbergh became the global celebrity and especially the celebrity in north america that he did was because the united states was in the position that was in and i think people then like now were starving for a hero or somebody they could believe in. somebody that was when to tell them the truth most of the time. somebody that wasn't going to do something stupid every day and have it treated across the world. somebody they could believe in. they had a lot of the same issues we do today and that's one of the things that makes this book appropriate. besides, he was an american.

i love my country. and i still think and i've seen most of the world, that is the greatest country in the world and i think this book goes along way of reminding people, and it is easy to forget that despite all the circus clown asked that we see and are subject to every day that this is still the country that produced a charles lindbergh. >> and with that, i will cease yakking and be happy to answer questions for you. >> yes, sir. >> if you could comment on the design of the spirit, made up brian aircraft in san diego and the back that there was really a spot aircraft, custom-designed and lindbergh succession with every ounce of fuel and the movie i think documents a lot of it quite well that he's a local pilot, no radio. every ounce of extra fuel that could be gained would be so invaluable to getting to paris. >> the standout thing was he didn't actually fly first

with a welding torch. he had tried to buy the bill on top, the aircraft in new york and couldn't do it, mostly because childs levine was an honor flight. so he said all right, i'm running out of time, i'm going to have an airplane. ryan aircraft was just getting started up, they saw this as an excellent chance at publicity. >> how much thought they gave what would happen if he disappeared like everyone else and tried to do, i don't know but they said we will do it for $10,500 which was a considerable amount of money at the time but not unreasonable. lindbergh put in 2000 of his own and went out to california to help don hall design the aircraft. i talked to don hall's son and he gave me insight into his dad. lindbergh had seen other people try to do this and

fail, people that use big multi engine planes with crews, renee faulk, a french ace had tried in september the year before and crashed on takeoff. the his airplane had red leather seats and was carrying spare close and it.all arrived, typical frenchmen to celebrate their successful flight across the atlantic. two guys, charles and francoise coley had taken off on may 18 a couple weeks before lindbergh attempted it, (to new york and they disappeared without a trace. lastly over terre haute in ireland, some flying into the sun heading west and they never saw him again. a couplenight navy guys and tried it . they were taking off from north oak out of april, less than a month before lindbergh did. they crashed, both of them died. big, heavy multi engine airplane overloaded.

lindbergh said i'm going to go small, streamlined and do it myself. i don't need a navigator because i can navigate, i don't need a second pilot because i'll just rely on him and i don't want to do that and i can use the weight or fuel. being a single seat guy myself, i appreciate that too. >> so that's what they design the spirit, they had a basic design that they use before but modified it, they made it longer and a little bit when standard increased a little bit to carry as much fuel as he could. it was rated for 425 gallons which to me like an appalling number to cross 3600 miles. but he'd worked it out. he knew he could function and could do it and when they fuel the plane up, they have to fuel it on curtis field and towed it over to roosevelt field and filled it the rest of the way. they got in another 25 gallons so it could carry 450

gallons. i'm asked a lot about that and i always go back to the car analogy. when the empty light comes on we can always go a little bit further. gas tanks are over engineered a little bit, his was two. turns out he didn't need it. by the time he landed in paris he had enough gas to fly another thousand miles. that was more due to the tailwind than anything else but he had enough fuel but in planning that was his primary concern. he also designed it so it would not be an empty plane to fly and i can tell you is not. it's like flying a lawnmower. if you let go of it for any length of time, it's immediately going to pitch in wine and gyrate. he did that on purpose because he thought it would keep him awake, maybe it did. it had no autopilot, he could lock the horizontal tail. that's over here on the side but he had a hand fly the rest of it. so he subordinated everything. >> put himself behind that

big main fuel tank, didn't wantany fuel tanks behind him because he seemed too many pilots be burned alive if they crashed . and then hehad three tanks , one on each wing and one right over head. so that's what the plane was designed for. >> he could manage cruising at about 100 miles per hour, he maxed it out at 126 i think out in california. he probably went faster than that, ground speed wise with 100 mile-per-hour tailwind but he wasn't going to plane and the plane held up just fine. >>. >> two questions, what about lindbergh's life surprised you the most as you research this and what's your next big project?>> i'm actually for those of you who don't know, it takes about a year to write a book and another six

months to edit it and get it to the point where it's published so i've already, i could go on to the next book before the previous book is published. the next book is due in january i think and it's on the us test pilot program before the right stuff, right before the right stuff. world of the 1940s and the air force, the wish i way i've been in it. it's not that way anymore. about lindbergh's life, i think the thing that surprised me the most was when i was looking into his life after the flight. just to dispel some of the myths. he was in the america first movement, most of you probably know that. a big movement formed during the battle of britain. to keep the united states out of world war ii.

all of these people had seen the great war, world war i. they fought war in europe was another european war and if they were stupid enough to get into it again, why should we go for them? pearl harbor hadn't happened yet and they figured all right, these people still a lost money for the last war, why should we go interfered. he wasn't alone in this, about 800,000 americans had a part of this including walt disney. ford, john f. kennedy, sinclair lewis and a whole bunch of others. public opinion in the united states was against the war, exceeded 70 percent were all for supporting britain materially but they didn't want us to get into the war so it was knocked out there being the lone wolf, railing against non-patriotic railing and fighting, he just didn't see any reason for us to get into it at that point. pearl harbor happened though and he was one of the first unlike a lot of celebrities and politicians to say hey,

my country has been attacked, i'm going to go fight. he'd been an army officer, tried to get his commission reactivated. roosevelt wouldn't do it because roosevelt hated him for a very public disagreement they had a few years before. and so lindbergh got himself appointed as a technical representative for aircraft manufacturers, he worked for henry ford, everybody else was making airplanes at the time . to make the airplanes better. he finally got permission to go to the south pacific as a field rep and against every rule in thebook , he flew 50 combat missions as a civilian. >> which if he'd gotten shot down they kill anybody but they would have, who knows what they would've done to him, he's a civilian and he can't legally fly. legally take part in combat if you're a civilian but that's what he did, he wanted to fly for his country.

shot down one plane for sure, probably two. get a lot of close air support. he had small problems with 10 or so different airplanes that improved the performance and survivability of the military, the us military including teaching guys fuel management techniques so that they could fly longer which is how the army airport shot down admiral yamamoto. supposedly flying beyond range of any us aircraft and lindbergh taught them howto stretch the range of their aircraft . so i think that was one of the things that surprised me the most because i didn't know that. i knew about the american person but i didn't know he flown combat missions. long answer. >> with all the books that are out there and i'm sure you had good access to materials available, i've never come across any kind of

documentation of how much money the guy made off his flight. you talk in your book that he made a lot of money. i know as a collector he endorsed pencil sharpener's, shoelaces, there was merchandise out of everywhere but i've never seen that he made 1,000,000 and a half or 25 billion. do you have any thoughts on that? >> i know one of them but he was very reticent. he was a very private guy which is one reason why the press and he never got along. and the press you know, they have a job to do but they interfered with his life quite a bit including nicking into new jersey and taking pictures of his dead baby and printing them. so he didn't like that. he didn't talk much about his private life. his doctor, i talked to her several times, he been not like that all of his life so he kept a lot of his finances to himself.

the legitimate offers he was given total in excess of $5 million which in 1927 would be about 65million now . there were a lot more offers, a lot of them were plain silly. and wanted to promote a lucky lindy bread. he was actually a movie maker in hollywood, offered him an outrageous amount of money to get married on camera whether or not he stayed married or not. which means investors in new york offered him $1 million so that he wouldn't have to take any false officers. tell me how that makes any sense. he didn't take it. he didn't take a lot of them but 5 million was at least a legitimate number, probably at the low end. right after he returned. there was a hand over here. >> was it all or airport? >> his first combat mission wasin a corsair . >> i don't think he was

crazy. my father over there landed on aircraft carriers. i don't think lindbergh did. he flew his first combat mission in a corsair out of houston field. >> of course. who else but a marine would fly something within 18 color. >> we go round and round with this. i see you wearing a marine sweatshirt so i can guess where your sympathies lie. >> what other aircraft did he fly combat? >> he flew all of them at one point or another. everyone, and a lot of little things that to a pilot can add up. these hydraulic problems, pneumatic problems, dreamlike engineering fixes here and there. recently they think better

would be good and he saw it as his debt. he wanted to get in there and fight. to be honest, it was good that he didn't. the best book that he wrote and i recommend this to anybody who's interested is called the autobiography of values, published posthumously. the collection of all his writings later in life and he really, he actually wrote very well. not at first, he thought so too but his books got very, very much improved as time went on. the autobiography of values put a lot into his thought and emotions that never express to anybody including his family. but he talked a lot about combat and i can tell you having been in more combat than i care to remember that it's probably good that he didn't do it full-time as a commissioned officer.

he didn't have, he didn't have the right mindset. as a civilian he could afford to think the way he did and he was a natural pilot but he didn't have the right mindset for staying in, so it probably work out best that he didn't continue with it. >> it absolutely boggles me as is his navigational skills, particularly as he got overthe atlantic . as to how he was able to keep that airplane on course . >> and modeled him to. >> dealing with the psychological walls, i'm curious, do you think in your own flying experience have you come close to any of the endurance things that he had to go upagainst ? >> yes and no. up to a point. our physical challenges were fairly nasty. they are different, just different. as far as he went, he had his

charts kicked off in hundred mile intervals because it's a nice round number, every hundred miles and he had the declination, magnetic variation, everything figured out. a few degrees less, usually to stay on his plot a course but you sound like you understand this so you know that a course is not a heading. i heading is what you fly off a compass or whatever it is you're using. you have to correct for wind and for 1900 miles at night he didn't know what the winds were. he was blindly trying to follow this course on the map, he didn't know the winds were from the side, behind, what to do with them and i told you he's deviating around thunderstorms and whatever and what i think happened was all his errors in the winds canceled each other out. they had to have or he wouldn't have ended up within 25 miles of where you wanted

to be but he didn't know that. but again, he figured as bad as i may be, i was on course, on heading when i left st. john. where ever it is i want to end up on the other side, it will be your whether it's norway or spain and i'll figure it out from there. again, being really confused and then being so close to where he was supposed to be confused because he didn't plan on being that close. a tremendous challenge, especially given those horrible instruments. and accuracy or lack of accuracy. i'm glad it wasn't me. >> by boat. >> he wanted to fly on it. he wanted to come back through asia and the president wouldn't let him. the president said no, i don't want anything to happen and he said i'm a civilian, i can do whatever i want and he said he reminded lindbergh that no, you were an officer in the military and once an officer, always an officer.

you're not really and i'm telling you, you're coming home on a boat. and lindbergh was smart enough to realize that crossing the president of the united states at that point probably wasn't a smart thing so they boxed up the spirit and they put it on the uss memphis, a cruiser out of cherbourg and the memphis set a record getting back, it was six days, days from cherbourg to the virginia cape and interestingly enough they passed right over the spot where billy mitchell sank, that german ship. and sailed into the virginia cape, realized they were early and anchored at the mouth of the potomac river and again, he heard there was going to be a big wealth and it overwhelmed him just the same. there were 300,000 people turned out in washington dc and from indianhead all the way to the river into

washington naval yard on both sides there were flags and bumping and fireworks and boats and they were firing off cannons.they gave him the national salute reserved for the president of the united states, gave him a salute and the memphis finally glided into her anchorage and more to write their and the person waiting for him was his mother. >> angelina. they brought her to see him and brought her up to the cruisers that and then a few minutes later both of them walked down together. quite a show. what else, anything. >> how long with the trip takes in an f-16? >> if i didn't need to refuel every hour, i could go twice the speed of sound, but unfortunately i took six minutes doing that. it would take us, the tanker

flew at 350 miles per hour. it seemed like today we could cross from the east coast to the coast of usually spain, it would take about eight hours . >> if memory fails, sorry. and i did it in some bad conditions too. sometimes depending what was going on on the wrong side of the world we take off from the east coast and one time i did it and it had to be six inches, eight inches of water on therunway and thunderstorms all up and down the coast . it was terrifying, i hate to admit it. i was clustered around a couple tankers and fuel and thunderstorms at night. flying off the night vision goggles thinking why didn't i listen to my mother. >> seriously, what am i doing here. so i know how lindbergh felt when he finally flew out of

the weather and the sun came up. you can see it makes all the difference in the world, even when you can see the clouds and in the book i talk about how happy he was when he got clear of the thunderstorms, it was still cloudy but he could see the moon, the shapes of the clouds. it's almost like i'm back in reality because until that time it's like flying through a cotton ball, you can't see anything. i couldn't, he couldn't so when you break free of that, you're tremendously relieved. the next big thing is to see land. i'm back sort of in an environment that's familiar to me and that's how he felt and i tried to convey as much of that as i could. >> one last thought. [inaudible] >> 90 years ago tomorrow. >>. [inaudible]

>> he referred to it as dead reckoning navigation i believe, didn't like the way that sounded. >>. >> he said not a bad way to do it except the only problem is the name. >> is not something you like to think about but that's all he had. i had gps and satellite, i could get anywhere in the world within six inches of where i needed to go. he didn't come close to having that luxury. and he, that's the point i get asked this a lot, is what you want people to take away from this book and i go back to what i said at the end of my diatribe is that this is something that we can all be proud of. i think i close the book with that. is that this transcendent nationalities, borders , genders, whatever problems we are having or have been, this was mankind conquering something that had been unconquerable before in nature. someplace we're not supposed to be, up in the air and yet he did it.

and america produced him. >> i think i'm out of time so i'll be happy to sign books, answer any other questions. thank you for showing up on friday and for your attention. >>. >>. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our lineup for tonight, at 7 pm by lebron provides a history of the six-day war, then university of arizona professor jennifer earl talks about digitally enabled social change at 8:30. on afterwards at nine, utah senator mike lever called the work of the forgotten men and women who fought against the large federal government during america's founding and

it 10, jenna and barbara bush just their forthcoming memoir on life in the white house. and it 10:30, derek draft reports on the governments continuity plan in case of an a popular apocalyptic event. that happens tonight on c-span2's tv. >> bowers director of the florida university press, what big books do you have coming out? >> two books that are part of their addition which is a regional inference and one is a worldly affair, new york and the united states and united nations, their unlikely relationship talking about how the un founded in new york amongst controversy and then when carl donated the land, in its current location, and it has cool sidebars. there's a restaurant for the public, if you make a reservation 24 hours in

advance a lot of people don't know and the original home of the general secretary was in flushing, queens. now it's near tudor city. >> we really need folks to talk about jersey city as an artist community. people think of soho, greensburg as these enclaves that were gentrified by artists and then going into these mega-metropolises. there's also these smaller german enclaves that we have. outside of the region we have this new book on google me and it's a translation from the french. so those are our three lead books. >> what would you consider university presses most specialized in. >> where known in humanities and social sciences, particularly in theology but they're very into disciplinary titles so they intermingle. that's our kind of we're most known for that and also reflect the mission of the

university because we have a strong loss of the end theology department and then in 2010, i started the empire state addition and the press is hundred 10 years old. matt bauer, he's the director of university press based in new york. >> every summer, but tv visit capitol hill to ask members of congress what are you reading? look at some of their answers. >> right now book called not meadows written by richard turley and i can't remember the names of the co-authors. it's a historical account of an event called the mountain meadows massacre that took place on september 11, 1857 in utah. it's a tragic event but one that factored significantly into the history of the state of utah where i come from. >> i'm reading a book by

president jimmy carter, his autobiography called a full life. i had the privilege to attend his school recently where he taught funding goals and i was in the congregation, it was amazing and after that i went to the school that he attended and of course it was turned into a wonderful museum and i purchased his book of life. >> i got home was mayor about the relationships between the kennedy familyand the churchill's . before churchill became prime minister. and of course joseph kennedy was ambassador to the uk. >> the outbreak of world war ii. >> and was widely criticized because he was varies sympathetic with the germans not that he wanted the germans to win but he didn't think we can win, he wanted to keep america out of it. well researched book about the relationships going up to the time churchill was still alive and kennedy was president so it tracks that hold. from joseph kennedy down to

jack kennedy. >> we want to hear from you, send us your summer reading list by a text or video or post them to facebook page, book tv on twitter at book tv or email us at book tv at c-span.org. >> good afternoon and welcome to the harrisburg book festival, i am a resident of gaithersburg and a member of the democratic central committee representing district 17 which encompasses the beautiful city of gaithersburg so welcome. gaithersburg is a city that supports the arts and humanity, we are pleased to bring you this event acts in