61 Years After Lindbergh, Boy of 11 Will Fly to Paris

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,” said his mother, Gail Marshall. “And I don’t personally like airplanes. And, here he is, getting ready to cross the Atlantic.”

Young pilot Chris says he tells his mother that “she’s a worry wart.”

Round the World Next

Come on, Mom, mellow out. He wants to fly around the world next, so you’d better lighten up and go with the flow. And, as you say, it sure beats doing drugs.

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

Chris and his co-pilot, who says he will keep his hands off the controls unless there is 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.

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

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

In addition to making the trip in half the time, there are other obvious differences between the two flights. Lindbergh flew non-stop once he left New York City; Chris will make three or four stops for fuel and rest. Lindbergh was alone; Chris has a co-pilot--retired Navy Cmdr. 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 into his hand.

Lindbergh made the newsreels and won the heart of the world without a press agent. Chris has a public relations man, who on Wednesday was trying to complete negotiations for a TV commercial to be broadcast on American television within 24 hours of Monday’s touchdown.

‘Real Exciting’

“This is real exciting,” Chris said Wednesday while running through his checklist one more time--flares; radio transponders; candy bars; life rafts; a “dry” suit to protect against exposure in the water; shark repellent and Charles Lindbear, a good-luck teddy bear that wears aviator goggles.

Chris has never been to Paris, but no problem: “We’ve got maps.”

Indeed, everything that Chris says seems a little nonchalant. “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, nary a flinch. And after that? “Fly to the moon?” he asks, giggling.

Hey, kid, can you even reach the pedals? “No problem,” he says. “I’m 4-foot-12, about.”

“I’ve never worked with someone who’s so unimpressed with himself,” remarked his public relations manager, Patrick Flack, in a telephone interview from a hotel suite in New York City, where he will reconnect with Chris and Cunningham Friday night before himself flying--commercially--to Paris.

A public relations man? Maybe for a Hollywood movie brat, but some kid out of the Central California coastal community of Oceano?

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 to be called “The Sky’s the Limit.” An author is already working on a Christopher Lee Marshall biography of the same name. There’s a fellow hustling souvenir T-shirts and caps. There’s the P.R. 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, near San Luis Obispo.

Company Formed

To handle all this, mother, son and Flack set up a company, Interlift. The promotion is necessary, says his mother, because the flight will cost more than $75,000, even after the plane is lent by Mooney Aircraft, which is also picking up the fuel tab. So there is a need for other corporate sponsors and private donations.

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

All this, because a dad took his 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,” his mother said, adding, “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.” His father, Lee Marshall, is 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 Chris at an air show last year in Oxnard and they “struck up a mutual admiration society for each other.”

“Every time I turned around, he was following me like a puppy dog,” Cunningham recalled.

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.

“The future of America is not only with the space program but with aviation as well,” Cunningham said. “But we can’t wait another 10, 15 or 20 years to start training new pilots.

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

Mom has another perspective: “Christopher has a message for the youth of the world, that whatever your dream may be, if you work hard enough, you can accomplish it.

“I’m just trying to make his dream come true. But I’m sure it will pay off for me down the road in another way. I don’t think Chris will have time to get involved in the drug scene. That’s my payoff.”