So Irene stood next to the gleaming ship with Sam, first waving, then looking at each other, then hands on hips casting each other the old challenging gaze—a novelty pose, they called it—and finally Irene sitting on one wing, in between engine and fuselage, while Sam stood next to her knee. That was the shot that made most of the papers, the shot that made the history books and the encyclopedias. Sam propped his elbow on the wing’s edge, right next to Irene’s leg, and they looked sunny and at ease with each other, like they were setting out for a picnic instead of the final test flight of a prototype aircraft they planned to fly across the Pacific Ocean together.

At last Irene nudged Sam, and Sam said, “All right, boys. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time we had ours.”

He put his hands around Irene’s waist and slid her back to the ground, and nobody took a photograph of that. In those days, a respectable newspaper simply wouldn’t publish it.

By the standards of 1928, the Centauri was a large, powerful aircraft. Still, it was not luxurious, certainly not in comparison to the modern passenger airliner. For one thing, when you were traveling thousands of miles over the ocean in 1928, you didn’t carry so much as a pound of unnecessary weight. The main deck was made of aluminum and left bare. The seats had no cushions. The air was hot and smelled of oil and gasoline. It was a special grade of fuel made especially for airplanes, and Sam and Irene weren’t planning to waste a drop of it.

The enclosed cockpit of the Centauri was larger than that of most existing airplanes, but not wide enough to accommodate both of them. Irene sat behind Sam, in the navigator’s seat, which had its own window and communicated with the pilot by means of a pulley cable they called the clothesline, even though their seats were only a yard apart and she could reach out and touch him if she wanted. This was because the two giant engines threw off so much racket, you couldn’t hear anything else inside that airplane but the relentless beat of gears and propellers. Nor did you want to. Without that noise, you were in trouble.