Second Try

With a shrug of resignation the dispatcher at Le Bourget airdrome switched off the floodlights which had blazed through the night. From Tempelhof weary newsmen dragged themselves off to bed. At Croydon the telephone operator made a last effort to raise remote stations, silent because of Whitsunday. At Floyd Bennett Field, New York, pessimism deepened to despair. It was 40 hours since Jimmie Mattern had rocketed off the mile-long concrete runway, and there was no word of his landing. His fuel must have run out at least ten hours ago.

It was a prodigious job that Jimmie Mattern had undertaken--to fly alone around the world and try to break Post & Gatty's 8 1/2-day record--but hardly anyone expected him to fail in the first jump across the Atlantic. He had done that once before, and neatly, with the same engine and parts of the same Lockheed plane. That was last year when he and Bennett Griffin first tried to beat the Post-Gatty record. They cracked up in landing when a Russian field turned out to be a bog; but first they had made a superb jump from Newfoundland to Berlin, whence they took off nearly 11 hr. ahead of Post & Gatty's schedule.

The ship had been rebuilt around the old engine, propeller and tanks, with fuselage, wings & tail surfaces taken from another plane which had once made a record flight to Buenos Aires. The whole was painted red-white-&-blue with the markings of an eagle in flight, and named Century of Progress. (Mattern's backers were H. B. Jameson and Hayden R. Mills of Chicago.) A big, blond, curly-headed Texan, onetime trapdrummer, seasoned pilot, Mattern was in the pink of condition. Besides a half dozen oranges he carried two gaily painted vacuum bottles of hot water given him by Artist George Luks. One was labeled "Happy," the other "Landings," "See you in a week," were his parting words. . . .

It was two days nearly to the minute after his take-off that word reached the U. S. of Mattern's safety in Norway. About 600 mi. out from Newfoundland he had hit stormy weather and the far more vicious hazard of ice. Throughout a night ''which seemed like a year" he fought thunderstorms, with ice on his wings nearly forcing him into the sea. He lost his course, missed England & Scotland completely, discovered himself over the coast of Norway which he was not prepared to navigate. With fuel running low, he picked out a landing spot in an island --Jomfruland--70 mi. southwest of Oslo. There he lost 18 precious hours before getting gasoline from the mainland. Off again, he paused for a brief moment at Oslo, then tore across the Baltic 1,100 mi. to Moscow where he landed three hours ahead of Post & Gatty's time.

Although he was haggard, his eyes bloodshot, Mattern permitted himself only a two-hour nap at Moscow. He worked over his plane slowly and painstakingly with Soviet mechanics under brilliant ground-flares, and had increased his lead to five hours when, shortly after midnight (third day) he whipped out of Moscow into the eastern moonlight. However his time across the Urals to Omsk was comparatively slow and he lost a considerable part of his lead. Then, apparently deciding to content himself with an unprecedented solo performance regardless of beating Post & Gatty, he rested in Omsk (where the others had not even landed) before heading for Novosibirsk, Irkutsk to Khabarovsk, jumping-off point to Alaska and home.

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