On May 20, the 75th anniversary of the famous flight Charles A. Lindbergh took from Roosevelt Field to Paris in 1927 was recreated at Farmingdale's Republic Airport. Just a few weeks prior, a crowd of approximately 250 spectators, including students from Howitt Middle School's Junior Honor Society, gathered at Republic Airport to watch Lindbergh's grandson Erik recreate the flight.

This time, the flight was reenacted to the exact time that Charles Lindbergh had departed from Garden City 75 years ago. At precisely 7:52 a.m., the control tower at Republic Airport released the replica airplane "The Spirit of St. Louis," with noted aviator Kermit Weeks at the controls, into the air. Weeks took a trip around the community and landed back at Republic.

When Lindbergh took his flight back in 1927, he and several other pilots were competing for a $25,000 Orteig Prize, which had been offered since 1919 by New York hotel businessman Raymond Orteig. The prize was to be given to the pilot who could perform the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. According to the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation, the prize was not what had intrigued Lindbergh, rather the idea of demonstrating publicly that airplanes could safely link the United States with Europe, at the same time giving greater credibility to civilian pilots. The dangers of such a flight did not deter the young pilot, then 25, as he, an experienced airmail carrier, had flown in less than perfect weather conditions such as rain, snow, ice and fog and believed that no weather nor danger of a transatlantic crossing could compare.

Funding for his flight was provided by several St. Louis businessmen and some of his own personal savings. Lindbergh's original plane of choice was a Bellanca, the best plane available at the time for such a flight, but was turned down when he attempted to make the purchase. Instead, he ordered a specially designed aircraft from a San Diego company, which he helped design. With his new single-engine monoplane, later named "The Spirit of St. Louis" by one of his financers, Lindbergh registered as a contestant for the prize with the National Aeronautic Association and was considered a long shot of all the crews since he was the only one who planned to fly in not just a single engine plane, but he was also the only one who planned to fly alone.

Despite some rather nasty weather conditions, Lindbergh took the controls of his plane on the morning of May 20, 1927, buckled his safety belt, placed cotton in his ears and put on his goggles and helmet. He carried with him five sandwiches, water, charts and maps and a limited number of other items he deemed necessary; leaving his parachute and radio behind so he could carry more fuel as the plane would be lighter. He figured that if he crashed, he wouldn't need them anyway. Doing everything in his power to keep the weight on the plane as light as possible, Lindbergh even went so far as to trim the edges of his maps and remove pages from his notebook.

At 7:52 a.m., the aviator's plane bounded along the muddy runway and splashed through the puddles left over from the early morning rain. At the halfway mark on the runway, the plane had not yet reached flying speed and as the load shifted from the wheels to the wings, Lindbergh felt the plane leave the ground quickly but he quickly returned. As he looked out the window, the young pilot noticed the approaching telephone lines and less than 2,000 feet away from the end of the runway he was successful in getting the plane off the ground again. The aircraft bounced again, and with less than 1,000 feet of runway left, Lindbergh sharply lifted the plane upward, cleared the telephone wires by 20 feet and was airborne two minutes after he had taken off. The pilot fought fog, icing, lack of forward vision and drowsiness, as he couldn't get to sleep the night before, during his just over 33 1/2 hour flight.

The next day, at 10:22 p.m. in France, Lindbergh set his aircraft down at Le Bourget Field near Paris to a crowd of approximately 150,000 onlookers awaiting his arrival. As he stepped off the plane, Lindbergh became an instant hero, the first pilot to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, and he had done it alone.