ERIK Lindbergh on Thursday duplicated the feat of his legendary grandfather Charles, completing a solo nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in a single-engine plane when he landed in France in his high-tech ”New Spirit of St Louis”.
Lindbergh (37) who left Republic Field on New York’s Long Island on Wednesday, set down his state-of-the-art Lancair Columbia 300 at 11:24 am (0924 GMT) after 17 hours in flight — about half the time of Charles’ flight.
The pilot — sporting a blue flight suit and sunglasses — kissed the tarmac as he left his aircraft, and then ran into the arms of his mother Barbara Rubbins.
”Physically, I feel pretty good,” Lindbergh later told a news conference at this airport outside Paris. ”I took half the time but I ate twice as much. I ate six sandwiches: three with ham, three with peanut butter.”
On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh also departed from a Long Island airport bound for Le Bourget, but made the trip in 33 hours and 29 minutes.
The president of the Flying Club of France, Gerard Feldzer, invited Lindbergh to the club to receive the same medal his grandfather was given in May 1927.
Lindbergh left a San Diego airfield on April 14, making a stop in St Louis in the midwestern US state of Missouri, and a second in New York — following the path his grandfather took 75 years ago.
The original ”Spirit of St Louis” was a lumbering contraption made of wood, canvas and metal rods that weighed 2 380 kilos. Charles Lindbergh used the stars and a simple compass for navigation.
Erik Lindbergh’s plane is made of carbon composite and glass, and comes equipped with a satellite telephone, global positioning system and advanced survival gear, and weighs 1 930 kilos.
The high-tech plane also carried an extra fuel reservoir allowing it to carry some 1 173 litres of fuel necessary for the lengthy trip.
Lindbergh hopes that his flight will call attention to commercial space travel, which he considers to be the aerospace industry’s next big challenge.
He is vice president of a foundation sponsoring the X-Prize, a 10-million-dollar (11-million-euro) prize aimed at jumpstarting space tourism through competition between the world’s top entrepreneurs and rocket experts.
The cash prize will be awarded to the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a spaceship carrying three people to 100 kilometres from earth, then returns and repeats the launch with the same ship within two weeks.
Charles Lindbergh was encouraged to conduct his risky 1927 trip — which marked the dawn of commercial aviation — to win a $25 000-pot known as the Orteig Prize, which served as the model for the X-Prize.
The flight will also generate funds for the Lindbergh Foundation and the Arthritis Foundation. Erik Lindbergh suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, a progressive auto-immune disease that nearly forced him to give up flying upon his diagnosis at age 21.
After 15 years of suffering from the illness and undergoing two knee replacement operations, Lindbergh only recently became active again after he began using a breakthrough drug.
”I couldn’t walk five years ago,” Lindbergh said. ”I have my freedom back — a second chance. I wanted to do something special.” – Sapa-AFP