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.
18
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.
As it plummeted under his machine, Bell saw a piece break off her left wing.
The broken piece trailed her, snared by control wires. He recognized an alettone, one of her hinged control flaps. Then the wires parted, and the flap blew away like a leaf in the wind. If Bell himself had not just battled the same gusts, he would have reckoned that Harry Frost had blasted the appendage with a heavy rifle slug. But this assault on Josephine was no criminal attack. This was Mother Nature at her worst. While not as malicious, the effect would be as deadly.
Josephine did not hesitate. Speed!
Bell saw her throw herself forward, thrusting all the weight of her slight frame to push her control wheel. She was trying to drop the nose, pushing the aeroplane to fall forward instead of sideways. At the same time, she was tilting her remaining alettone to turn against the spin.
Bell tensed every muscle, as if he could somehow help her machine survive by force of will. But it seemed certain that despite her cool courage, lightning reflexes, and vast experience, the power of the wind and the crippling loss of a control flap would smash her into the harbor.
He saw a blur of light ripple across the waters around the Statue of Liberty. Spectators on scores of boats were looking up at her falling craft, thousands of faces agape with horror.
Bell hit his blip switch, cutting off his motor, and put the monoplane into a steep volplane, dropping after Josephine’s machine at a sharp angle, trying to stay with her, in a desperate impulse to help that was as impetuous as it was futile. The wind humming in the wire stays rose in pitch, shrieking, as the Eagle increased speed.
One hundred feet above the water, Josephine’s aeroplane banked sharply into a turn that put her on a collision course with the colonnaded pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Leveling off, her craft headed directly into the wind, which was blowing every flag in a stiff line from the south. It descended and wobbled left of the statue. She was attempting to alight, Bell realized with unexpected hope. She appeared to be aiming for a tiny patch of lawn beneath the stone walls of the star fort and the water.
The narrow space looked no bigger than a country vegetable garden, not more than sixty yards long and barely two wingspans wide. But as Bell leveled out of his glide and restarted the Gnome, he saw that that was all the room the aviatrix needed. Her wheels touched at the start of the green grass, and the monoplane bounced, skidded, and stopped a foot from the water’s edge at the
