Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Against the backdrop of these looming technical problems, Jackie had proceeded with her own preparations with Floyd by her side living vicariously through her flying adventures. Together they’d mapped her route and decided that three o’clock in the morning was her ideal takeoff time so she could take advantage of daylight flying hours. For weeks leading up to the race, she’d gone to bed a little earlier every night to adjust her body clock for the early takeoff. She’d even adjusted her diet to add a little more meat to her upper body; she would need all the strength she could get to muscle the controls of her Gamma. Jackie was as ready for the Bendix as she could be.

  Jackie and her troublesome Gamma were on the Burbank runway as the fog got so thick officials were forced to put the race on hold. Half the competitors had already taken off, including Amelia, while the rest waited for the weather to clear. Jackie silently cursed her decision to leave at three o’clock; the added daylight hours wouldn’t be much help if she couldn’t get off the ground.

  When the fog finally started to break around two o’clock and the race resumed, the on-site field representative for Pratt & Whitney begged Jackie one last time not to fly.

  “Are you willing to say to the public that that motor is malfunctioning?” she challenged.

  “I can’t afford to say that,” he admitted.

  “Then I can’t afford not to take off. If I don’t take off, probably no woman will be allowed to fly in the race again.” She’d had enough. She’d spent months training for this race, and no one was going to keep her from flying. She went through the same thing with the on-site representative from Northrop. “Go away and hush,” she told him.

  There was just one pilot to go before Jackie. Focused though she was on her own preparations, she paused to watch Cecil Allen race down the runway in his Gee Bee, a notoriously troublesome plane. She watched him gain speed and start to lift off the runway, then watched in horror as the plane struggled under its heavy fuel load and slammed into the fence at the end of the runway where it disappeared inside a fireball.

  Jackie joined the fray that rushed to the end of the runway where Cecil’s headless body lay among the wreckage. The sight gave Jackie her first pangs of uneasiness, as though seeing the remains of a crash made the risk she was taking suddenly real, but she knew she couldn’t let it show. Maintaining a strong front, Jackie went into the airport restaurant and ordered a bowl of chili while officials cleared the wreckage from the runway. One of the Civil Aeronautics Authority officials followed her in, and as she took defiant bites of her meaty stew to prove her nerves weren’t rattled, he implored her not to race.

  She hit her breaking point. Jackie had had it with men telling her not to fly. She was qualified, her plane was ready, and she had every intention of leaving California that night. She told the official that if she died, it was her problem, not his, but that she would be sure to haunt him for pestering her. With that, she left the restaurant. The bowl of chili was left largely untouched; the rest she promptly vomited up on the side of the building.

  It was finally Jackie’s turn. As she went through her final preparations with photographers snapping endless pictures and destroying her night vision with their flashbulbs, her emotional strain became too much. Jackie trusted herself in the air, but if she was being honest, she was worried about taking off in bad weather. She climbed out of the cockpit, found a long-distance telephone, and called Floyd in Albuquerque. Over the phone, she poured out her fears. Ever the source of strength and support, Floyd told her the decision to fly was hers alone and that only she could say why she flew. As she listened to the comforting voice of the one she loved, she knew she had to satisfy her emotional urge; she had to fly. Secretly sure she’d never make it to the finish line but bolstered by Floyd’s words, Jackie decided to at least take off. That much she could do, she could prove she wasn’t scared of starting the race.

  Newly determined, she reentered the Gamma’s cockpit. She started down the runway with fire trucks trailing behind her just in case. The plane was so loaded with fuel that even her cutting-edge engine couldn’t give her the power she needed. It was touch and go whether she’d be able to take off, and all the while the end of the runway was drawing ever closer, though she could hardly see it through the fog. She hit her point of no return, the point where she wouldn’t have enough room to stop safely without hitting the fence and turning into a ball of fiery wreckage herself. She pulled back on the yoke and felt the wheels leaving the ground. She grazed the fence, snagging her antenna and tearing it clean off. Eyes trained on her instruments, she flew out over the Pacific Ocean, getting clear of the mountains before turning toward Cleveland. Rising above the fog, Jackie saw stars appear. At that moment, they were the brightest and friendliest things she’d ever seen.

  It was nearly an hour before Jackie’s engine started overheating, sending vibrations through the plane that left her bouncing around in her seat. Nevertheless, she flew. As she crossed the border between California and Arizona, the Sun started to rise. Now she could see the Grand Canyon, the majestic but foreboding landscape stretching for hundreds of miles, and a violent electric storm brewing on the horizon. Caution finally replaced pride. Alone in her Gamma, she didn’t care if she withdrew from the race. She’d made an instrument takeoff through heavy fog, proving to herself and everyone else that she was worth her salt as a pilot. Now, it was safer to land than battle the storm in an unsteady plane.

  She dumped fuel through untested valves to lighten her load for a safe landing, but the gasoline shot back toward the cockpit, drenching her in the flammable liquid. But she had trained for emergency situations. Like a seasoned pilot, she registered that the biggest danger was the fumes, so she ripped the canopy open to breathe fresh air but now had wind whipping her face. Struggling to keep her eyes open between the gasoline and the wind, she spotted a small landing strip. With all her focus on that spot beneath her, Jackie brought the Gamma down to a safe landing. The moment she touched down, she leaped out of the plane, ran to the washroom, stripped, and began rinsing herself as best she could. The last thing she needed was to survive an emergency landing only to have some careless onlooker flick cigarette ash near her gas-soaked flight suit.

  Her port in a storm turned out to be Kingman, Arizona. When she emerged from the bathroom, a kind attendant loaned her an overcoat while another ran into town to buy her a shirt and trousers. Sitting in the airport soaking wet in a borrowed coat with her race dreams dashed, she refused to admit defeat. She wasn’t going to win, but she had managed an instrument takeoff at night and survived an inflight emergency. And more important, there would be another Bendix.

  10About $482 in 2019.

  11About $552,000 in 2019.

  Chapter 4

  The Cochran-Odlum Ranch in Indio, California, Late March 1937

  Amelia had become a frequent guest at Jackie’s Indio Ranch. More often than not she arrived alone, staying in one of the many guesthouses, spending her days swimming or riding horses before joining the ever-rotating cast of Jackie and Floyd’s notable friends for dinner in the main house. An inscribed copy of Amelia’s book, The Fun of It, sat on Jackie’s bookshelf “in memory of an Electra jaunt across the continent.” On the rare occasion Amelia arrived when her hosts were out of town, she would stay in Jackie’s own bedroom, an intimacy never afforded any other guest.

  Such was their friendship that if Jackie and Floyd had had a formal wedding, Amelia would have been present. Instead, the couple had opted for a private civil ceremony in Kingman, Arizona, in 1936—on Jackie’s thirtieth birthday—with just two friends as their witnesses. As a wedding present, Jackie had given Floyd an envelope sealed with a quarter set in wax. “This is for you Floyd,” she’d written on the outside in an untidy scrawl. “I have never read the contents. You can burn it or read as you wish. I love you very much.” She told him the envelope contained her true history, including everything known about her birth parents and blood relatives. To preserve her story of bein
g raised an orphan, she told him the information had come from a private detective. However touched he was by this moment of vulnerability from his new bride, Floyd said he didn’t care about her past. He only cared about her present and future with him. He handed the wedding present back to her unopened. Jackie promptly hid it away in her lockbox.

  Jackie never shared anything about her true past with Amelia, either, though the women shared just about everything else. They talked about flying, poring over maps to plan Amelia’s distance flights or Jackie’s speed runs. They continued their forays into extrasensory perception, Jackie concentrating hard on survivors of some air crash they read about in the newspaper before the pair would fly out to help the rescue effort. More than once, Jackie’s visions coincided with the accident site. Even Floyd became a close friend to Amelia after all the time she spent at the Ranch. The only thing Jackie didn’t like about Amelia was her husband, George Putnam.

  To Jackie, George was nothing more than a mean and manipulative man who knew his wife was his meal ticket. All of Amelia’s routes were dictated by media stops George set up and refused to change. He openly berated her manners in front of their friends. But more than anything, Jackie hated that George valued Amelia’s celebrity over her safety and pushed her into dangerous flights. George’s latest idea was an east-to-west circumnavigation around the Earth’s equator. A half dozen men had made the flight already, but Amelia would be the first woman to do it. The whole thing worried Jackie. She knew Amelia was a good flyer, but she also knew her friend’s limitations. Circumnavigation was a weeks-long endeavor that demanded complicated and precise stellar navigation while flying over huge bodies of water, and navigation wasn’t Amelia’s strong suit. She would be wholly dependent on a hired guide, and Jackie shuddered to think about what would happen to her friend if that guide was wrong. The circumnavigation got off to a poor start with a crash aborting the flight in Hawaii. Amelia, shaken but unhurt, went right to Jackie’s Indio Ranch when she got back from the island.

  Days after that crash in Hawaii, Amelia sat on the floor in Jackie’s living room in front of the cavernous fireplace. It was a quiet night; in addition to her host, the only guests that night were the women’s close friends Mike and Benny Howard, a pair of married pilots. Amelia gave the group a play-by-play of the failed flight that left her audience silent.

  “What,” she teased, smiling at them each in turn. “Isn’t anyone going to ask me the big question. Don’t you want to know whether or not I’m going to try it again?”

  Still, no one spoke. Jackie had one house rule: no matter how curious, no pilot ever asked another pilot something that would put them on the spot. They wanted to give Amelia time to recover from the flight and decide free from social pressure whether she would try again, but the conversation nevertheless turned to the circumnavigation plans. By the end of the night, no one, not even Amelia, was sure whether she would make another attempt.

  The question was still on Amelia’s mind days later when she and Floyd, out for a drive around the property, got stuck in the desert sand in an old car. As they waited for help to come dig them out, Amelia turned to Floyd.

  “Do you think I should do it?”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “Fly around the world.”

  The question hung in the still desert air as Floyd considered his answer. He knew Jackie and Amelia were extremely similar, so he had a pretty good idea of what was going through his friend’s mind.

  “Amelia,” he told her, “if you are doing this to keep your place at the top among women in aviation, you’re wasting your time and taking a big risk for nothing. No one can topple you from your pinnacle. But if you are doing it for the adventure and because you simply want to do it, then no one else ought to advise you.”

  Amelia did crave the adventure, but decided it would be her last; she would retire from daring flights after completing this last big journey. She returned to the Ranch weeks later with new plans. The flight path had been reversed: she would now be flying from west to east, a route no pilot had taken before. She and Jackie pored over every detail of the route. At Jackie’s urging, Amelia hired a new navigator, Fred Noonan, after her original pick had proved unable to navigate by the stars. But Jackie remained uneasy, particularly about the final leg. The proposed route had Amelia leaving Lae Airfield in New Guinea for Howland Island, a spot nearly 2,000 miles southwest of Honolulu, where the Department of the Interior had built her a landing strip. It was her last planned stop before traversing the rest of the Pacific Ocean and landing in California, but it was a tiny island to find. If Amelia was off course at all, she’d miss her only safe landing spot for hundreds of miles. The more they talked about it, the more Jackie’s unease grew.

  “You’re not going to see that damned island,” Jackie told Amelia one night. “I wish you wouldn’t go off and commit suicide because that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  Together, they decided to see if Jackie’s ESP could help, if she could track Amelia in flight and “see” where she was in case something happened. Jackie’s intuition had always been particularly strong with Amelia. One night while driving Floyd into Palm Springs from the Ranch, she was hit with a flashing vision of a fire in one of the engines in Amelia’s plane, though she sensed that it wasn’t serious and ground crews were already dousing the blaze. Later that night, she and Floyd heard the news of Amelia’s fire on the radio; the next morning’s newspapers held the full account, and it lined up with Jackie’s vision.

  To test this connection, Jackie kept a detailed log as Amelia flew across the country with George and sent them to her friend every night. She “saw” that everything was fine, though Amelia landed in Blackwell, Oklahoma, one night, fifty miles away from her planned stopover. The next morning she “felt” Amelia take off at nine o’clock for Los Angeles.

  When the women compared notes, only George tried to poke holes in Jackie’s account. Amelia had left Oklahoma at seven o’clock, he goaded. Jackie calmly pointed out that she, unlike him, understood the concept of time zones.

  On June 1, 1937, Amelia took off from Oakland, California. Jackie followed the incoming reports throughout the month, tracking Amelia across the United States, to the northern tip of South America, across Africa, India, to Australia, and finally to New Guinea. When news reached America that Amelia hadn’t reported in from Howland Island, Jackie had a powerful intuition about her friend’s fate. It was just like when she and Amelia had focused on finding crash sites. Concentrating hard, Jackie could see Amelia in her mind’s eye floating along in the ocean on the wreckage, saw that she was fine but that Fred Noonan had hit his head and was in bad shape. Jackie’s vision of Amelia persisted for three days before the feeling faded. When the image of Amelia vanished, Jackie went to church and lit a candle for her friend’s soul, which she knew had gone off on a journey of its own. The loss of such a close friend hit Jackie hard, but death was a reality. Every flier knew the risk they bore.

  Questions about Amelia’s disappearance were fast cementing her status as an American hero, leaving the way clear for Jackie to become a living legend in the sky.

  * * *

  Within weeks of Amelia’s disappearance, Jackie, still mourning the loss of her dear friend, was in hot pursuit of her own fame as an aviatrix. She was by now a staple of the race circuit, known to fellow pilots and manufacturers as a woman to watch in pursuit of speed records, the most demanding records held by pilots skilled enough to push their planes to their design limits in the quest to save a few seconds in the air. There were smaller records, closed course or straight-line flights Jackie was practicing for, but her white whale remained the cross-country Bendix. She still felt the allure of this prestigious race, and so she started planning.

  The first thing Jackie needed was a new, faster plane. She’d lent the Gamma that had forced her out of the Bendix in 1935 to her friend Howard Hughes, which meant she didn’t have anything fast to fly. One day back at her old stomping gro
und of Roosevelt Field, she saw her next Bendix plane—a sleek, silver Seversky Pursuit P-35 monoplane she just had to have. As she stood ogling the magnificent design, Alexander P. de Seversky himself sauntered over.

  “I just wrote you a letter to ask you if you want to fly my P-35,” he said.

  “Why don’t you let me fly it in the Bendix?” she answered.

  The P-35 was groundbreaking. In addition to the standard fuel tank in its belly, the P-35 featured extra tanks in the wings, which meant it could hold enough fuel to fly as far as 3,000 miles without stopping. It was also aerodynamically advanced. Where most planes had curved metal cowlings covering the fixed landing gear, the P-35’s gear folded right up into the fuselage. This decreased drag on the plane and increased its cruising speed to 300 miles per hour. Flying this engineering marvel in the Bendix was Jackie’s absolute dream. She knew it would be her winning ticket, but first, she had to test it.