The Spirit of St. Louis

Spirit of St. Louis Ryan NYP
Role	Long-range aircraft [for record attempt]
Manufacturer	Ryan Airlines
Designer	Donald A. Hall
First flight	April 28, 1927
Retired	April 30, 1928
Produced	1927
Number built	1
Unit cost	$10,580 ($144,931.51 in 2015)
Developed from	Ryan M-2
Career
Registration	N-X-211
First flight	April 28, 1927
Owners and operators	Charles Lindbergh
Flights	174
Total hours	489 hours, 28 minutes
Preserved at	National Air and Space Museum

The Spirit of St. Louis (Registration: N-X-211) is the custom-built, single engine, single-seat monoplane that was flown solo by Charles Lindbergh on May 20–21, 1927, on the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France, for which Lindbergh won the $25,000 Orteig Prize.

Lindbergh took off in the Spirit from Roosevelt Airfield, Garden City, New York, and landed 33 hours, 30 minutes later at Aéroport Le Bourget in Paris, France, a distance of approximately 3,600 miles (5,800 km). One of the best known aircraft in the world, the Spirit was built by Ryan Airlines in San Diego, California, which at the time was owned and operated by Benjamin Franklin Mahoney who had purchased it from its founder, T. Claude Ryan, in 1926. The Spirit is now on permanent display in the main entryway's Milestones of Flight gallery at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Officially known as the "Ryan NYP" (for New York to Paris), the single engine monoplane was designed by Donald A. Hall of Ryan Airlines and was named the "Spirit of St. Louis" in honor of Lindbergh's supporters from the St. Louis Raquette Club in his then hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. To save design time, the NYP was loosely based on the company's 1926 Ryan M-2 mailplane with the main difference being the 4,000 mile range of the NYP and, as a non-standard design, the government assigned it the registration number N-X-211 (for "experimental"). Hall documented his design in "Engineering Data on the Spirit of St. Louis" which he prepared for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and is included as an appendix to Lindbergh's 1953 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Spirit of St. Louis.