Dave Kearton wrote:

: The difficulty I have with the Spirit of St Louis is that it's a US national
: icon and that there's bound to be a fair amount of emotion tied up in
: defending it.

It was a good design for the flight; but it was only
Lindbergh's second best option. He really wanted to
have the Bellanca in which Chamberlin and Levin flew
from New York to Berlin, a few day's after Lindbergh's
flight from New York to Paris. Note that the Bellanca
was able to make a longer flight, carrying two people
instead of one, and was a practical aircraft for daily
use (which the Spirit of St. Louis emphatically was
not). Later another Bellanca made the first non-stop
crossing of the Pacific.

: The plane that seems to have avoided the Usenet radar is the Vickers Vimy
: that Alcock and Brown used to FIRST fly across the Atlantic.

The Vimy was a fairly conservative design, very much
a WWI bomber and nothing more.

IMHO the really great aircraft of the period was the
Fokker F.VII/3m, especially the version with Wright
Whirlwind engines. This not only made great long-distance
flights, but it also opened transcontinental routes
for commercial traffic.

Emmanuel Gustin
--
http://users.skynet.be/Emmanuel.Gustin/