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In the early 1930’s, Charles Lindbergh worked as a very high-profile technical advisor for Pan Am Airlines. He actively participated in route planning and aircraft design approval, along with making a number of pioneering flights in the Caribbean, Central and South America with Pan Am’s growing fleet of flying boats. The collaboration of Lindbergh, Juan Trippe (Pan Am’s dynamic CEO), and Igor Sikorsky was both a technical and marketing powerhouse.

In mid-October of 1931, While making the inaugural commercial flight of the Sikorsky S-40 flying boat (the Flying Forest), the plane piloted by Lindbergh was being refuelled at it’s scheduled stop in Barranquilla, Colombia. Lindbergh was supervising refuelling by standing atop the fabric and dope covered wing when the fuel tanks were overfilled to the point where avgas was running off the wing and spreading on the water below. Lindbergh shouted at the bystanders on the adjoining docks to extinguish their cigars and cigarettes immediately. They did so, by flipping them into the gas covered water. Historically, disaster was averted by those smokes not igniting the gas.

What might have happened IF the gas and plane went up with a whoosh and a bang and Lindbergh perishes in the conflagration?

  • What happens to Lindbergh’s aviation legacy?
  • Obviously, with the POD of 1931, Lindbergh doesn’t live to play a role in isolationism, or even his tempered admiration of the Nazi’s. How does his absence factor into those developments?
  • Impact on US military aviation in WW2, specifically Lindbergh’s work in the South Pacific?
  • Does the kidnapping of the “Lindbergh baby” occur?
  • Does the high profile disaster impact Pan Am or Sikorsky Aviation
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