Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  The third person to know Amelia’s plan was Balchen’s assistant, Edward “Eddie” Gorski, formerly master mechanic for Anthony H. G. Fokker before Fokker moved his plant from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, six miles from New York on the other side of the Hudson. Stocky, blond, blue-eyed Balchen and the slim, wiry, twenty-six-year old Gorski worked on the Vega in an empty hangar at Teterboro. They strengthened the fuselage to hold a large auxiliary fuel tank and added more tanks to the wings, increasing the fuel capacity to 420 gallons and the flying range to thirty-two hundred miles. They installed a new Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine, Number 3812, and shortened the exhaust stacks. Maj. Edwin Aldrin, father of astronaut “Buzz” Aldrin, was asked to supervise the fuel supply.

  To test the Vega, the two men flew it for hours loaded with sandbags to simulate the weight of the fuel. “We couldn’t land with all that weight,” Gorski said, “so I pushed the sandbags out while Bernt flew back and forth over the Jersey meadowlands.… People thought we were dropping bombs.”

  Additional instruments were added, a drift indicator and three compasses—an aperiodic, a magnetic, and a directional gyro. Amelia spent hours with Balchen learning all she could about flying solely on instruments, for she and Balchen both knew that the weather over the Atlantic, which was always treacherous, might require more “blind flying” than she had ever done.

  On an April Sunday when Balchen had come over from his home in Hasbrough Heights to Rye for lunch and a game of croquet, Amelia put down her mallet and asked him, “Am I ready to do it? Is the ship ready?”

  Balchen said she was and it was.

  That night Amelia told the fourth and last person, her cousin, Lucy Challis, who had come to stay at the house in Rye in January. Lucy was in the kitchen with G. P. and Amelia, stirring cocoa for their Sunday night supper while G. P. and Amelia fixed eggs and toast.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Amelia asked her.

  “Of course.”

  Amelia continued to slice bread while she spoke. “I’m—I’m going to fly the Atlantic again. Alone.”

  Amelia guarded her secret with a hand that proved quicker than the public’s eye—or those of her colleagues. She appeared to be as busy as ever, constantly on the move, giving lectures, being interviewed, maintaining a voluminous correspondence even after her secretary, Norah Alstrulund, left for a trip to South America in April. As late as May 6 she wrote to the regional governors of the Ninety-Nines, suggesting that the annual meeting be held on August 30 and listing room rates for three different hotels in Cleveland.

  Amelia was busy but waiting, waiting for the go-ahead from Doc Kimball, the New York weatherman regarded by transatlantic fliers as their most reliable adviser. All during April and the first half of May he had nothing but bad news. One veteran pilot, Louis T. Reichers, who ignored Kimball’s advice was forced down seventeen miles off the coast of Ireland. He survived, plucked from the stormy sea by Amelia’s old friend, Harry Manning from the Roosevelt. Reichers’s plane was a Lockheed Altair, holding one hundred more gallons of gasoline than Amelia’s Vega with an engine rated at fifty more horsepower. One editorial writer commented that if an aviator as experienced as Reichers failed, his experience should impress others. It did not impress Amelia.*

  Every day she drove the thirty miles from Rye to Teterboro in the hopes the weather would turn and every night she came back. G. P. told his friend Walter Trumbull that he could no longer sleep nights, but Amelia did. On May 17 she told her neighbor Ruth Nichols, who was also planning a transatlantic flight, that one had to take chances on long-distance flights, “so I don’t bother to go into all the possible accidents that might happen. I just don’t think about crackups.”

  The next day Amelia was at Holmes Airport in New York City, christening the new Goodyear dirigible, Resolute, while newsreel cameramen photographed her and a group of women pilots. Twenty-four hours later, she was on her way.

  On May 19, after driving to Teterboro, Amelia called G. P. who was with Doc Kimball in New York. G. P. told her that at 11:30 that morning the weather was good as far as Harbor Grace. She drove home and picked up her flying suit, two scarves, a comb, a toothbrush, a thermos of soup, and a tin of tomato juice. Wearing jodhpurs, a white silk shirt, and a leather jacket, she raced back to Teterboro, arriving at 3:30. G. P. was waiting at the field with his friend, Dr. Lawrence Gould, the Byrd Antarctic explorer whose work he had published, and Mrs. Gould. Gould noticed that when Balchen taxied the plane for takeoff and Amelia waved from the cockpit window, no one at the field seemed to take any notice of her departure.

  Balchen flew and Gorski sat beside Amelia behind the auxiliary fuel tank at the rear. She slept most of the way. They arrived at St. John, New Brunswick, at 5:46, too late to go on to Harbor Grace, Newfoundland. News of the flight reached St. John before Amelia. Balchen assured reporters waiting there that “Mrs. Putnam has ninety-nine chances out of a hundred to cross the Atlantic if she gets an even break. She is probably the greatest woman pilot of today.”

  After a night’s sleep at the Admiral Beatty Hotel, the trio rose at 5 A.M. and left for the field at 6:20. They waited there until 8:30 for the fog to clear before leaving for Harbor Grace, where they arrived at 2 P.M. when the fog was again rolling in. Amelia, who seems to have slept about half the time since her departure from Teterboro, went to a small hotel for another nap. Bernt and Eddie worked over the plane until the fog lifted at six that night when Balchen called her at the hotel. In his diary he wrote, “She arrives at the field in jodhpurs and leather flying jacket, her close-cropped blond hair tousled, quiet and unobtrusive as a young Lindbergh. She listens calmly, only biting her lip a little, as I go over with her the course to hold and tell her what weather she can expect.”

  She told reporters, “I am confident of success. To all my friends, both far and near, let me say that you will hear from me in less than fifteen hours.” She seemed less certain when she stood by Balchen where no one could hear her:

  She looks at me with a small, lonely smile and says, “Do you think I can make it?” and I grin back, “You bet!”

  She crawls calmly into the cockpit of the big, empty airplane, starts the engine, runs it up, checks the mags and nods her head. We pull the chocks and she’s off.

  It was 7:12 P.M.

  Back in New York G. P. spent the day at the weather bureau with Kimball and that night in his rooms at the Hotel Seymour, which served as a watch station and news release center. Hilton Railey manned the telephone, periodically calling the Associated Press for any word of ships sighting her at sea. There were none. Carl Allen was also there. G. P. told him that although he was confident, he couldn’t help but be anxious for some word of her. “I’ve spent my life being the father of a distinguished son [David, whose birthday it was] and the husband of a famous wife,” he told Allen. He was also determined to make her even more famous. Amelia left Harbor Grace on May 20, the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh Day, the day on which he started his historic transatlantic flight. The date had to be more than coincidence. It had to have been set by the creator of the “Lady Lindy” of 1928—George Palmer Putnam.

  The date was perfect but the weather was not. Four hours out of Harbor Grace Amelia was fighting for her life. After cruising at twelve thousand feet into a sunset that faded to darkness while the moon rose over low clouds, she encountered a severe storm along with a series of life-threatening mechanical malfunctions. Her altimeter was not working, leaving her to guess in the dark how high or low she was flying. The electrical storm tossed and battered the Vega while she fought to hold it on course for more than an hour. When she climbed to evade the storm, her tachometer picked up ice and began to spin, making it impossible to estimate her speed and, consequently, the distance she had traveled. She no longer knew if she was on course. About the same time the weld on her manifold cracked and exhaust flames from the engine blazed in the night.

  There could be no turning back. Landing at the unlighted field at Harbor Grace would be s
uicidal. Fire from the manifold and a maximum fuel load carried a death warrant. Flying at what she estimated to be twelve thousand feet, the wings began to ice, forcing her to descend. Heavy with ice, the plane went into a spin. She pulled out of it so near to the sea that she could see the waves breaking beneath her. She had to climb again because at that height it was impossible to navigate by instruments. They would not function so near the surface. Climbing again, she saw ice form on the windshield and felt it weighing down the plane. For the next ten hours she fought to stay low enough to prevent icing but high enough to use her instruments. All through the night she felt the vibrations of the flaming manifold, and tried not to look at it while the rudder bar throbbed under her feet. The cabin stank of gas fumes, increasing the stomach contractions she always had on long flights. To retain her strength and stay alert she forced down part of the chicken soup in the thermos and drank the tomato juice from the tins, which she pierced with an icepick. When she reached up to turn on the reserve fuel tank she discovered the gauge was broken. Gasoline was dripping down the back of her neck. She no longer knew how much fuel remained in her tank.

  Shortly after dawn she spotted a ship, then a fishing fleet. She knew she was off the coast of Ireland and would have to land. “Paris was out of the question.” Because the waves beneath her indicated a northwest wind, she decided she was south of her course and turned north. Actually she was already north of the course to Paris and by flying even farther north she almost missed the northernmost tip of Ireland, beyond which there was nothing but open sea. After sighting the coast, she flew inland, following some railroad tracks while she looked for an airfield. There was none. She landed in a meadow, “frightening all the cows in the neighborhood,” and for a brief moment sat in the plane, looking out at the green hills.

  Dan McCallion, herder of the frightened cows, approached the plane as she climbed out, her face smeared with grease. “Where am I?” she asked him.

  “Sure, you’re in Derry, sir.”

  “In Derry? Oh, Londonderry.” She pointed to a farmhouse across the field. “Whose house is that over there?”

  “It belongs to the Gallaghers.”

  “Could I stop there?”

  “Yes, sir—I mean, Ma’am. And have you come far?”

  “From America.”

  “Holy Mother of God!” McCallion muttered as she walked toward the house.

  At the James Gallaghers she washed her face and drank two cups of tea but insisted she was neither hungry nor tired. A few minutes later she hailed a passing car and rode into Londonderry to telephone G. P. She spoke to him for six minutes, then returned to the Gallaghers to watch her plane until arrangements were made to guard it—a wise procedure, for it might well have disappeared, a piece at a time, in the clutches of souvenir hunters. The plane secured, Amelia returned to Londonderry and placed five three-minute calls to G. P. When she returned a second time to the Gallaghers, she was mobbed by crowds until 10 P.M. when she retired.

  Sunday morning she was again besieged by newsmen, photographers, and autograph hunters, although none gave her the mauling she had suffered at Burry Port in 1928. Congratulatory cables were already arriving, among them two which were of particular importance to Amelia. The first was from the Lindberghs who had learned only ten days before that their kidnapped infant son was dead, his body discovered not far from the young parents’ home. (The first sentence in Anne Lindbergh’s diary of May 21 was “Amelia landed in Ireland!”) The second cable was from Nancy, Lady Astor. “Congratulations,” it said. “Come to us and I will lend you nightgown and other garments.”

  Amelia did stay with the Astors but not until she had been received in London and officially lodged for a night with the American ambassador, Andrew W. Mellon. A Paramount News plane took her from Londonderry to Hanworth Air Park near London, a private flying club. Disembarking in a cloudburst to rousing cheers from club members and a fight between a cameraman and a reporter, she learned that another cameraman and a pilot had been killed when their plane crashed while carrying photographs of her taken in Londonderry to their office in London. Two noted British women aviators, Lady Mary Bailey and Peggy Salaman, were also missing after arriving in Londonderry too late to see her there, then starting back to London. They were found safe the next day.

  Dashing through the rain to the clubhouse, Amelia was greeted by Mellon and was read a message from Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald in which he addressed her as “my friend, Miss Earhart.” She was then taken to London in Mellon’s car, with his daughter, Mrs. David K. E. Bruce, and her friend, Mrs. David E. Finley. On the way they stopped at the British Broadcasting Company studios for a broadcast to the United States. After dinner Amelia was interviewed again by newsmen in the embassy library.

  Another “circus” like that of 1928 had begun, only this time Amelia did not have Hilton Railey in London to help her. G. P. had an agent in town, a Mr. Grubb, who cabled him on May 23 that if the Evening Standard telephoned, the price for an exclusive story from Amelia should be twenty-five hundred dollars. Grubb said he had already initiated the bargaining at three thousand dollars and thought the paper would give twenty-five hundred. But Amelia was left to answer the congratulatory messages as best she could, starting with one from President Hoover who said that she had demonstrated “the capacity of women to match the skill of men in carrying through the most difficult feats of high adventure.”

  Messages poured in, from heads of state—George V of England, Albert, king of the Belgians, and Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany—as well as from aviation officials, pilots, and friends. There were several hundred telegrams from women’s organizations, including Zonta International, the Ninety-Nines, Business and Professional Women, YWCA, Daughters of America, American Association of University Women, university alumnae clubs, church groups, and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union whose members were delighted when, at a luncheon in her honor, she toasted George V in water.

  Press notices were largely adulatory, noting her “modesty and good sense” and how her “glory shed luster on all womanhood.” One editorial said that her reckless disregard for her own safety might tempt others to emulate her in what another called “a magnificent display of useless courage,” but the criticism was tempered with praise. Only The Aeroplane, the British magazine that had treated her 1928 flight as useless publicity seeking, attacked her again, calling her vain and foolish.

  Amelia stayed in London twelve days, in a perpetual round of appearances that left her bedridden with a cold and sore throat by the tenth day. In all of her speeches and interviews she stressed two themes. One was that she had made the flight “for the fun of it” and it would add nothing to aviation’s progress. The other was that she was certain that safe, scheduled transatlantic flights would take place “in our lifetime.”

  On her third day in London she was received at York House by the world’s most eligible bachelor, the future Edward VIII, who would abdicate to marry Wallis Simpson. Amelia met him again on May 31 at a charity ball. Wearing a gown of shimmering green satin, Amelia arrived shortly after the prince and was escorted to his table, where she bobbed her head in greeting, rather than curtsying. (This pleased an American public fascinated by royalty but disapproving of undemocratic manners demanded by protocol.) The prince, who had danced only once until then, led her to the floor where they danced until the orchestra leader asked permission to stop for the midnight supper. Amelia’s only comment was that she hoped the prince was amused and that he was, like most aviators, a very good dancer.

  While she was in London Amelia made a new friend, England’s pilot-heroine Amy Johnson, the twenty-seven-year-old woman who had flown a Moth biplane from London to Australia. With Johnson was her fiancé, James A. Mollison, who had set a record of eight days and nineteen hours flying time from Australia to England. The couple accompanied Amelia to a civil air show along with Gordon Selfridge, Jr., son of the department store magnate. The same day, the senior Selfridge arranged for
Amelia’s Vega to be shipped from Londonderry to London where it was displayed in the window of his store.† The editor of The Aeroplane complimented Selfridge on his contributions to “air-mindedness” with his Aviation Department but renewed his criticism of Amelia: “Whenever something is done by mechanical means to achieve fame, or even merely notoriety, the Great Warm-Hearted Soft-Headed British Public wants to examine the machinery which did it.”

  In addition to the Selfridge family, Amelia renewed her friendship with Nancy Astor, with whom she stayed. Her hostess, whose drawing room was a salon for celebrities in every field, was determined that Amelia meet as many as possible. On June 2, Amelia’s last day in London, she wrote to her mother from the house on St. James Square that she was waiting for Lady Astor to return. “G. B. Shaw is being towed in to meet me or I him.” In the same letter Amelia explained she was meeting G. P. in Cherbourg the next morning because “I thought I just couldn’t face coming home alone.”

  G. P. was on his way. Initially he had said he could not join her because of an important business trip to the West Coast on May 25. It was important, because three weeks later he was named chief of the editorial board of Paramount Studios. Nevertheless, he was looking after her interests at home, lining up paid testimonials and arrangements for her postflight appearances in New York, Chicago, and Boston. The one arrangement he had failed to make was authorization for the flight by the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce. A Branch official wrote complaining that Putnam had pretended that he thought the Vega’s NR license was all that was needed but he knew better. Nothing came of it. G. P. almost always knew someone important enough to silence the complainers.