In May 1928, days after his plane, The Spirit of St Louis, landed in France after his record-breaking nonstop Atlantic crossing, Charles Lindbergh lost his flying helmet.

High in the sky above Le Bourget airport near Paris, while engaged in a mock dogfight with a French aviator and performing acrobatic feats in a borrowed fighter plane, it fell off.

The following day, a woman discovered the brown leather, sheepskin-lined hat in her vegetable patch. She took it home and kept it.

Lindbergh wears a leather flying helmet similar to the one he lost in Paris in 1928. Photograph: AP

Nearly 70 years later, having remained in the same family, the battered helmet is up for auction in Paris with a guide price of up to €80,000 (£72,000). Lot number 123 will go under the hammer at the Hôtel Drouot house in Paris on 16 November.

Lindbergh, nicknamed the Lone Eagle, was a 25-year-old pilot for the US postal service when he achieved instant fame by flying from Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget in Paris.

The Britons John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had made the first nonstop transatlantic flight in 1919, and there were other successful trips before Lindbergh’s. However, his was the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight, and the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. His 33-and-a-half-hour journey also entered the record books as the longest in distance at 3,600 miles (5,800km).

Six celebrated aviators had lost their lives trying to be the first to fly from New York to Paris alone. When Lindbergh arrived in France he was mobbed and his single-seat biplane was damaged by souvenir hunters. He was later appointed to the Légion d’Honneur.



On his return to America, Lindbergh became a household name. But he suffered tragedy in 1932 when his baby son, Charles Jr, was kidnapped from the family home. The 20-month-old’s body was later found nearby.

Though Lindbergh became a prize-winning author, explorer, environmental campaigner and inventor, his legacy is indelibly stained by his well-documented antisemitism and fascist sympathies; he supported the Nazi view of race, religion and eugenics, and believed in the superiority of the white Nordic race.

He died on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 1974 aged 72.