by Susan Butler
Amelia told only four people of the impending adventure: head worker Marion Perkins, George Ludlam, Harold Dennison, and Sam Chapman, her fiancée.
9
Vortex
●●●● Commander Byrd was in charge of all arrangements for the flight; his decisions were the ones that governed the outfitting of the Friendship. His judgment was strongly influenced by the harrowing transatlantic flight he had taken the summer before in another Fokker, a virtual twin of the Friendship except that it had wheels instead of pontoons, in which he had taken off from Roosevelt field on Long Island and which he ended up ditching at sea off the coast of France.
Richard Byrd was a charismatic, glamorous figure—one of those people who loom large in the eyes of their contemporaries, but who in the light of history become reduced in size and can be seen as flawed. His misjudgments were monumental. Where he went, accidents happened. He recounts the first instance himself—the accident that almost sidelined his naval career. At Annapolis, as captain of the navy gym team, intent on winning the intercollegiate championship in 1911, Byrd devised a splendid gymnastic trick for himself, a “hair-raising” stunt on the flying rings—a kind of double flip that he tried successfully. Once. Then, instead of practicing, he never tried it again until the day before the meet, in a crowded gym. Not surprisingly, he fell, badly breaking his foot.
He barely graduated that June, and because he couldn’t physically function properly on a boat, (his ankle didn’t work; he fell down a gangway), he was retired by the navy after five years, “retired on three quarters pay; ordered home for good.”
World War I saved him. He became a navy pilot, fought his way back on duty. He learned to fly, naturally, on seaplanes.
By 1926 he was a world figure by virtue of the fact that he and Floyd Bennett were the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole (a claim now disputed). To cap that adventure, in pursuit of winning the Orteig prize of $25,000, Byrd next set about assembling plane and crew to fly the Atlantic nonstop from America to France. His aircraft, a Fokker which he grandly named America, was ready before Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis but was involved in an accident caused largely by Byrd’s thoughtlessness. Aboard at the time were the plane’s designer, Anthony Fokker, Floyd Bennett, George Noville, and Byrd. It was Anthony Fokker, bitter at the needless accident that had ended the chance of his plane becoming the most famous in the world, who pointed the finger at Byrd. He had planned to test the plane alone, but Byrd turned up and not only insisted on going but insisted on Noville and Bennett going also. “I should have refused,” Fokker said later to Floyd Bennett, “because without any load in the rear, and with an empty main tank the ship became nose heavy.” The Fokker crashed. Byrd had his arm broken, Noville had his stomach muscles torn; Floyd Bennett, the most gravely injured, suffered a fractured thigh and a lung punctured by a propeller fragment; he was in the hospital for months and never did fully recover.
Undeterred, after the airplane was repaired, Byrd got on with his plans, but by that time on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis had landed in Paris and won the Orteig, and Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine in the Columbia had flown nonstop to Eisleben, Germany.
The America finally took off from Roosevelt field on June 29, laden down, in addition to what Byrd considered necessities, with 150 pounds of mail—and four in crew, Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville. They hit France, according to Byrd, right on target, then flew over Brest heading for Paris (their destination), but by then it was nighttime and foggy. Byrd later called the trip “a most terrible experience.” By his account, they saw bright lights just about the time they expected to see Paris and thought their flight was almost over, but flying a bit further, they realized that the lights were not Paris but a lighthouse beacon; they were lost. They flew on. The compasses had malfunctioned, and again according to Byrd, they tapped them, got them “okay,” and headed for Paris again. Then although “I knew we were heading toward Paris,” there were no lights. Just blackness. By then, afraid they would run out of gas, they cast out unnecessary equipment in an effort to lighten the plane and headed back for the lighthouse, which they found. As they peered through the rainy night by the light of the beacon, they couldn’t clearly distinguish the beach and therefore decided it would be safer to land their land plane in the water as close to the beach as possible. Bernt Balchen, at the controls, made a perfect, incredible landing in the sea, the water shearing off the landing gear “with hardly ajar to the plane.” Stunned but not hurt, they all hurriedly climbed out of the plane, inflated the rubber boat, and rowed to shore. They were lucky to escape unharmed. They had landed at Versur-Mer, later to become famous in World War II as Omaha Beach. After the flight, Byrd alone of the fliers always claimed the lights had been Paris.
Just that April 1928, Commander Byrd sent Balchen and Bennett, the pilots who would be going with him to the South Pole, to go rescue German pilots who were stranded on Greenly Island, off the northern tip of Newfoundland, after making the first successful east-to-west transatlantic flight. The rescue mission, sponsored jointly by The New York World and the North American Newspaper Alliance, drew public attention to Byrd’s upcoming Antarctic adventure. But the Germans had been in no danger. Byrd, with utter disregard for his men, sanctioned Balchen and Bennett to go, even though both were ill with the flu—so ill that when they arrived in Detroit to pick up the plane (as it happened, just a week after Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon picked up the Friendship), Edsel Ford took one look at the fliers and clapped them both in the Henry Ford Hospital. Still far from well a few days later, they took off in the specially equipped Ford trimotor bound for Greenly Island. Floyd Bennett, never fully recovered from the first plane crash of the America the year before, caught double pneumonia, and in spite of a dramatic flight to bring him serum by Charles Lindbergh, on April 26 he died at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec.
A few years later in the Antarctic (with the trimotor renamed Floyd Bennett in honor of his dead friend), Byrd endangered the lives of his entire support staff when he insisted on manning an advance weather base alone through the dark Antarctic winter simply because he “really wanted to go for the experience’s sake.” Rescuing him, his teammates almost died.
Instead of entertaining thoughts to the effect that the America’s watery end the previous summer might have been the result of two conditions—that the plane was too heavily loaded and that the navigating had been faulty—Byrd drew the conclusion that flying across so much open water in a plane with wheels was foolhardy. The solution he came up with was to use pontoons instead of wheels.
There had been a mounting number of transatlantic air fatalities since Lindbergh’s successful crossing the summer before. Month after month, the world’s top fliers took off to cross the North Atlantic in land planes and were never heard from again. The worst stretch came during the first wrenching week of the previous September—three planes, two taking off from the North American continent, one taking off from England, disappeared at sea; eight fliers died within seven days. The first was the Fokker St. Raphael, carrying the English pilot Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim and British air aces Colonel Fred Minchin and Captain Leslie Hamilton, which took off on August 31 from Upavon, England. The second, another Fokker called Old Glory, took off on September 6 from Old Orchard, Maine, carrying the aviation editor of the New York Daily Mirror and two top pilots, one American and one French. The third was a Stinson, Sir John Carling, which took off the next day, September 7, from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, with two British pilots.
A feeling began to grow that Lindbergh had been lucky rather than smart. Such an august official as the U.S. secretary of the navy, T. Douglas Robinson (who naturally had a built-in bias toward seaplanes) announced: “the departmental policy will in the future be that no naval personnel will be permitted to engage in transoceanic flights in land planes.” The Australian government for a time prohibited land planes from flying more than fifty miles over open wat
er within its territory. John A. Wilson, director of civil aviation for the Canadian Air Board, declared: “I deprecate the use of land planes in transoceanic flights.” So Byrd touched a chord when he said, “I believe that the flight of the three engine plane that will fly with one engine dead and which is equipped with floats for landing in water is the next step in transatlantic flying.” But he should have known better.
When Amelia first saw the Fokker in the shadows that mid-May of 1928, it still had wheels—but mechanics and welders were working on the struts for the pontoons that were shortly to replace them. As she noted, the pontoons were experimental, and “no one definitely could tell in advance whether or not it would prove practicable.” Not only was this the first Fokker to be fitted out with pontoons, it was the first pontoon-equipped plane to attempt a nonstop Atlantic crossing. The particular pontoons chosen—made of thin sheets of a new wonder metal, duralumin, a recently developed copper-aluminum alloy a third the weight of steel yet possessing the same strength, constructed by the Junker factory in Germany—were each divided into nine watertight compartments. Each of the huge pontoons, measuring twenty-nine feet in length by four feet in width, could supposedly float, airtight, for weeks in water.
The advantage of a seaplane for a transatlantic flight was obvious: if there were engine trouble and the plane was forced down at sea, the fliers stood a chance of survival because the plane wouldn’t sink. The disadvantage, more subtle, understood only by experts in the fledgling new world of planes, was formidable. It boiled down to the fact that a seaplane could not lift nearly as heavy a load as a land plane, therefore not as much fuel could be taken, therefore the range of the plane was cut down. Byrd publicly estimated that pontoons would cut two hundred miles off the range of the plane. He was way off, as the Friendship crew would learn. A second and related problem, as Commander Robert Elmer, USN retired, whom Byrd had chosen to supervise the day-to-day fitting out of the Fokker, noted, was that seaplanes needed a wind to become airborne at all; if there were no waves and the water was smooth, it was difficult for a fully loaded seaplane to rise, according to Elmer, “because pontoons stick to water much as a dime sticks to a wet table.”
Charles Lindbergh, meticulous planner that he was, knew exactly why he had chosen a land plane to fly the Atlantic: because flying boats couldn’t take off with sufficient fuel to go the distance. Byrd, on the other hand, was juggling the safety factor of a plane’s being able to land anywhere on the gray-green sea against its drastically curtailed range. He knew that a seaplane couldn’t make the direct flight from New York to Europe—that was why he had used wheels on the America the summer before. So whereas Byrd’s Fokker America, with engines similar to the Friendship, had been able to take off from Roosevelt field on Long Island with four men aboard and fly nonstop almost to the shores of France, Amy Guest’s Fokker Friendship, loaded down, handicapped, as it were, could not even approach making such a long flight even with one less person aboard—it didn’t have the range. The plan, therefore, was to fly to Newfoundland, refuel, and then to take off from its easternmost end, from Trepassey Harbor on the Avalon Peninsula, where the navy seaplanes had started off on their flight across the ocean in 1919—a much shorter flight of eighteen hundred miles.
In addition to loading the plane down with pontoons, Elmer, under the direction of Byrd, loaded it down with equipment. Lindbergh’s disciplined approach, which had led him to weigh every single necessary item—to go to the lengths of having a special lightweight seat made out of rattan, and special boots made of lightweight materials, of cutting out unneeded sections of charts, of worrying about the few letters he carried, of deciding against a radio, of deciding to fly alone because “I had decided to replace the weight of a navigator with extra fuel and this gave me about three hundred miles additional range”—was antithetical to Byrd’s thinking.
By the time Byrd and Elmer were finished with the Friendship, they had equipped it with, as Elmer proudly announced, “everything.” They installed the usual instruments, altimeter, gas gauge, speedometer, two magnetic compasses, the newly developed earth induction compass (reliable but having to be reset when a plane changed course), wind drift instruments, smoke bombs to determine wind direction and velocity, flares, a Cardwell, a radio similar to the one Byrd had on the America, which had a range of a thousand miles on a 600-meter wave length, and a receiving set designed, built, and installed by Wallace Battison, a Cambridge radio expert. There was also an emergency transmitter with aerial located in the tail of the plane with a range of 50 to 100 miles that would give them ten minutes, in case of a disaster, to send out a call for help to steamers. Battison said it was put on so securely, “you couldn’t jar it loose with a charge of dynamite.” The Cardwell, all by itself, according to Bill Stultz, weighed a hundred pounds.
Elmer, in spite of his reservations about pontoons, thought he had overseen the fitting out of “the safest and best equipped airplane ever to attempt an ocean flight.” Guest and Earhart certainly thought they were in good hands. So did George Putnam. By mid-May the varying load tests, the “countless” takeoffs from the bay, the “brief” flights around Boston, the fine-tuning of the instruments—all of which Amelia was kept apprised of but took no part in—were finished; the plane was ready.
David Layman and his wife came up to Boston hoping to witness the takeoff, as did Amy Guest’s two sons Winston and Raymond; Dorothy Putnam came up to join her husband, who by this time had taken to haunting the hangar. An auxiliary pilot, Lou Gower, hired to help out as far as Trepassey, was also present with his wife and waiting patiently. The new problem was the weather—it refused to cooperate. Amelia would remember long gray days.
Still, her life had begun to take on the texture of the future. She had moved into Boston’s most elegant hotel, the Copley Plaza (registering as Dorothy Binney, the maiden name of Dorothy Putnam, to avoid discovery) and was at least exposed, if she didn’t participate in tea dancing, to the music of Meyer Davis.
David Layman had first grudgingly and then gratefully ceded control of the enterprise to George Putnam, whose expertise in mounting expeditions was second to none. Putnam, assisted by Hilton Railey, now addressed himself to the public relations aspect of the flight. Able to present Amelia as a published writer on the basis of her article in The Bostonian, he struck a deal with The New York Times: they would pay Amelia ten thousand dollars for the exclusive, syndicated rights to her story. (Amelia, of course, would turn this money over to her benefactor.) Then he worked out a deal with Emanuel Cohen, his friend at Paramount News, for an undisclosed sum, giving Paramount News exclusive newsreel coverage in Boston and in Trepassey, Newfoundland. The Paramount News man in New England, considered by all to be the dean of his profession, was Jake Coolidge; he went to work immediately. In the interests of secrecy all of his shots of Amelia were taken on the unused, unfinished roof of the Copley Plaza; there he took a “a great reservoir of shots” of her for future release, assisted by his son Phil. He kept his photographic equipment, in those years so bulky, hidden in a utility closet on the top floor under the roof. (The choice of venue must have been Amelia’s; who else would have thought of climbing out onto the roof of an elegant hotel?) It was Jake who deliberately created the “Lady Lindy” image that in later years would stick to Amelia like glue. He posed her mostly in her leather jacket, white-edged helmet, brown broadcloth riding “breeks,” high-laced brown riding boots, and goggles. The theme was “Remember Lindbergh.” Amelia had bought the jacket at a sale in 1922 for twenty dollars. When new, it had been “an elegant leather coat,” a bit too elegant—a bit too shiny for Amelia. Wrinkles, she had decided, were what it needed, so she had slept in it for three nights until it had “a properly veteran appearance.” Even then not quite satisfied, she had given it “a last going over—rubbing the sheen off here and there.” Now it was to become a fashion statement for the world.
Jake didn’t think that Charles and Amelia looked the least bit alike—it was just an i
llusion he created with his camera. “It wasn’t so much that the resemblance was there as that you could make it seem to be there, by camera angles.” Later, influenced by the poses and the similar outfits, many people would remark on their resemblance to each other, but just as many thought there was none. George Palmer Putnam, having been part of the magic act, couldn’t see it. “She couldn’t have resembled the Colonel very much or I would have noticed it,” he would write. His wife Dorothy, on the other hand, thought the resemblance “uncanny”; Hilton Railey thought it “extraordinary.”
Paramount News sent another of their photographers, Andy Fulgoni, up to Trepassey to wait there for the fliers.
George Putnam arranged with David Layman to provide funds for Hilton Railey to go to England to run interference for Amelia when and if she landed; Hilton set off by boat.
On nice days Amelia drove her confreres around in the battered yellow convertible that George Putnam dubbed at first glance the Yellow Peril, not only apt, but also the name of a sleek English plane made by Handley Page.
Her new friends may not have known what kind of a pilot she was, but they undoubtedly noticed that sweet and modest though she was, she drove a car like a bat out of hell. Depending on their temperaments, her passengers were either impressed or scared. Marion Perkins was one of those impressed. Amelia was, she wrote, “an expert ... handling her car with ease, yes more than that, with an artistic touch.” Hilton Railey’s wife Julia was one of those who was not. “People got out of the way of it I noticed. Our battered and bedented bus scudded through the traffic like a car possessed. With something of a flourish we drew up at last at the Old France restaurant.” (She didn’t like the car, either, calling it “the worst looking automobile—hers—I think I ever saw, bar one. Its rear end was cigar-shaped and its ground color a sick canary.”)