After taking the plane through a series of maneuvers Amelia looked back at Wade and laughed, pointing first in one direction, then in another. She was lost. She had been so intent on studying the controls and feeling the responses of the aircraft that she had no idea where they were.
A few years later, Wade saw what he thought was another demonstration of Amelia’s instinctive skill when he watched her take off from Clover Field in Santa Monica. As her Vega headed toward the trees at the end of the runway, he saw intermittent puffs of black smoke in its wake, evidence of a badly misfiring motor. With the aircraft nearing stall point Amelia eased it up gently over the trees, circled the field, and landed. “There,” Wade said, “was a pilot.”
At least one colleague disagreed. Elinor Smith, holder of the women’s solo endurance record who learned to fly when she was twelve years old, thought Amelia was an incapable amateur. Amelia came to New Castle, Delaware, while Smith was there for the trials of a new plane designed by Giuseppe Bellanca in which she intended to set a second record. Bellanca’s test pilot, George Haldeman, invited Amelia to go up with him and Smith. Smith claimed later that as soon as Amelia took the controls “our big, calm bird suddenly lurched out of control.” Amelia asked to go up again without Haldeman. When Smith took her up the second time, the same thing happened. They “slipped and skidded all over the sky,” she said.
Smith’s recollections of the incident were written a half century after a bitter dispute with George Palmer Putnam, long after the deaths of both Putnam and Amelia. She claimed that he had tried to hire her to fly Amelia’s plane for her in the Women’s Air Derby of 1929 and when she refused his offer he said that he would see to it that she never flew again professionally. It seems likely that Smith’s differences with G. P. might have colored her view of Amelia’s ability and it seems unlikely that Amelia could have been so inept when she had just passed the tests for her transport license.
Certainly the two women disagreed on the attributes of the Lockheed Vega. Smith said the Vega “had all the glide potential of a boulder falling off a mountain.” That was after she bought one in 1931 for a transatlantic flight she hoped to make but cracked it up at Garden City four months later. Amelia, who thought the Vega was a great plane, never changed her mind. In 1933 she bought the same Vega Smith had cracked up from a subsequent owner and set three records in it.
While she looked for a Vega that was old (and cheap) Amelia flew whatever she was offered, including gliders in Michigan and, in May, a single-engine amphibian as copilot with Ralph DeVore. The flight was a near disaster. They were taking a Keystone Loening Air Yacht on an inaugural flight from Cleveland to Detroit when a fog forced them down on Lake Erie. They had no radio, so while the plane tossed on five-foot waves for almost three hours, search parties were organized ashore and newsboys were on the streets selling “extras” on the plane’s disappearance. When the fog lifted, DeVore made it to the Detroit terminal. For most of the return trip, Amelia piloted the plane and pronounced the flight “a great lark,” a phrase more suited to an Ogontz debutante than a working pilot.
Until July, most of Amelia’s flying was in the Avian, which she took on the lecture and air show circuit whenever weather permitted. She also attempted to fly to Boston in it for Muriel’s marriage to Albert Morrissey in West Medford on June 29, but was grounded by weather and missed the rehearsal. She made it in time for the ceremony, at which she was the maid of honor, then informed the officiating minister that she thought it would take more courage to marry than it took to cross the Atlantic in a plane.
There is no record of whether she talked first to someone at Air Associates in New York about buying the Vega or waited until she visited the Burbank plant of Lockheed while she was in California for TAT. She bought it in July—serial number 10, the tenth Vega built by Lockheed, registered to her as NC6911. The plane, which had been a demonstrator for a year and had been leased to New York’s Mayor Walker, was reported to be in poor condition.
Amelia took possession on July 20, ten days before the bill of sale was completed, and went to Chatauqua, New York, where an audience of five thousand packed the amphitheater to hear her speak. She did not fly the Vega but took along a pilot, Lt. O. L. Stephens, either because she was not yet the legal owner or because she was still uncertain about her ability to land it on the fourteenth hole of the golf course like Stephens did. Years later, she told the great speed flier and test pilot Ben Howard that the first time she took the Vega up alone, the altimeter failed to function and with poor visibility she had to estimate how low she could safely fly by using a combination of readings from the fuel mixture control and carburetor response dials, a solution Howard thought ingenious and sensible.
She had to wait another two weeks after her return from Chatauqua before she could spend much time in the Vega. G. P. had scheduled other appearances, including a publicity stunt at Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island on July 23. Part owner of a submarine along with its inventor, Simon Lake, and a third man, Putnam had tried and failed to sell Lake’s concept of an air pressure escape compartment to the Navy. Before he sold his rights to the ship, G. P. decided to use it for some free publicity for Amelia. He arranged for Amelia and Dorothy Putnam to swim out of the escape compartment of the submarine to the surface. Both women wore bathing suits but Dorothy looked a lot more attractive than Amelia, who was too thin. Amelia also donned a diver’s suit and descended thirty-five feet to the bottom of the harbor where she remained for fifteen minutes. Unfortunately two St. Louis aviators, Forest O’Brine and Dale Johnson, broke the world’s endurance record the same day, relegating Amelia’s dive to the inside pages.
She also had work to do for TAT on the West Coast. This time she took Amy along. She was back in New York by August 3 for a national network broadcast to Richard Byrd at the South Pole. She finished at midnight and left the next morning with Lieutenant Stephens for Los Angeles where they arrived on August 7.*
When Amelia brought the plane to the Lockheed plant for an inspection flight, Wiley Post, the test pilot, said it was unfit to fly. Lockheed offered her a replacement, serial number 36, registered as NC31E. The trade was arranged by Carl B. Squire, the new general manager of Lockheed, which had just been purchased by a holding company, Detroit Aircraft Corporation. Lockheed was currently building a new plane for Lindbergh, the Lockheed Sirius†, and with Amelia in another Lockheed, Squire could claim as customers the public’s king and queen of the air.
One year after the instant fame resulting from her transatlantic flight, Amelia was ready for another exploit. The fires of that fame needed refueling; the lecture circuit, new material; and Amelia, proof that she was more than an attractive, lucky pilot with a shrewd manager. The best opportunity offered her that summer of 1929 was the first cross-country women’s air derby. Amelia took it.
* A week later Stephens was killed in a crash near Clovis, New Mexico. The thirty-eight-year-old Army man was flying a new plane he planned to use in the National Air Races at Cleveland when the vent for his cockpit blew off. While he was looking for it, he banked, went into a side-slip, and crashed.
† On display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
CHAPTER NINE
Losing and Leading
In August of 1929 Amelia was one of nineteen contestants in the first woman’s cross-country air derby. She signed up for the race on her birthday, July 24, the same day the Vega became officially hers, but only after a six-week struggle over rules with the committee for the National Air Races. The all-male committee had suggested that the women’s event, which would precede the air races at Cleveland, begin at Omaha rather than Santa Monica to spare the women the dangers of crossing the Rocky Mountains. An alternative suggestion from the committee was that of starting in California but with each woman accompanied by a male navigator. Amelia was outraged. She immediately became the self-appointed spokesperson for the perspective contestants.
On June 11 she sent telegrams
of protest to both the NAA contest committee and the national races committee along with a statement to the press. It would be ridiculous, she said, to advertise the derby as an important event if the course was the easy route over the middle west from Omaha to Cleveland. As for taking along a male navigator, the proposal was an insult to contestants who were required to have a minimum of one hundred hours of flight time. If she were not allowed to fly solo from California, she said, she would not enter the race. She was joined in her protest by Lady Mary Heath, Elinor Smith, and Louise Thaden.
The NAA committee passed the buck to the manager of the National Air Races, Cliff Henderson, who persuaded the race committee to accept Amelia’s terms. The race, they ruled, would extend over a period of eight days, starting August 18 at Santa Monica. The contestants would fly solo in planes to be rated as CW (85 to 115 cubic inch displacement) or DW (150 to 220 cubic inch displacement). Amelia signed up with six other women. Twelve eventually joined them.
Amelia’s effort to gain recognition for women as competent pilots was not made any easier by Will Rogers, aviation aficionado and the nation’s most famous humorist. In his nationally syndicated newspaper column, the gum-chewing pseudocowboy from Oklahoma called the race the “Powder Puff Derby.” Feature writers followed his lead, referring to the women aviators as “Flying Flappers,” “Aerial Queens,” and “Sweethearts of the Air.” To counteract this public perception of the derby as a female flying circus, Amelia said she thought it would be more important for all of the contestants to reach Cleveland safely than for any of them to set new records. Most did not agree. They flew to win and before the derby was over, one would die, and nearly all would narrowly escape serious injury or death.
Once Amelia had possession of the Vega, she had almost no time to fly it. Instead she spent her time publicizing the derby or working for her new employer, TAT. The last real rest she had was on the weekend before the derby, which she spent at Lake Arrowhead with Lindbergh’s friends, Jack and Irene Maddux. One of Keyes’s partners in TAT, Maddux was very fond of Amelia but saw nothing wrong in using her presence as his houseguest to gain recognition for himself and the new airline. Three days before the race he gave a dinner aboard a Maddux transport plane for Amelia, five other derby fliers, and the mayor of Santa Barbara. All of the women spoke on a national network hookup over the plane’s radio. Maddux also arranged for Amelia and Irene Maddux to arrive in a Goodyear blimp at the start of the derby on Sunday, August 18.
Twenty thousand spectators gathered along the edges of the Santa Monica airfield or stood on a nearby hill under a fiery sun to see the derby fliers take off. Their nineteen planes were lined up at two starting lines on the field, six of the light CW class in front and thirteen of the heavier DW class behind. Amelia’s light-green Vega was the sixth in the DW class to leave but at the south border of the field she turned back, circling until the last plane had left before landing. Her electric motor switch had shorted out, costing her fourteen minutes of lost flight time while repairs were made.
The first overnight stop, at San Bernardino, was chaotic. There were not enough mechanics or guards for the planes and long after midnight the women were still wrangling with officials over a scheduled stop the next day at Calexico, California, en route to Phoenix. A number of pilots in the DW-class planes who had used the field the week before said it was unsafe for heavy aircraft. One of them, Florence “Pancho” Lowe Barnes, a Pasadena heiress who had acquired her nickname from reputedly crewing on a banana boat running guns to Mexico, settled the matter. The stocky, profane, cigar-smoking Pancho, clad in riding breeches and leather boots, stomped from room to room with a petition stating that the fliers would refuse to continue the derby unless the first checkpoint was changed from Calexico to Yuma. The officials agreed.
By the end of the second day Amelia’s hopes for a safe race to prove women were competent pilots had been dashed. She was one of the offenders, crashing at Yuma when her plane struck a pile of sand and nosed over. The accident did cause an unusual reaction from the derby fliers, ordinarily so fiercely competitive. They voted to give Amelia an extra hour and a half of waiting time without penalty for repairs. Later that day she almost cracked up again when she side-slipped and bounced in for a precarious landing at Phoenix.
As usual she refused to accept responsibility for the crash at Yuma. She had been told, she claimed, that the Yuma field was good for its entire length. “Instead I struck sand,” she said. “There wasn’t anything to do but let it [the plane] go over.” Only a week before, the pilots who had objected to Calexico’s field had also said Yuma’s was not much better with soft, sandy spots—a difficult place to land.
Other competitors were having a worse time than Amelia. Marvel Crosson, a twenty-five-year-old Alaskan bush pilot, had disappeared after leaving Yuma. The slim, pretty Crosson, holder of a women’s altitude record, had refused her colleagues’ pleas to wait at Yuma for repairs to an engine that had been overheating since the beginning of the race. She did promise to “take it easy” to Phoenix, where a new engine was to be delivered and installed during the overnight stay there. No one had seen her since soon after she left Yuma.
Bobbi Trout, a twenty-three-year-old test pilot and former altitude and endurance record holder, was washed out of the race after drifting over the border into Mexico where she was forced down at Algondones. Her plane flipped over, destroying landing gear and propeller. Trout was not injured, but she had lost her chance to win the derby.
Carburetor trouble forced German flier Thea Rasche down at Holt-ville, California. Rasche showed reporters an anonymous telegram that read, “Beware of sabotage.” Another contestant, Clare Fahy, echoed Ras-che’s accusations of sabotage at San Bernardino after mechanics discovered both center section wires of her plane had been severed. They attributed the damage to a rough landing but Fahy’s husband, Lt. Herbert Fahy, said the wires had been weakened by acid and advised his wife to drop out of the race.
Four other fliers also had trouble. Ruth Elder reported that San Bernardino attendants had mistakenly put gas in her oil tank causing vapor to form on her goggles and a loss of ten minutes flying time while she circled over the desert cleaning them. Opal Kunz, whose husband was vice-president of Tiffany’s, lost her way, ran out of gas, and landed in a creek bed four miles from Prescott, Arizona. A far more militant and outspoken feminist than Amelia, Kunz sought and got help from several male residents of the area who carried enough gasoline in tins to get her plane to Phoenix. Mary Haizlip, a professional flier from St. Louis, was also forced down, at Mexicali.
New Zealander Jessie Maude Keith Miller lost her lead in the CW division when she misunderstood the instructions for a fly-over of Calexico—and landed there. Miller, the first woman to fly from London to Australia (with Bill Lancaster, a man for whom she left her husband) shared a room with Amelia in Phoenix. Her roommate had more to say about the night at San Bernardino than Amelia. She told reporters it had been a waking nightmare in which unauthorized persons climbed in and out of the planes while the pilots were at dinner and none of the women slept more than two or three hours. “We’re tired,” she said.
Amelia was more worried than tired waiting for news of Marvel Crosson. It came the next afternoon at Douglas, Arizona. Crosson was dead, her body discovered near her plane by a search party in the mountains outside Wellton, Arizona. When Louise Thaden and Gladys O’Donnell heard the news they burst into tears.
There were other, less serious misadventures that day. Vera Dawn Walker, a Los Angeles actress, had been lost in New Mexico for more than an hour and Blanche Noyes, a Cleveland woman, also an actress, had flown almost sixty miles inside Mexico where she landed at Cananes to get her bearings but took off immediately when she saw a mob of villagers running toward her plane. Keith-Miller had damaged her Fleet-Kinner during a forced landing at Elfreida, Arizona, but managed to repair it herself, reaching Douglas late that night.
On the next, the fifth day of the derby, four more conte
stants met with accidents. At Pecos both Gladys O’Donnell, who ran an aviation school with her husband Lloyd at Long Beach, California, and Edith Foltz from Portland, Oregon, damaged their landing gears, although they completed the day’s course to Fort Worth. Pancho Barnes was out of it after she overran the field at Pecos and plowed into a parked car, demolishing her aircraft. The fourth, Noyes, had a fire aboard. She landed thirty miles west of Pecos in some mesquite trees, burned her hands pulling smoking equipment from the baggage compartment, then took off again, tearing the bottom of the fuselage and smashing part of her landing gear. Noyes flew back to Pecos, had her hands bandaged, ordered parts for the landing gear sent to Fort Worth, called in the story to a Columbus newspaper, and took off again for Fort Worth. A fifth flier, Margaret Perry of Beverly Hills, was forced to drop out of the race when she was hospitalized at Fort Worth with typhoid fever.
The exhausted survivors were hustled into waiting cars at Fort Worth and taken to the estate of publisher Amon G. Carter where a banquet was given in their honor. Amelia now had an ally in Will Rogers who had followed news of the derby with great sympathy for the women pilots. He wrote in his column that race officials had been unfair in making the contestants stop “in every buffalo wallow that has a chamber of commerce. They even make ’em eat with Amen [sic] Carter,” Rogers added.
On the morning of August 25 in East St. Louis ten of the eleven remaining fliers in the race had their picture taken.* All but two wore grease-spattered coveralls or riding breeches and boots. Only Amelia and Blanche Noyes were in blouses and skirts but they looked just as bedraggled as the others. Before they left, the fliers sent off a collective message to the local committee at Columbus where they would spend that night. They would, they said, eat anything except fried chicken, which they had eaten every night since leaving Santa Monica.
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