“Well, Dick Byrd had accomplished his life’s ambition. But it didn’t mean that he was ready to quit. There were new fields to conquer. How about flying the Atlantic? He’d always wanted to fly the Atlantic. Anything that was all adventure appealed to him. So when they hoisted anchor at Spitzbergen after the flight across the Pole Byrd said to his companion Bennett, ‘Now we can fly the Atlantic.’ “The plan to fly the ocean had its origin in the same motives that the North Pole flight had. Byrd wanted to make America aviation conscious; and he wanted to make American aviators conscious of the benefits of careful planning. Dozens of lives had been lost in unsuccessful trans-oceanic flights—the lives of young men full of the love of adventure, who made hasty plans, or no plans at all for spanning the ocean—who had no qualifications except a great ambition to see them through the great grind that was before them. Byrd wanted to show all fool-hardy young flyers that care, care, and more care was needed in their preparations. He had to prove to the United States, too, that if care were exercised in these flights, they were not necessarily dangerous. All this Byrd had to prove. And in the meantime he’d have the time of his life, steeped in the adventurous sort of work that he craved. “So Byrd and Bennett started their plans. The first step, of course, was the choosing of the plane. Opinion was in favor of a single-motored plane for a cross-Atlantic flight, since a single-motored plane would have a greater cruising range; offer less resistance in the air; and be less complicated to handle than a multi-motored craft. But Byrd held out for the tri-motor, the same type of plane as the Josephine Ford, which had carried him over the Pole. There was this to say for it: if one motor stopped, the other two would still function; and it might be the solution to the problem of what kind of plane would cross the Atlantic in the future, when planes ran on regular schedule. They wanted a bigger plane than the Josephine Ford, though. So they had one designed with a wing spread of 71 feet, which meant that they got an increased lifting power of about 3,000 pounds. That enabled them to take along about 800 pounds of equipment above what they actually needed, to show that a pay load could be carted across the water in a plane. “They needed plenty of equipment, though. There was a special radio set, rockets to shoot off as signals if anything went wrong; two rubber boats for the crew; and emergency food and equipment of all sorts for forced landings; and even a special apparatus for making drinking water out of salt water so that they would not go thirsty. In fact, they could have survived for three weeks in case of an accident. They? Why, Byrd decided that besides himself and Bennett, they would take along passengers, also to prove something—this time that passengers could be carried across to Europe by plane.