May 20, 1927

Spirit of St. Louis

Lindbergh begins and completes his solo nonstop New York–Paris flight

Car headlights on the roads near Le Bourget helped him find the landing field in the dark, after more than 33 hours awake in an unheated cockpit.

Off Roosevelt Field, alone

On the morning of 20 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off alone from Roosevelt Field on Long Island in the single-engine Ryan NYP monoplane Spirit of St. Louis, bound nonstop for Paris. He was 25, a former barnstormer and airmail pilot.

The aircraft carried 1,704 litres of fuel — so much that Lindbergh could not see directly forward and had to use side windows and a periscope.

He flew through the night on compass, stars and dead reckoning, meeting fog, rain, sleet, cold and low cloud over the Atlantic, sometimes only metres above the waves.

Le Bourget, 10:22 p.m. the next day

He landed at Le Bourget outside Paris at 10:22 p.m. local time on 21 May, after 33 hours 30 minutes in the air over a ratified distance of 5,809 kilometres.

A crowd estimated at 150,000 surged around the aircraft and carried him away from the field, turning a little-known airmail pilot into an international celebrity on landing.

A sealed barograph carried aboard recorded altitude changes and helped officials verify that the flight had been nonstop; the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale ratified it as a straight-line distance-without-landing world record.

Which first this actually was

It was not the first nonstop transatlantic flight of any kind. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had crossed from Newfoundland to Ireland with a two-person crew in June 1919.

Lindbergh's firsts were the solo nonstop crossing and the first nonstop New York–Paris flight. The listing's single date is also incomplete: he took off on 20 May and landed on the evening of the 21st.

Raymond Orteig's $25,000 prize, the decorations and the aviation boom came afterwards, not during the flight.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

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What the sources leave uncertain

The event spans two calendar dates. This sheet uses 1927-05-20 because that was the takeoff date; the achievement was completed on 1927-05-21.
Authoritative sources variously give 33 hours 28 minutes or round the duration to 33 hours 30 minutes. The FAI and modern Smithsonian summaries use 33 hours 30 minutes.
The Library of Congress has one catalog description giving 21–22 May, but contemporary records, the Smithsonian, FAI, and the aircraft’s log establish 20–21 May.