Lindbergh’s 1927 Adventure Lures Young Pilot to Try Atlantic Crossing

Pilot Christopher Lee Marshall spent part of Wednesday in a huge, survival-training water tank at the Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, learning how to escape from a belly-up airplane and climb into a life raft.

Not that Chris figures on ditching his plane into the drink when he flies to Paris this weekend. But an 11-year-old kid can never be too careful.

“I don’t even allow him to go alone to a shopping mall” sighs his mother, Gail Marshall. “And I don’t personally like airplanes. And here he is, getting ready to cross the Atlantic.”

“I tell her she’s a worrywart,” the youngster says.

While most California kids his age are hanging out at the beach or ball field, plying their skateboards up makeshift ramps, packing up for summer camp or hoisting 12-pound balls in a summer bowling league, Christopher Lee Marshall of the small California coastal town of Oceano is scheduled to leave today from San Diego’s Montgomery Field in an attempt to become the youngest pilot to fly across the Atlantic.

Christopher and his co-pilot--who says he’ll keep his hands off the controls unless there’s an emergency or a need to fly by instrument flight rules--will fly first to Texas to pick up their plane, then stop over in St. Louis before arriving in New York City Friday night.

On Saturday, they will leave La Guardia Airport for Montreal, where Canadian officials will inspect the plane and its emergency gear. From there, the two will fly to Sondestrom, Greenland, on Saturday night, and on to Reykjavik, Iceland, Sunday night, before landing in Paris on Monday. The flight will total 3,610 miles, with about half of the 16 hours of total flight time over water.

“This is real exciting,” Chris said Wednesday, while running through his check list one more time: flares, radio transponders, Snickers candy bars, life rafts, a “dry” suit to protect against exposure, shark repellent and a good-luck teddy bear--”Charles Lindbear,” complete with flying goggles.

He’s never been to Paris before, but no problem. “We’ve got maps,” he says.

Last August, Chris, then 10, set a record as the youngest pilot at the time to fly coast-to-coast and back. He was upstaged in April by 9-year-old Tony Aliengena of San Juan Capistrano, who made a similar flight.

Chris’ flight will retrace the path Charles Lindbergh took at the age of 25 when he left San Diego in May, 1927, for New York, by way of St. Louis. From New York he made his historic 33 1/2-hour non-stop flight across the Atlantic.

In addition to the fact that Chris hopes to make the trip in half the time, there are other obvious differences between the two flights. Christopher will make three or four stops for fuel and rest. Lindbergh was alone. Chris has as co-pilot retired Navy Comdr. Randy (Duke) Cunningham, the nation’s most decorated flying ace during the Vietnam War and later an instructor at Miramar’s famed “Top Gun” fighter pilot school.

When Lindbergh landed, he was greeted with champagne. Chris will probably have a soft drink thrust in his hand.

Lindbergh made the newsreels and won the heart of the world without a press agent. The 11-year-old has a public relations man, Patrick Flack, who on Wednesday was in New York trying to complete negotiations for a TV commercial to be broadcast on American television within 24 hours of Monday’s touchdown.

A public relations man?

There’s more to this flight than a single-engine Mooney 252, a co-pilot, shark repellent and a teddy bear.

There will be three compact video cameras inside the cockpit--and maybe a fourth attached to the wing--for footage for a video movie. An author is already working on a biography. There’s a fellow hustling souvenir T-shirts and caps. There’s the publicity man helping to arrange interviews. And there’s talk of several television commercials, including one for a soft drink and another for a family amusement park. And there will be promotions back home.

To handle all this, mother, son and Flack set up a company, Interlift. The promotion is necessary, says his mother, because the flight and its attendant expenses will cost perhaps $75,000, even after the plane is lent by Mooney Aircraft, which is also picking up the fuel costs.

If there’s any money left over, Gail Marshall said, it will go into a trust fund for her son.

All this, because a dad took his 4-year-old son flying seven years ago.

Christopher was born with cleft feet and spent his first three years in a foot-to-hip cast. “We never even expected him to walk,” Gail Marshall said. “But he’s always had so much determination to complete all his dreams, and flying was one of them, ever since he was 4 and he went flying with his father,” Lee Marshall, a commercial airline pilot who is now divorced from Gail.

Co-pilot Cunningham, now dean of the National University Flight School in San Diego, said he met the young Marshall at an Oxnard air show last year, where they “struck up a mutual admiration society for each other.”

The trip, he said, is intended in part to attract other youngsters to the aviation industry, which he said is suffering from a lack of young blood given the diminishing number of military pilots.

“If an 11-year-old can fly across the Atlantic and from that we can turn one Jonathan Livingston Seagull on to aviation, the whole flight is worth it,” he said.

Chris seems a little nonchalant about the whole thing. “I like to fly,” he says about his mission in life. “It’s fun, like being off the Earth a little bit.”

After Paris, what’s next?

“Around the world,” he says, without a flinch. And after that? “Fly to the moon?” he asks, giggling.