by Susan Butler
On Sunday evening Ruth Nichols came for dinner. She and Amelia discussed the various problems that ocean flying presented—in a general way—but Amelia was vague about her own plans, although friendly and helpful. Ruth was always looking for support and help and good ideas, and it didn’t occur to her that Amelia wasn’t too, but Amelia, made of sterner stuff, was looking for none of those things. Ruth described the modifications just being completed on her Vega, and particularly the safety factors that had been added, sure that Amelia was focused on safety considerations as she was, but Amelia was confident that she and Bernt had thought of everything. She just didn’t think in terms of negatives. “I don’t bother to go into all the possible accidents that might happen,” Ruth remembered her saying. Amelia didn’t even pack a parachute, figuring it wasn’t worth the weight. Nor did she query Ruth about the St. John’s airfield, the field where Ruth had crashed into the cliff, Amelia’s first destination now—so supremely confident was she that Bernt was right and that the problem had been Ruth and her plane. And yet Amelia had to have been more than just a little curious. She dissembled, giving Ruth the impression that if she was planning an ocean flight, it certainly wasn’t imminent—there was no need for Ruth to rush her preparations. And anyway, Ruth told their mutual friend Carl Allen, her impression was that if Amelia took off on a solo flight, it would be “across the South Atlantic: ’
It wasn’t that Amelia was ultrasecretive, it was just that she was competitive and wanted to get off first. Actually, the only thing holding her back was the weather. A front was passing, according to Dr. Kimball: “Not to go just yet,” wrote Lucy.
On Tuesday a Fox MovieTone crew showed up at the field, so instead of flying she marked time by picking up a barograph in Newark and checking in with Doc Kimball. She headed back to Rye for dinner.
She took the next day off, driving out to Long Island for a ride in the new Goodyear blimp Resolute.
Lucy’s diary entry for Thursday, May 19, 1932, begins, “Breakfast as usual, Mill to fly.” However, it really wasn’t “breakfast as usual” at all—it only seemed that way to Lucy because Amelia had been her usual calm self. They had all been counting down the days waiting for the right weather—and because, as everyone in the flying world knew, May 20—the next day—was the fifth anniversary of Charles Lindbergh’s flight. If Amelia were to take off for Europe exactly five years to the day after Charles had, which was her intention and which would add immeasurably to the excitement and significance of her flight, she had to get to Harbor Grace by Friday. That meant that the dawn of the nineteenth was the dawn of the last day Amelia could start out from Teterboro. They—Amelia, George, Bernt, and Eddie Gorski—all knew that if the weather gave a promise, even a hint of breaking, it would be D-day And that morning dawned with a clearing sky, a northwest wind, and temperature in the low sixties. The weather would have been foremost in Amelia’s mind.
But Lucy was unaware of the significance of May 20 as a starting date, and lulled by Amelia’s ordinary manner into assuming that if she went out to Teterboro with Amelia, it would be just another day of flying for Amelia and waiting around for herself, Lucy decided to stay home, do “bits and pieces,” and lunch with a friend. To her misfortune: upon returning from lunch, she found that Amelia had returned briefly to the house and left her a cryptic note—“Came to fetch you.” A bit later George called to tell Lucy that Amelia had taken off from Teterboro at three fifteen.
In fact Amelia had returned to Rye not just to “fetch” Lucy, as she so considerately wrote her friend, but to don her jodhpurs and yellow silk blouse and retrieve her windbreaker, her flying suit, and some miscellaneous maps and charts.
Twenty minutes after Amelia returned to Teterboro, the trio were airborne. With Bernt at the controls, Amelia, in the fuselage with Eddie Gorski, tried to rest. Bernt flew for three and a half hours, arrived at St. John’s at dusk, and landed without incident; the airport where Ruth Nichols had cracked up held no surprises for them. They stayed the night, took off the next morning, and arrived at Harbor Grace at 2:01 Atlantic Time (one and a half hours later than Eastern). Bernt again did all the flying so that Amelia could save her strength.
The airfield at Harbor Grace, running east-west, lay between the town and Conception Bay to the southeast and Lady Lake to the north. Fred Koehler from Stinson Aircraft, sent looking for a place to put an airfield for transatlantic flights, had spotted the location in 1927 and talked the townspeople into building the field. It was a high natural plateau, a natural elongated plain, four thousand feet long, two hundred feet wide, with a stone and gravel surface, a dream field. Best of all, there was a hill at its eastern (starting) end that made the field slope downward for half its length, which greatly helped the heavily loaded transatlantic planes gather speed as they took off. It was here that Mabel Boll and the Columbia had waited four years before.
Immediately upon their arrival in Harbor Grace, Amelia was taken into town to the customs and immigration offices. Then she and Bernt went over the latest weather information from George: the outlook was not perfect, but it was “promising.” On the assumption that she would take off at dusk, Amelia went to Archibald’s Hotel and took a nap while Eddie and Bernt supervised the servicing of the Vega. Several hours later she returned to the field.
In the meantime more telegrams arrived from George, giving them Kimball’s final weather forecast, based on reports from weather stations in the United States, from some forty vessels scattered from Iceland and Greenland, from Labrador and Baffin Land, from England, France, and Germany. It all pointed to not perfect but reasonably good weather. Amelia made the final, irrevocable decision to go.
Twenty-four miles away at Holyrood, Captain Christensen, the skipper of the greatest plane in the world, the Do-X, who had planned to precede Amelia and help her by flashing wireless weather reports of the weather she would encounter, made the opposite decision and stayed on the ground, waiting for better weather.
Amelia appeared very calm. The AP reporter Bill Parsons, watching her as she returned to the airfield, wrote that “there seemed to be an aura surrounding her. Even though everyone wanted to get as close to her as possible, to shake hands, to wish her well, to touch her, she was very patient, and showed no signs of anxiety or fear.” Her confidence was so palpable, “it just oozed.”
Was she really as cool as everyone thought? She was, for she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to pass on to someone else a job she had had no time for, and now she tended to it. At 6:11 she sent a telegram to Louise Thaden:
WESTERN FLYING WANTS FIVE HUNDRED WORDS ON NINETY NINES STOP PLEASE COVER PURPOSES FORM OF ORGANIZATION ACTIVITIES MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENTS OFFICERS NAMES STOP THINK OPPORTUNITY TO STRESS OLDEST BROADEST PILOT CLUB ALSO IMPORTANT TO MENTION PREPAREDNESS COMMITTEE CAN COVER SAME GROUND STRICTLY MILITARY GROUPS STOP SEND TO RANDALL IRWIN MANAGING EDITOR
AMELIA EARHART
Five hours and thirty minutes after landing at Harbor Grace, one hour and nine minutes after sending off the telegram, carrying with her some canned tomato juice and a thermos of Rose Archibald’s soup, Amelia climbed into her Vega. Bill Parsons snapped some final pictures, and when he pleaded for “just one more,” she paused obligingly and smiled. Then she settled herself down into the Vega, gunned the engine, and waved good-bye to Eddie and Bernt and the small watching crowd. The chocks were removed, and she roared off down the field.
The plane gathered speed nicely as it roared down the field and took off into the southwest wind. Then it climbed into the twilight sky, made a wide turn over Lady Lake and out across the town and the blue waters of Conception Bay, and disappeared. Weather reports indicated that there was a storm to the south of her proposed course but nothing serious between her and France.
Amelia was now on the Lindbergh trail, her destination Paris. “They gave me clearance papers, and I filled a blank space saying I was going to Paris,” the AP reporter quoted her as saying. It would have been a nice touch, exactly five yea
rs after Lindbergh, to land, as he had, at Le Bourget.
It was such a clear evening that from an altitude of twelve thousand feet, Amelia could see icebergs and a fishing boat on the water’s surface. One hour out, as clouds began to scud over the waves, the altimeter failed, but the visibility was still good; the moon came out, and the stars, so she had time to adjust to the fact that she would have to rely on her eyes to see how far above the sea she was flying. After three hours she smelled burning oil and, looking out, saw that a small blue flame was licking through a broken weld in the manifold ring where the hot exhaust gases from the cylinders went. It was worrisome: weighing the alternatives, she decided it was safer to continue than to turn back, try to find the unlit Harbor Grace field, and land there still carrying a heavy load of gasoline.
There was a cold front over the North Atlantic. As she continued flying, the weather began to deteriorate; she ran into a storm that, according to Kimball, should have been to the south. Ahead she saw black cumulus clouds that extended from the ocean to “very very high”—too high to fly over. Four hours out she plunged into the black clouds, found herself in a rainstorm, then saw that the rain on the windshield was turning to ice—and then felt the ice as the controls froze and the Vega went into a spin: “How long we spun I do not know. I do know that I tried my best to do exactly what one should do with a spinning plane, and regained flying control as the warmth of the lower altitude melted the ice.” She skirted “too close for comfort” to the whitecaps. Twice more she ventured higher, only to encounter ice; twice more she came down and flew just above the breaking waves, which she could not always see. She was using the fuel mixture control and the carburetor to give herself some sense of altitude. It gave her her lowest low-level limit—warning engine sputters—but it was a delicate process requiring maximum concentration, staying high enough to require a little leaning of the engine to get it to operate properly. (When Ben Howard, another fine pilot, heard about it later, he said, “I thought, doggone it, I don’t know many pilots—that is many men pilots—who would have sense enough to do that, let alone a gal.”) As dawn broke, she found herself between two layers of clouds, then eventually climbing, flying in brilliant sunlight on top of white clouds that looked like endless snowfields.
More hours out, she turned on some of the reserve tanks of gasoline, only to find that a cockpit fuel gauge was defective; gasoline started trickling down the side of her neck.
At two in the afternoon the American ambassador to France, accompanied by most of the staff of the U.S. embassy, arrived at Le Bourget to wait for Amelia.
Charles Lindbergh had had a twenty-five-mile-an-hour following wind pushing him along; but as the day progressed, Amelia did not. What had been a light southerly breeze turned into a strong southwest wind. And it was turning against her.
Again she came down to sea level, and this time saw a small fishing boat; she realized by its size that she was near land. Continuing, she saw two more boats. She had been flying a fixed-compass course all night—not the harder-to-plot-but-shorter great circle course—but because she had run into a storm and Kimball’s weather reports had shown a storm to the south of her route, she worried that she, not the storm, was off course. The thought that she had drifted south was reinforced now when she saw by the waves that the wind had come around to the northwest. Concerned about the manifold, concerned about the defective fuel gauge, concerned that the engine was beginning to sound rough, and lastly uncertain about her exact location, she gave up hope of France and turned her thoughts to Ireland. She flew over a rocky island (probably one of the Aran Islands) and found herself over Ireland; started south but didn’t like the look of the sky ahead; turned north, picked up a set of railroad tracks, followed them north away from the storm, and landed in a pasture. She had reached Culmore, outside of Londonderry, in northwestern Ireland. She had made landfall exactly on the course Bernt Balchen had set for her, a little north of the center of Ireland.
“Tell my friends in New York I am very glad to have come across successfully but I am sorry I didn’t make France,” she said cheerfully in her first statement. Nobody really cared. They were just glad she was safe and sound.
She was the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in an airplane.
She had landed on James Gallagher’s farm hard by his cottage at 1:46 P.M. British time. She explained who she was to the startled farmers, then went into Londonderry to telephone. She also called the airport at Croydon outside London, thinking she might fly there. But the Croydon officials advised against it.
So, refusing all offers of hospitality from the townspeople, she calmly returned to Gallagher’s thatched cottage to be near her plane, accepted the Gallaghers’ offer to spend the night with them, went to the room they gave her, and fell asleep.
The next day, after posing with the Vega, Paramount News flew her to London. The American ambassador, Andrew Mellon, was waiting in the clubhouse at Hanworth air park in Middlesex in a thunderstorm. He brought her to London, and she spent the night at the U.S. embassy.
And the world lined up to sing her praises. She had become the most famous, most celebrated woman in the world. Wrote American columnist Walter Trumball, “So now Charles Lindbergh and you are the only two who have ever flown the ocean alone, and the championship, as John L. Sullivan would say, remains in America.” The English felt the same: “Her glory sheds its lustre on all womanhood,” trumpeted The Sunday Express. When she returned to America, she would learn that the new theater in Radio City, the glitziest new movie theater in Manhattan, had incorporated her feat in the glass mural they commissioned to decorate the lobby.
She did her best to defuse the adulation with humor. In her first radio speech she said that the rumors that she had killed a cow upon landing were false “unless one had died of fright.” A while later she remarked, “When there is a traffic jam on Fifth avenue men always comment, ‘Oh, it’s a woman driving.’ So I determined to show them.”
For fear of disturbing her preflight focus, Amelia had made no postflight plans. That left her alone in England to deal with all the consequences of the flight. It was too much; George was anxiously awaiting her request that he join her, in the interim keeping himself busy lining up lucrative deals. (He would bring a line of hats and sport clothes picked out by Lucy with him on the Olympic for Amelia to endorse—she said no to the hats.) Finally she asked him to join her; he sailed for Cherbourg on the twenty-seventh.
By that time much had happened to her. She had visited the Prince of Wales at St. James’s Palace at his invitation, and they had gotten along so famously that the prince kept her an extra fifteen minutes past her scheduled time—a very unusual occurrence that caused much comment and later led to press stories (untrue) that she had danced with the Prince of Wales; and she had received a telegram of congratulations from his father, the king. Her plane was on display on the ground floor of Selfridge’s department store in London, drawing thousands. She had been entertained at the House of Commons, taken by Lady Astor to Epson Downs to see the derby, been “towed” to meet George Bernard Shaw, and had given so many speeches that her voice was down to a whisper.
She was wearing clothes from Selfridge’s at the urging of Gordon Selfridge, a pilot himself and the brother of Violette de Sibour. It was the easy way out; she had brought no change of clothes with her and was wearing a dress loaned to her by Ailsa Mellon, the daughter of the American ambassador. Still, she had been a hard sell; she wasn’t in the mood, according to Gordon Selfridge, even for the pleasure of having her plane displayed. She was uncomfortable with the quid pro quo of free clothes for free publicity for the department store. “My first impression of Amelia,” he recalled, “was a sort of comical paradox. She was determined she wouldn’t select any clothes just to get herself, easily, on the front pages. But she submitted.”
By Wednesday she had finished the final chapter, “Across the Atlantic—Solo.” In a special pocket inside the back cover, George included a recordin
g of her speech upon landing in John Gallagher’s field; The Fun of It was on sale within weeks of her return to the United States.
Because her original destination had been Le Bourget and so many preparations had been made for her there, Amelia felt that it was only right that she visit France before returning home. She made the Channel crossing on aircraft manufacturer C. R. Fairey’s yacht Evadne, met up with George in Cherbourg harbor, and then they both went to Paris. There the crowds were, if anything, more enthusiastic than in England. She was awarded the Cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor by the minister of air, Paul Painlevé, who had awarded the same medal to Lindbergh five years before. “And now I have the honor to bestow this cross upon the Colonel’s charming image,” he was quoted as saying, to which she replied dryly, “I can find no words to express my appreciation.” She was received by the French Senate and dined with Lady Mendl at her Villa Trianon, which had just been wired for sound by Douglas Fairbanks.
From Paris they went to Rome upon the invitation of Mussolini, and then to Brussels, where the king and queen of Belgium asked them to dine. (The queen pulled out a camera and snapped her picture; King Albert awarded Amelia the Cross of the Chevalier of the Order of Leopold.) They sailed for home on June 15 on the Ile de France.
The United States continued the unprecedented shower of honors. The National Geographic Society awarded her the special gold medal they had given Charles Lindbergh five years earlier. The award, made in Constitution Hall, the auditorium of the Daughters of the American Revolution, by President Hoover, was the first the society had ever bestowed on a woman. More than ten thousand requests for tickets to the 3,800-seat auditorium were received. If a bomb had gone off, the government of the United States would have ground to a halt, for present was the president; the chief justice of the Supreme Court and his wife; the secretaries of state, treasury, and commerce; the attorney general; the postmaster general; enough members of Congress to form a quorum of each House; high officers of the army, navy and marines; and diplomats from twenty-two countries. The president of the society spoke, followed by the president of the United States, followed by Amelia. She limited herself to an account of the flight, straying only to say in closing that although her flight had added nothing to aviation, still she hoped that the flight had meant something to the women in aviation. “If it has, I shall feel it was justified.”