In February 1927, Charles Lindbergh arrived in San Diego with a commission and a deadline. He was a 25-year-old airmail pilot who wanted to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, had $15,000 in backing from St. Louis businessmen, and had been turned down by every established aircraft manufacturer on the East Coast. The Glenn L. Martin Company in Cleveland passed. Columbia Aircraft turned him down. Fokker didn't take the meeting.
Ryan Airlines, operating out of a small factory on Juniper Street just east of where San Diego International Airport now stands, said yes.
Ryan's designer, Donald Hall, worked closely with Lindbergh on the specifications. The requirements were unusual: a single-engine monoplane that could carry enough fuel for 3,600 miles, flown by one person, without stops. Hall had to reconfigure Ryan's standard B-1 monoplane design from the ground up to carry the fuel load, while keeping the structure light enough to lift it. The wing was lengthened. The fuselage was redesigned. The cockpit was positioned behind the engine, with only side windows — no forward visibility except through a periscope — to save weight and allow the fuel tanks to sit where they provided the best balance.
Ryan's staff completed the Spirit of St. Louis in sixty days. Lindbergh test-flew it at Dutch Flats Airport, a nearby field on the San Diego mesa. He then flew it nonstop from San Diego to New York — setting a transcontinental speed record in the process — before departing Roosevelt Field on Long Island on May 20, 1927, for Paris.
He landed at Le Bourget field 33 hours and 30 minutes later. The aircraft had been built in a factory that no longer exists, near a runway that the Spirit's own takeoff tests helped establish as a viable airport site. That airport is now San Diego International Airport — Lindbergh Field.
Lindbergh Field is immediately adjacent to the bay on the north shore, between Harbor Island and the MCRD campus. Jets on final approach to Runway 27 cross directly over the water at low altitude — gear down, flaps extended, engines at low power. From JADA's deck, departing aircraft climb over your mast. The airport sits within a few hundred feet of the water.
The factory where the Spirit of St. Louis was built is gone, replaced by the development that fills the blocks east of the airport. The aircraft itself is at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Ryan NYP" and "Spirit of St. Louis"; San Diego Air and Space Museum, Ryan Airlines history; National Air and Space Museum, Spirit of St. Louis records.
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