Flight of fancy Students replicating cockpit of Lindbergh's pla

ST. LOUIS -- Flying solo for more than 33 hours across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh made do in the monoplane cockpit so spartan it didn't even have fuel gauges -- something he considered unnecessary weight in his bid to stretch every precious drop of fuel.

A windshield? Forget it. Lindbergh's famous "Spirit of St. Louis" 75 years ago was like a flying submarine, its front window sacrificed for greater fuel tank space. To see his way over the sea and into the history books, Lindbergh had a periscope.

"People today see all the electronics, instrumentation and windows in planes, all of which run counter to the experience he had," said Charles Kirkpatrick, dean of Saint Louis University's Parks College of Engineering and Aviation.

Now, Lindbergh's cramped, primitive space behind the throttle is coming alive, courtesy of Parks College students replicating the cockpit for all to see.

Given that Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis now hangs from the rafters of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., those behind the re-creation believe that few have seen the actual plane's cockpit. Seeing a cross-section replica, they say, could amplify Lindbergh's feat in a flying machine so primitive by today's standards.

"We wanted to let people know what it was like to sit in this thing for 33 1/2 hours" as Lindbergh did, Kirkpatrick said. "One way is to do it with pictures, the other way with models. The whole point is to let people experience the difficulties, the challenge."

And so the project took flight.

Crunching numbers

Largely using photographs and some drawings of the Spirit of St. Louis' cabin, a collection of Parks College students since last month have punched into a computer the perceived dimensions of the instrumentation and parts.

The computer then feeds the dimensions to a machine that crafts the parts out of plastic. Each piece could take three to 44 hours -- no small task, considering that Lindbergh's fuel-regulation system was a maze of tubes and valves.

Working as volunteers without class credit, the students painted the roughly 60 components to mirror the originals.

"The point here is not to have it be a functional model, just to replicate the appearance," Kirkpatrick said, estimating that the parts cost as much as $5,000 to make. "What would be really expensive is if we had to pay for labor. But the students are donating their time, doing it for the experience of taking conceptual things and making them reality."

Michael Jennings won't argue with that. As one of the project's team leaders, the junior studying aerospace engineering says he has sacrificed sleep while juggling studies in trying to finish the job by this week, when the replica is to be moved to the local Missouri History Museum for an exhibit scheduled to open May 5.

"It would have been nice to have more time, but it's actually starting to look like something," said Jennings, 20. "I'd definitely do it all over again. One of the reasons I became an engineer was because I enjoy building and making things."

After its local exhibition through at least the end of this year, the display is to move on to museums in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan and Virginia.

The project's completion is timely, given Erik Lindbergh's expected departure Wednesday from New York in his Paris-bound quest to match his grandfather's historic 1927 trans-Atlantic flight.