The Race

Isaac Bell did not hear it over the roar of the Gnome, but he saw a big white puff of gunpowder smoke.

They had drawn straws for start position. First to tear across the grass was cotton planter Steve Stevens, his enormous white biplane powered by twin pump-fed V-8 Antoinettes that were similar to the motor in Josephine’s machine only bigger. Dmitri Platov had installed them, joking with the other mechanicians that the Antoinettes’ high ratio of power to weight almost made up for the Southern cotton planter’s to

Army Lieutenant Chet Bass rose next in his orange Signal Corps Wright 1909 Military Flyer. Joe Mudd followed in his “Revolution Red” biplane. Moments after Mudd circled the start pylon, Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin passed him in his blue headless pusher. Machine after machine took to the air, had its time noted when it circled the start pylon, and headed for the Statue of Liberty.

Josephine had drawn the short straw. She rose last, leaping her Celere off the field in less than eighty yards, diving dangerously close to the ground to gain speed in the pylon turn, and whipped west as if fired from a slingshot. Bell flew above and slightly behind her, blessing Andy Moser for tuning the Gnome engine so finely that it could hold the pace of Josephine’s powerful Antoinette.

The immensity of his task struck hard, as the land swiftly changed from the open farm fields of Nassau to the rooftops of densely developed Brooklyn. He could see everything for miles ahead but nothing in detail. If Harry Frost opened fire, shielded by chimneys, pigeon coops, and clotheslines of flapping laundry, the first clue in the air would be lead ripping into Josephine’s machine.

Or his, Bell comforted himself grimly, since the two yellow craft looked so similar. Also of some relief, the aviatrix’s course was constantly altered by air currents and wind gusts. If Frost ended up a quarter mile to either side of it, the same objects screening him would block a clear shot. Which made it all the more likely that the savvy hunter would attack from the water.

Bell saw it gleaming up ahead ten minutes after Josephine took to the air.

New York Harbor was a huge swath of rivers and bays cluttered with tugs, fleets of ferries carrying people to watch the race, barges, steamers, black freighters billowing smoke, four-masted ships, fishing boats, oyster boats, rowboats, speedboats, and lighters. To his right, Bell saw the Brooklyn Bridge draped across the East River, co

Dead ahead, Bell saw Brooklyn ending at Buttermilk Cha

The colossal copper green statue stood three hundred feet tall on a granite-clad pedestal set atop an ancient stone star-shaped fort on tiny Bedloe’s Island. The Van Dorn Agency had another V-marked launch cruising near Bedloe’s, weaving among the ferryboats, barges furnished with bleachers, and private yachts packed with spectators waving hats and handkerchiefs.

Bell saw that Steve Stevens’s white biplane had already circled the waypoint and was disappearing far to the north up the Hudson River. He was closely followed by Billy Thomas in the race-car driver’s green Curtiss Pusher. Four contestants trailed them. Joe Mudd’s red biplane was just completing its turn around the tall statue, and two fliers were close behind him. Missing from the field was Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher, and Bell knew that Josephine had to be worried that the Englishman was so far ahead of Stevens that he was already sipping tea in Yonkers.

Bell took his left hand off the control wheel, gripped the field glasses suspended from his neck, and sca

The Eagle lurched like an auto skidding toward a ditch. Bell let go of his glasses to use both hands. When he had coaxed her back on an even keel, he resumed flying with one hand, spun the focus wheel to narrow in on the wreckage, and found the Englishman with his field glasses. The baronet was kneeling on the pusher’s top wing. His goggles were askew, and he had lost his helmet, but he had somehow managed to light a cigarette. He greeted the first tug to arrive to fish him out of the water with a grateful wave of his smoke.

Before Bell could resume scrutinizing small boats with his field glasses, he ran into a patch of rough air that required both hands to control the American Eagle. It got rougher, roller-coastering him fiercely. He guessed that he had driven into the precise junction in the sky where opposing winds, blowing down the rivers and up New York Bay, butted heads violently. Whatever the cause, he felt them battering his monoplane, testing Di Vecchio’s wing design for weaknesses.

Suddenly the machine heeled on its side, turned to the right, and fell.

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ISAAC BELL ACTED INSTINCTIVELY, quickly, and decisively, and tried to steer out of the turn with the rudder. As he turned the rudder, he pulled back on the wheel to raise the nose. Neither rudder nor elevator had any effect. The American Eagle turned tighter and heeled more sharply.

His instincts had betrayed him. His propeller pointed into empty sky, and the ships in the harbor were suddenly under his right shoulder. And then, before he could reckon what he was doing wrong, everything began to spin.

He glimpsed a blur of yellow in the corner of his eye. In a flash, it was huge. Josephine’s machine. He whizzed past it like an express train, missing her by yards, imagining Joe Van Dorn’s reaction when, in the course of protecting America’s Sweetheart of the Air, his chief investigator smashed into her in full view of a million spectators.

Speed! Josephine’s first answer whenever he posed a question about flying technique. Speed is your friend. Speed makes air strong.

Bell turned his rudder back to a neutral position, stopped pulling on the control post and shoved it forward. Then, as gently as if he were commanding a frightened horse, he tilted the post sideways, raising the alettone on his left wing, lowering the one on the right. The American Eagle straightened out of its heel, stopped falling sideways, dipped its nose, and accelerated.

He was out of it in seconds. The gusts were still knocking him about, but the Eagle felt more like an aeroplane now than a falling rock. Speed, he thought ruefully, as the machine settled down. Easy to know in theory when flying on an even keel, hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

The confluence of river and sea winds that had nearly undone him proved to be as determined as it was deadly. It spawned a second maelstrom, more vicious than the first, that slammed into Josephine.

Bell had been lucky, he realized. It had hit him with a glancing blow. The full force of a band of crazily twirling wind gusts struck Josephine’s Celere so hard that it knocked her out of the sky. Her machine flipped on its side. And, in an instant, the monoplane was falling in an uncontrollable flat spin.