[21] To gain flight experience and earn money for further instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the next few months barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist.

[34] Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training a year earlier remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925, thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.

[N 3] The Army did not need additional active-duty pilots, however, so following graduation, Lindbergh returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor, although as a reserve officer he also continued to do some part-time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St. Louis.

[47] On September 21, 1926, World War I French flying ace René Fonck's Sikorsky S-35 crashed on takeoff from Roosevelt Field in New York, killing crew members Jacob Islamoff and Charles Clavier.

On May 8 French war heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli departed Paris – Le Bourget Airport in the Levasseur PL 8 seaplane L'Oiseau Blanc; they disappeared somewhere in the Atlantic after last being seen crossing the west coast of Ireland.

[53] The group tried to buy an "off-the-peg" single or multiengine monoplane from Wright Aeronautical, then Travel Air, and finally the newly formed Columbia Aircraft Corporation, but all insisted on selecting the pilot as a condition of sale.

On May 28, Lindbergh flew to Evere Aerodrome in Brussels, Belgium, circling the field three times for the cheering crowd and taxiing to a halt just after 3:00 PM, as a thousand children waved American flags.

Coolidge's own executive order, published in March 1927, required recipients to perform their feats of airmanship "while participating in an aerial flight as part of the duties incident to such membership [in the Organized Reserves]", which Lindbergh failed to satisfy.

The route was not available for commercial service until after World War II, as prewar aircraft lacked the range to fly Alaska to Japan nonstop, and the United States had not officially recognized the Soviet government.

[193] Arthur Krock, the chief of The New York Times's Washington Bureau, wrote in 1939, "When the new flying fleet of the United States begins to take air, among those who will have been responsible for its size, its modernness, and its efficiency is Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.

[210]In April 1941, he argued before 30,000 members of the America First Committee that "the British government has one last desperate plan ... to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war.

[212] President Franklin Roosevelt publicly decried Lindbergh's views as those of a "defeatist and appeaser", comparing him to U.S. Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham, who had led the "Copperhead" movement opposed to the American Civil War.

"[230][231] Lindbergh considered Russia a "semi-Asiatic" country compared to Germany, and he believed Communism was an ideology that would destroy the West's "racial strength" and replace everyone of European descent with "a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown".

[246][250] On July 28, 1944, during a P-38 bomber escort mission with the 433rd Fighter Squadron in the Ceram area, Lindbergh shot down a Mitsubishi Ki-51 "Sonia" observation plane, piloted by Captain Saburo Shimada, commanding officer of the 73rd Independent Chutai.

With most of eastern Europe under communist control, Lindbergh continued to voice concern about Soviet power, observing: "Freedom of speech and action is suppressed over a large portion of the world...Poland is not free, nor the Baltic states, nor the Balkans.

"[253] In Lindbergh's words, Soviet and communist influence over the post-war world meant that "while our soldiers have been victorious," America had nonetheless not "accomplished the objectives for which we went to war," and he declared: "We have not established peace or liberty in Europe.

[254] As Berg wrote in 1998, Lindbergh returned from this two-month European journey "more alarmed about the state of the world than ever," but nonetheless "he knew that the American public no longer gave a hoot for his opinions.

"[253] Soon after returning to America, Lindbergh paid a visit to his mother in Detroit, and on the train home he wrote a letter wherein he mentioned a "spiritual awareness," speaking of how important it was to spend time in the garden, take in the sun, and listen to birds.

)"[274] In later life Lindbergh was heavily involved in conservation movements, and was deeply concerned about the negative impacts of new technologies on the natural world and native peoples, focusing on regions like Hawaii, Africa, and the Philippines.

[256] He contrasted his time amid the African landscape with his involvement in a supersonic transport convention in New York, and while "lying under an acacia tree," he realized how the "construction of an airplane" was simple compared to the "evolutionary achievement of a bird."

[256] As David Boocker wrote in 2009, Lindbergh's essays, appearing in popular magazines, "introduced millions of people to the conservation cause," and he made an important "appeal to lead a life less complicated by technology.

Although both NBC Evening News and National Geographic ran stories about the supposed discovery of the tribe, a controversy emerged over whether the Tasaday were truly uncontacted, or had just been portrayed that way for media attention—particularly by Manuel Elizalde Jr., a Philippine politician who publicized the tribe—and were in reality "not completely isolated.

[288][289] U.S. Air Force Maj. Bruce Ware and his crew—co-pilot Lt. Col. Dick Smith, flight engineer SSgt Bob Baldwin, and pararescueman Airman 1st Class Kim Robinson—flew their Sikorsky HH-3E Jolly Green Giant over 600 miles (970 km) to rescue Lindbergh and his news crew on April 12, 1972.

But when you've got an international hero, it kind of gains some momentum.”[293] Lindbergh joined with early aviation industrialist, former Pan Am executive vice president, and longtime friend, Samuel F. Pryor Jr., in "efforts by the Nature Conservancy to preserve plants and wildlife in Kipahulu Valley" on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

[297][305] After he realized the treatment would not save him, he decided to leave Columbia hospital and returned to Kipahulu with his wife Anne, flying to Honolulu on August 17 and then traveling to Maui by small plane, dying a week later.

[296] On the evening of August 26, President Gerald Ford made a tribute to Lindbergh, saying that the courage and daring of his Atlantic flight would never be forgotten, describing him as a selfless, sincere man, and stating: "For a generation of Americans, and for millions of other people around the world, the 'Lone Eagle' represented all that was best in our country.

Included among those writings were five other books: The Culture of Organs (with Dr. Alexis Carrel) (1938), Of Flight and Life (1948), The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (1970), Boyhood on the Upper Mississippi (1972), and his unfinished Autobiography of Values (posthumous, 1978).

[358] Shortly after he made his famous flight, the Stratemeyer Syndicate began publishing a series of books for juvenile readers called the Ted Scott Flying Stories (1927–1943), which were written by a number of authors using the nom de plume "Franklin W. Dixon", in which the pilot hero was closely modeled after Lindbergh.

The Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America (2004) explores an alternate history where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Lindbergh, who allies the United States with Nazi Germany.

[361] The Robert Harris novel Fatherland (1992) explores an alternate history where the Nazis won the war, the United States still defeats Japan, Adolf Hitler and President Joseph Kennedy negotiate peace terms, and Lindbergh is the US Ambassador to Germany.