East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  At dawn they took off into headwinds “as usual.” Collins reported that during the Electra’s journey from Darwin to Lae, communication was established with Darwin for a distance of two hundred miles from this station, “radio phone being used by Miss Earhart.”

  Seven hours and 43 minutes later, Amelia and Fred landed in Lae, New Guinea, a flight of some twelve hundred miles, mostly over water. It was Tuesday, June 29.

  22

  Lost

  • • • • Longitude and latitude are imaginary lines drawn on the globe. The equator is the beginning point of latitude, from which all degrees of latitude are measured. All other latitudes run parallel to it. It is also the only great circle of latitude—the only one that passes through the center of the earth. So circling the earth at its waist means traveling at zero degrees latitude. Put another way, it means, roughly, always flying east or west.

  Longitude is harder to pin down. The meridians of longitude are not parallel; they are all great circles that pass through the North and South poles. That makes the distance between them zero at the poles and the maximum at the equator.

  As Dava Sobel points out in Longitude, any sailor worth his salt can gauge latitude—that was how Columbus sailed straight across the Atlantic in 1492. Latitude depends on taking sights on the sun, or “shooting the sun,” measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon when it is highest in the sky at noon. Time is not a factor. Fred had no trouble figuring latitude.

  But figuring longitude is much more of a problem because time is a factor. Zero degrees longitude is an arbitrary line. Navigational aids calculating longitude began when the Englishman John Harrison perfected the chronometer, so the meridian passing through Greenwich, England, became zero degrees. Likewise, the measurement of time was based on the observatory in the town of Greenwich. Greenwich Time—GMT—became the universal benchmark from which times all over the world are calculated.

  Longitude is measured in degrees, but to plot one’s position the navigator must know the time—exactly. The earth makes one complete spin—one 360-degree circle—every twenty-four hours. Every hour is 15 degrees of longitude, always. But the distance between the meridians is greatest at the equator and least at the poles. One degree of longitude always equals four minutes of time, but only at the equator does one degree stretch for sixty nautical miles. Latitude, by contrast, is always the same—one degree of latitude equals sixty miles no matter where on earth you are.

  When navigating by the sun and stars, the only tools available on ocean passages in 1937, longitude—that is, the distance traveled around the earth—was determined by consulting the Greenwich Hour Angle, a detailed compilation of star positions, upon which Fred Noonan also relied. The Air Almanac gave the Greenwich Hour Angle—the geographic position of the important celestial bodies for every day, hour, minute, and second of the year. Using his octant to “shoot” heavenly bodies, Fred could locate the spot on the earth, the geographic position, that was directly under a given celestial body—it’s splash-down position—and work out the plane’s distance from that spot. Then he could enter the Electra’s probable position on his chart. But to do this he had to know what time it was—exactly—for each minute of error would result in a fifteen-mile miscalculation. That was why radio communication was so important to Fred: he had to check the rate of his chronometers.

  Amelia kept the Electra at an altitude of eleven thousand feet for most of the way to Lae, to stay above a heavy cloud layer. Proceeding by a combination of celestial navigation and dead reckoning, Fred positioned them perfectly; they came down, as planned, on the western flank of New Guinea’s mountain range, reached the coast, found Lae, and set down.

  Lae was by no means a hardship stopover. More than a thousand Europeans lived there, and it was the headquarters of Guinea Airways. It had a three-thousand-foot-long airstrip, a new hotel, and excellent communication with the rest of the world. After seeing to the airplane and getting radio and weather reports, Fred and Amelia went their separate ways. Amelia went out to dinner with Eric Chater, the manager of Guinea Airways; Fred went out drinking with some locals, including James A. Collopy, district superintendent of civil aviation. Fred “had some drinks and sat talking airplanes” and didn’t turn in until well after midnight, according to Collopy.

  The next day Amelia got on the telephone and called her story into the Herald Tribune. She was aiming to get off the next day at noon, she reported, if everything could be done by then: “Everyone has been as helpful and cooperative as possible—food, hot baths, mechanical service, radio and weather reports, advice from veteran pilots here.”

  But the plane was having radio difficulties again, according to Amelia, just a day after being fixed by the Australians. “Captain Fred Noonan, my navigator, has been unable, because of radio difficulties, to set his chronometers.”

  Later in the day, she sent a telegram to George, which has been the subject of much speculation. She sounded worried.

  RADIO MISUNDERSTANDING AND PERSONNEL UNFITNESS PROBABLY WILL HOLD ONE DAY HAVE ASKED BLACK FOR FORECAST FOR TOMORROW YOU CHECK METEOROLOGIST ON JOB AS FN MUST HAVE STAR SIGHTS ARRANGE CREDIT IF TRIBUNE WISHES MORE STORY.

  “Radio misunderstanding” probably refers to the fact that Amelia had thought that Itasca could take radio bearings on her on 3105 kilocycles until they informed her that they could not “due to lack of suitable calibrated equipment on that frequency.” The coast guard on June 18, just prior to the Itasca’s sailing, said they informed her of that.

  The words “personnel unfitness” remain a mystery. Gene Vidal told Gore that he as well as George had been at the Herald Tribune office, that “personnel trouble” was code for Fred’s drinking, and that both he and George advised her to abandon the flight. But she told them she thought “personnel” were improving. Since Amelia’s views on alcohol had gone from laissez-faire to negative—there was no liquor served in her new house—she was being strangely mysterious if the problem was a clear-cut case of too much alcohol. Paul Collins, a close friend of Gene’s, corroborates this conversation. Gene told Paul, “Amelia stated that she was still having personnel trouble and had had to delay her takeoff for Howland Island for two days though the weather pattern was good.” George never divulged to anyone what he thought, and, it must be noted, he never mentioned that he had spoken to Amelia in Lae.

  One can only speculate. Possibly Fred went on a bender. Possibly the word in the telegram is misspelled and Amelia meant “personal” unfitness. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that something was wrong, or Amelia wouldn’t have sent the telegram. The real question is, did it affect the flight? And the answer, of course, is that we don’t know. The enforced delay certainly annoyed Amelia though, for she wrote, “Denmark’s a prison and Lae ... appears to two fliers just as confining.”

  With an extra day on their hands, Amelia and Fred used the time to re-pack the plane and discard various things that were no longer of use. Amelia noted that she and Fred were making the repacking a joint effort, and that when that task was finished, they went off sight-seeing—together—and that Fred was the driver: “We commandeered a truck and with Fred at the wheel ... we set out along a dirt road. We forded a sparkling little river.... We turned into a beautiful coconut grove.” It doesn’t sound as if she is dragging around a disagreeable companion with a hangover, as some biographers have speculated, or that she was ill, under the weather, or feeble, as others have put forth, but it cannot be ruled out.

  There was no partying the next evening, according to James Collopy. Both went to bed early. There are several pictures of them taken in Lae. In most Amelia has a camera in her hand. Contrary to later reports, she looks fit and healthy. So does Fred.

  Fred Noonan was a fine navigator. Pan Am had thought so highly of his abilities that they made him chief navigator and gave him the job of training individual navigators for the Clipper runs. William Grooch, a fellow officer at Pan Am wrote about the beginning of Pan Am’s trans
pacific service:

  Several junior flight officers were assigned to each flight. Their work was supervised by the navigation instructor, Fred Noonan. In flight, Noonan directed them as to the proper use of navigation instruments. Later he corrected their paper work and pointed out mistakes. Training was tedious work but it was absolutely necessary. All of us realized that while the radio direction-finder was a great aid it was not infallible, and our navigators must be able to find their way without it if necessary.

  Fred was regarded with something close to awe: “The crew maintained that he could ‘shoot the sun’ standing on his head.”

  The big problem in navigation was still longitude. What was true about longitude in the fifteenth century still held true in the twentieth: it was more difficult to figure than latitude. On that first Clipper flight that Musick skippered and Noonan navigated, one night Noonan got seven fixes from the stars and received forty-one radio bearings; he was dead on course but was making a bit faster speed than he had figured. That meant his longitude calculations were off.

  Fred was very good, but on the Electra he was missing navigation aids that he had become used to on the Clipper flights, namely the radio bearings beamed to the Clippers by Pan Am operations, and the ability to communicate with ships at sea. It was because he couldn’t send and receive messages in Morse code, necessary to communicate with ships, any better than Amelia, that they had jettisoned the trailing antenna; he was also aware that Howland Island was not reachable by Pan Am radio because it was too far from their route. Perhaps he didn’t even realize himself just how crucial the constant stream of information was to his navigational prowess. Amelia certainly knew how hard it was to find an island. After she, Fred, Harry Manning, and Paul landed in Hawaii, she had written, “Making the landfall that morning was even pleasanter than my first of California’s shore line two years ago. After all, it would require ingenuity to miss a continent, which I was aiming for then. Hawaii, however, is something else again and we all knew how easily it could be passed by.” Compared with Howland, Hawaii was a continent.

  Richard Black, whom George was in contact with, was point man for Amelia for the South Pacific, in charge of gathering the weather information as well as coordinating the ships that would help guide her in. He saw to it that the Fleet Weather Central forecast for July 1 for Amelia’s route, based on information gathered from all British and American stations and ships in the South Pacific reached her:

  For Earhart, Lae, accurate forecast difficult account lack of reports your vicinity. Conditions appear generally average over route, no major storms apparent. Partly cloudy skies with dangerous local rain squalls about 300 miles east of Lae and scattered heavy showers remainder of route. Winds ESE about 25 knots to Ontario and then E to ENE about 20 knots to Howland.

  Black, in hindsight, would later say that he thought she shouldn’t have taken off in the face of such a forecast. But five years before, while waiting at Harbor Grace, Amelia had been faced with a doubtful weather report that kept the captain of the greatest plane in the world, the Do-X, on the ground; she had taken off and triumphed. It didn’t particularly bother her that she would have the wind on her nose; she would have been expecting it. Southeast trade winds blowing at twenty-five miles an hour were the norm in June, according to Clarence S. Williams, who mapped portions of the flight.

  Nor did the report seem dangerous compared with the storms that she and Fred had already flown through, the monsoons that had forced her back twice to Akyab. The thought undoubtedly was that if a serious storm developed before the point of no return, the Electra could do what it had done in the past: retrace its route back to Lae. The most important factor was Fred’s ability to set their course by the sun and stars—and nothing in Fleet Central’s forecast cast doubt that he would be able to do so.

  The standard navigation operating procedure that Fred set up for the Clipper flights was as follows: the navigator received a weather report every thirty minutes; every sixty minutes he “shot the sun”; and every 120 minutes the plane dropped down near the surface of the water so that he could make a drift site from which he could compute the exact wind direction and intensity. Fred would have been following this procedure on the flight to Howland, at least in the beginning—shooting the sun and the stars, dropping down to the sea to take drift sights. He would have depended also on dead reckoning. He would have been flying a great circle course, as was Pan Am practice. If he was following the procedures he had instituted at Pan Am, he would be plotting longitude and latitude every half hour, as well as altitude, speed, and direction of the wind.

  There would later be theories that there was confusion as to time, because the flight crossed the international date line. But standard operating procedure at Pan Am was to send time messages based on Greenwich time, precisely to obviate this error. Indeed, every Pan Am Pacific flight crossed the date line, and knowing about it was one of the tricks of the trade.

  The navy and coast guard thought they were prepared to render every aid. The Itasca was waiting at Howland Island, with Richard Black aboard, backed up by a staff of nine military personnel. Black had juggled the schedule of Itasca’s regular three-month tour to replenish supplies at Howland, Baker, and Jarvis so that it arrived in plenty of time to get Howland set up for Amelia. Now, under the supervision of Army Air Corps Lieutenant Daniel Cooper, the runways were marked off with red flags by the young Hawaiian settlers. The short 2,400-foot runway running east-west, the one Amelia was expected to use because of the prevailing easterly winds, got special attention, but the other two, the 4,100-foot northeast-southwest runway, smooth and hard, which would be used in a crosswind, and the 4,100 foot north-south runway, the longest of all, which would be used if the wind shifted, were also carefully checked out and marked. Since there was a huge bird population—10,000 frigates, 8,000 boobies, and 14,000 terns on the tiny island—numerous birds had been forcibly removed from the runways. The small house with a living-radio room, kitchen, and bedroom had been tidied up for her, and the bed made. Beach and offshore patrols had begun, and a radio-telephone connection was set up between the island and Itasca. The USS Ontario assumed a position halfway between Lae and Howland Island to help guide her in. The USS Swan took up a position midway between Howland and Honolulu, to guide her home on the final leg. They began waiting.

  According to navy records, a final weather report to Fred Noonan showed that the winds had abated; they were estimated to be between twelve and eighteen miles per hour beginning east-southeast and changing to east-northeast, with squalls to be detoured. It seemed as if the weather was improving. The radio must have been fixed—they wouldn’t have dared take off otherwise.

  The Electra, loaded to the maximum—with 1,100 gallons of gasoline and 75 gallons of oil—began its roll down the runway at precisely zero Greenwich time, ten A.M. Lae time. As the plane reached the road that crossed the unpaved runway near the seaward end, it bounced into the air, went over the drop-off and then flew so low over the water that the propellers threw up spray, according to observers. The flight to Howland Island was 2,556 miles, or 2,201 nautical miles, a very long way, but no one—certainly not Fred’s peers—expected that Fred would have any trouble finding Howland.

  A cable went out to the Herald Tribune that she had finally taken off. The world began waiting.

  Not much more than a month ago I was on the other shore of the Pacific, looking westward. This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific. In those fastmoving days which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us—except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.

  So ends Amelia’s narrative.

  The fact that they left at zero Greenwich time made it easier for Fred to work out their position from the celestial sights, for now his watch time and GMTwere the same. For everyone else waiting to hear from the plane—notably the navy and the coast guard—it made it easier to follow the Electra’s progress: for even t
hough the Electra would be crossing the 180th meridian, the international date line, they didn’t have to make allowances for all the time changes and the date change as well.

  The chart of the area then in use, #1198, published at the Hydrographic Office within the navy, contrary to assertions that it showed Howland Island wrongly placed, in fact was reasonably accurate. According to the last chart correction made by the U.S. Government dating from 1995, the coordinates to the day beacon on the west side of Howland are: latitude, 0 degrees 48 minutes, 19 seconds north; longitude, 176 degrees 37 minutes west. The chart Fred was using showed Howland within half a mile of those coordinates. When, years later, emulating Amelia’s world flight, Anne Pellegreno used the latitude and longitude coordinates that Fred Noonan had used for Howland, she found they were correct.

  Seven hours, 20 minutes into the flight, Lae received a report from the plane that their position was 4 degrees 33 minutes south, 159 degrees 7 minutes east. That meant they were on course flying east-northeast, coming up on the equator but still south of it by some 277 miles, with 1,390 nautical miles to go before they would reach Howland. But it also meant that they had covered, by Fred’s computations, only 785 miles in 7 hours, 20 minutes and were therefore making a ground speed of only 107 knots (nautical miles) per hour. Flying at that rate, it would take them another thirteen hours to reach Howland. That meant slightly over twenty-one hours in the air. That longitude reading meant that the headwinds they were encountering were stronger than had been predicted. The flight from Oakland to Hawaii was only some hundred miles shorter, and they had made that flight in 15 hours, 47 minutes. This was going to be different.