When Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, embarked on their ambitious 1933 flight to survey over-water routes for airlines, they packed a secret weapon. The famous couple headed to some of the most isolated areas of the North and South Atlantic because that’s where the most direct routes from North America to Europe and South America lay.
Technology had come a long way since Lindbergh’s most famous flight from New York to Paris just six years earlier, and the heart of their new Lockheed Model 8 Sirius (named Tingmissartoq by a young Inuit boy in Greenland) was a brand-new Wright Cyclone SR-1820 radial engine, a state-of-the-art powerhouse that made 710 hp and set the standard for reliable performance at a time when powerplant technology was rapidly developing.
