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Spirit of St. Louis (First solo non-stop transatlantic flight, 1927)
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Custom built high-wing monoplane (1927)
The Spirit of St. Louis (formally the Ryan NYP, registration: N-X-211) is the custom-built, single-engine, single-seat, high-wing monoplane that was flown by Charles Lindbergh on May 20–21, 1927, on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France, for which Lindbergh won the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
I’ve always loved that all this specialized work and preparation went into making the Spirit of St. Louis and its flight and a decade later “Wrong Way” Corrigan does basically the same thing in a plane repeatedly deemed unfit to fly by authorities and was leaking so much fuel Corrigan punched a hole in the floor to drain it because it was sloshing around his feet.