The Spirit of St. Louis
Only days later, Ryan Airlines received an inquiry from Robertson Aircraft Corp. of St. Louis asking if they could design and build an aircraft capable of flying nonstop from New York to Paris. Donald Hall signed off on the inquiry. Ryan Airlines responded in the affirmative and after all the other potential manufacturers had said no, Charles A. Lindbergh finally traveled to San Diego to inspect the Ryan Airlines facility. There he met Donald Hall for the first time. After touring the facility with the new owner Benjamin Franklin Mahoney, Lindbergh met and discussed the project with Donald A. Hall in his second story office. Lindbergh wanted to decide if the company could really deliver on the proposed aircraft.
Lindbergh later stated in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Spirit of St. Louis, that the decision to go with Ryan Airlines would depend primarily on his estimate of the chief engineer, Donald Hall. He found a true partner in Donald Hall and the men at Ryan Airlines, so an agreement was finalized and the two men began working closely to design and construct the aircraft in only sixty days. History would be made in that short amount of time.
The final aircraft was known as the Ryan NYP (registration number N-X-211) which captured popular imagination as the Spirit of St. Louis in May 1927 by flying nonstop from New York to Paris. Charles A. Lindbergh would become a world wide celebrity because of this famous flight and aviation would become much more popular around the globe.
Hall left Ryan Airlines in 1929 after the company became Mahoney-Ryan Airlines and later relocated to St. Louis.
Read more about this topic: Donald A. Hall
Famous quotes containing the words spirit and/or louis:
“He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)