The Spirit of St. Louis (Registration: N-X-211) is the airplane that was flown by Charles Lindbergh in 1927, on the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris.  It made him a world-wide celebrity.  The original Spirit of St. Louis airplane now hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.  In 1928. three flyable reproductions were made.  They were used to make movies like the 1938 production Men with Wings, starring a thirty year old Fred MacMurray.

The one pictured in this post is on display at the Missouri History Museum, in St. Louis.  The second is part of the collection at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The third belongs to the Cradle of Aviation Museum located in Garden City (Long Island), New York, not far from the site of Roosevelt Field from which the original departed in 1927.  A much later built static reproduction hangs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

The Spirit of St. Louis was so named, because a group of Saint Louis businessmen put up the money for the building of the airplane.  It was built by Ryan Air in San Diego.  After he finished flight testing there, Lindbergh flew non-stop to Saint Louis and landed at Lambert Field.  This is the present-day sight of the Saint Louis airport.  His next flight was to Long Island and then Paris.  After he returned to America he flew The Spirit around the country and was celebrated wherever he went.  On his final flight in The Spirit of St. Louis he took off from Lambert fiend in Saint Louis and flew to Washington D.C.  There he personally presented the airplane to the Smithsonian.