Charles Lindbergh was once the most famous person on Earth, and he used that fame as cover for three secret families in Europe that were not confirmed until decades after his death. This episode traces the engineering dropout from barnstorming wing-walker and Army flier to airmail pilot, then into the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, a plane with no forward visibility and a wicker seat, for his 33-hour solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927.

We then follow the darker and stranger chapters: the kidnapping of his son and the federal Lindbergh Law, his perfusion pump work with Alexis Carrel, and his embrace of eugenics. We also cover his anti-Semitic views shared with Henry Ford, his role leading the America First Committee, his clash with FDR, his 50 civilian combat missions in the Pacific, his later environmentalism, and the hidden families he kept under an alias.

• How barnstorming and night airmail flying prepared Lindbergh for the Orteig Prize flight
• The design of the Spirit of St. Louis, navigating by dead reckoning, and the boom in commercial aviation that followed
• The crime of the century and how it made kidnapping across state lines a federal crime
• The perfusion pump, his isolationist politics and prejudices, and his surprising turn to combat in WWII
• His later environmental advocacy, his three secret European families, and how compartmentalization defined his life