Lindbergh, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail
pilot, emerged from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize
-winning solo non-stop flight
on May 20–21, 1927, from Roosevelt Field located in Garden City
on New York's Long Island
to Le Bourget Field
in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3600 smi, in the single-seat, single-engine monoplane
Spirit of St. Louis
.
1927 At 07:52 Charles Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, on the world's first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. He touched down at Le Bourget Field in Paris at 22:22 the next day.
1927 Charles Lindbergh touches down at Le Bourget Field in Paris, completing the world's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
1927 Aviator Charles Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape parade down 5th Avenue in New York City.
1928 Charles Lindbergh is presented the Medal of Honor for the first solo trans-Atlantic flight.
1932 The son of Charles Lindbergh, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III, is kidnapped.
1932 Ten weeks after his abduction Charles Jr., the infant son of Charles Lindbergh is found dead in Hopewell, New Jersey, just a few miles from the Lindberghs' home.
1935 Bruno Hauptmann goes on trial for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh
1935 A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.
1936 Bruno Richard Hauptmann is executed for the kidnapping and death of Charles Augustus Lindbergh II, the baby son of pilot Charles Lindbergh.
1941 Charles Lindbergh testifies before the U.S. Congress and recommends that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Adolf Hitler.
Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?
What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific.
It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.
Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.