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| Ryan NYP "Spirit of St. Louis" |
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Length: 11 1/2"
Wingspan: 20"
Scale: 1/28
Includes desk stand.
The Spirit of St. Louis (Registration: N-X-211) is the custom-built single engine, single seat monoplane that was flown solo by Charles Lindbergh on May 20Ð21, 1927, on the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris for which Lindbergh won the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
Lindbergh took off in the Spirit from Roosevelt Airfield, Garden City (Long Island), New York and landed 33 hours, 30 minutes later at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris, France.
Officially known as the Ryan NYP (for New York to Paris), the single-engine monoplane was designed by Donald A. Hall of the aircraft manufacturer Ryan Airlines located in San Diego, California. To save design time the NYP was loosely based on the company's 1926 Ryan M-2 mail-plane with the main difference being the 4,000 mile range of the NYP. Hall documented his design in "Engineering Data on the Spirit of St. Louis" which he prepared for the US NACA and is included as an appendix to Lindbergh's 1953 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Spirit of St. Louis.
In 1927, the company was owned by Benjamin Franklin Mahoney who had co-founded it as an airline in 1925 with T. Claude Ryan. The latter remained with the company after Mahoney bought out his interest in 1926, but there is some dispute as to how involved Ryan may have been in its management after selling his share. It is known, however, that Hawley Bowlus was the factory manager who oversaw construction of the Ryan NYP, and that B.F. Mahoney was the sole owner at the time of Donald A. Hall's hiring. Although the "Spirit" was designed and built in San Diego for a flight from New York to Paris, it was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri because both Lindbergh and his financial backers lived in that city. The flight was inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris which Lindbergh would win in the monoplane. (The three earlier failed attempts made prior to Lindbergh's flight, in which a total of six aircrew were killed, all involved biplanes.) Hall and Ryan Airlines' staff worked closely with Lindbergh to design and build the Spirit in just 60 days. Although what was actually paid to Ryan Aeronautical for the project isn't clear, Mahoney offered to do it "at cost."
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