Sixty Days in San Diego

In February 1927, a 25-year-old airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh sent a telegram from St. Louis to a small airplane company in San Diego, California: could they design and build a single-engine monoplane capable of flying nonstop from New York to Paris, by May? Ryan Airlines had 35 employees and a converted fish-cannery factory at the foot of Juniper Street. Their answer: yes, $10,580, sixty days. Donald Hall, Ryan's 28-year-old chief engineer, designed the aircraft on the floor of his apartment over the next several days, working from sketches Lindbergh approved by telegram. The team — engineers, machinists, seamstresses doing the fabric — worked seven days a week. Lindbergh moved to San Diego to supervise. On April 28, 1927, exactly sixty days after the contract was signed, the silver Ryan NYP — christened Spirit of St. Louis after the Missouri businessmen who funded it — was towed by car a mile from the factory to a dirt strip called Dutch Flats and Lindbergh took off on her maiden flight. Over 11 days he made 23 test flights between Dutch Flats, Camp Kearny, and Rockwell Field on North Island. Then on May 10, 1927, he departed Rockwell Field on the first leg toward New York. Ten days later, alone over the Atlantic with 425 gallons of gasoline, he flew the 33-hour, 30-minute leg to Le Bourget Field outside Paris and into a crowd of 150,000. The Ryan factory site is mostly absorbed by the modern KSAN Lindbergh Field today. Dutch Flats is townhouses now. The bond issue that funded today's San Diego International Airport passed in 1928 specifically to honor Lindbergh's return — making KSAN the only major U.S. commercial airport named for an aviator.