Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  At that time Carl Allen of the Herald Tribune was the only reporter informed of her plans to start the world flight from Miami. He met her there, bringing his Oakland notes for updating the story. Going over a checklist with her Allen noticed that the marine frequency radio operating on five hundred kilocycles with a Morse key was missing. “Oh,” she told him, “that was left off—when Manning had to drop out of the flight.” She explained to Allen that neither she nor Noonan could operate a Morse code key fast enough to justify carrying the extra weight. That left, as Mantz already knew, the only means of sending or receiving a “fix” on her location the five-hundred-kilocycle band on the Western Electric telephone-radio that required the 250-foot-long trailing antenna. Before the week was up, Amelia had done just what Mantz feared. She dropped the trailing wire. He did not learn about it until after she had left Miami, when a letter from G. P. informed him that the radio that gave them “unending trouble” was finally fixed by technicians in Miami, who decided the aerials were all too long and shortened them.

  On May 29 Amelia announced her revised plans to the press. She would leave from Miami, flying east to west on Pan American’s regular route through the West Indies and along the east coast of South America. She would not, she said, use the code wireless set (she did not admit she had dumped it) but would depend entirely on voice broadcasts of her position on a daytime frequency of 6210 kilocycles and a nighttime one of 3105. Her only cargo was the six thousand five hundred original flight covers and two thousand more, stamped for the second attempt.

  Amelia spent most of her time at the airport until Sunday, when Noonan persuaded her to go fishing for pompano. He had already charmed a Miami business man, W. Bruce MacIntosh, into offering him an office, and when he told MacIntosh that Amelia liked pompano, the Miami man and his wife, Lily, invited Noonan and Amelia to spend the day fishing on their boat. MacIntosh noticed that Amelia was too distracted to do much fishing but she seemed to enjoy the outing, so much so that when he asked her about her departure time she told him she couldn’t say but suggested that he come to the airfield early Tuesday morning. He did, later claiming he was the last man to shake her hand before she left the country.

  Other than this one Sunday, G. P. took over any time Amelia was not at the municipal airport. There were numerous interviews and news photography sessions, including one in which David and Nilla Putnam, who had come from Fort Pierce to say goodbye, were pictured. On May 31, Amelia’s last full day in Miami, G. P. escorted her to the Pan American operations base at Dinner Key to thank the mechanics and officials for their “splendid assistance.” They met Noonan there visiting his former colleagues after picking up two pairs of eyeglasses. He had broken his only pair, he said. He sat on them while driving to the airport.

  Amelia and G. P. left Dinner Key without Noonan, for lunch with Harvey Firestone at his Miami Beach House. After lunch Amelia was supposed to spend the afternoon napping in her hotel room but she spent at least part of it at a dentist’s office where her upper right third molar was extracted “to cure headaches.”

  A better cure for her headaches might have included a navigator with a reputation for sobriety, a single supervisor responsible for all aspects of the flight, more practice flying in the Electra, and a husband less eager to cash in on the flight. She had always insisted that anticipated dangers were seldom realized. This time she was not so sure. She had given Cochran a small, silk American flag, one she had carried on all her long-distance flights. When Cochran asked her to take it with her and autograph it when she returned, Amelia said, “No, you’d better take it now.”

  When she asked Carl Allen what her chances were, he said he thought about fifty-fifty. Amelia told him that she thought she might never complete the flight. “It’s not a premonition,” she said, “just a feeling.” Except for Noonan’s sake, this didn’t worry her, she said to Allen. “As far as I know, I’ve got only one obsession—a small and probably feminine horror of growing old—so I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Just One More Flight

  At 5:56 on the morning of June 1 Amelia’s friend Carl Allen watched the silver Electra lift off the runway at Miami Airport. This was to be her last “stunt” flight. “I have a feeling there is just one more flight in my system,” she told him. “… this trip around the world is it.” After that she was going to settle down “for keeps,” to fly only for lecture tours, for research at Purdue, and “for fun.”

  Amelia had left the hotel at 3:15 with G. P. in the first car of an entourage. David and Nilla Putnam were in the second, and Noonan in the third, driven by a woman friend. Five hundred of Amelia’s admirers also came to see her off, the light from their cars piercing the darkness on every road leading to the airport. When the Electra was rolled out onto the ramp and the gates of the field opened for the spectators they rushed forward, pushing back a line of policemen for a glimpse of their idol.

  Amelia could still attract five hundred people willing to get up in the middle of the night just to see her take off. Newspaper editorials praised her for her courage and “careful planning” even as they claimed the risk outweighed the value of the flight. But banner headlines on June 2 went to a battle between striking steel workers and police in South Chicago in which five died and one hundred were injured, on June 3, to the marriage of Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore to Edward of England. That week Germany and Italy abandoned any pretense of neutrality in the Spanish civil war and Franklin Roosevelt continued his efforts to “pack” the Supreme Court with three additional justices. Amelia’s flight was relegated to short stories on inside pages of most newspapers.

  For six days she flew along the eastern coast of Central and South America, stopping at San Juan, Puerto Rico, Caripito, Venezuela, Paramaibo, Dutch Guiana [Surinam],* and Fortazela and Natal in Brazil. She was up most mornings by three or four, averaging five hours of sleep a night. On the longest flight, from Paramaibo to Fortazela, she crossed 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean in ten hours.

  At Natal, her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic, she wrote in her log, “Gas fumes in the plane from fueling made me sick again this morning.… Stomach getting weak, I guess.” The plane was noisy, the cabin cramped, and her chief means of communication with Noonan was by notes fastened to a line with a clothespin and passed back on a fishpole that hung along the top of the bulkhead at her right. The alternative was for one or the other of them to climb over the auxiliary fuel tanks that blocked the area from cockpit to the table at which Noonan worked at the rear.

  The flight across the Atlantic was the first real test of the Electra and her crew. The plane passed with honors. So did Fred Noonan, whose navigation was very accurate. Amelia did not do as well. When they were near the African coast, she chose to ignore Noonan’s advice to turn south for their destination of Dakar, French West Africa [Senegal]. Instead she turned north flying for 50 miles along the African coast until she sighted St. Louis, 163 miles north of Dakar, then sent a note to Noonan asking “What put us north?” She did. She admitted the error soon after, writing “The fault was entirely mine.”

  Navigating by instinct was not her worst mistake. She had already made that in Miami when she dropped the trailing antenna for her DF and the CW (telegraph code key) transmitter. Over the Atlantic she passed two Air France mail planes during the night but could not communicate with either because they were equipped with CW only, a far more dependable system than her MCW (microphone voice transmission).†

  Amelia’s neglect of so vital an element as telegraph-radio originated in her own nature and past experiences. In spite of her denials she was a romantic about flight. It was a near-transcendent experience for her and she instinctively avoided the communication that broke her isolation from the earthbound and mundane. As a student she was intelligent but impatient, reluctant to record the steps by which she arrived at an answer. Learning telegraphic code was dull, time-consuming work—the kind
she avoided whenever possible. She also lacked the time. Joseph Gurr, the radio expert who worked on the Electra’s system before and after the aborted March flight, said, “I finally got her into the airplane on the ramp at Paul Mantz’s.… We had barely covered the preliminaries when Amelia had to leave. She was hard to pin down because she was obviously in demand in other places.” On her 1935 flight from Hawaii to Oakland, she had used the radio to listen to music from the West Coast, to talk with G. P. and to report the weather, but not to give her position. Without a position report the crews of four Coast Guard cutters one hundred miles out from San Francisco to escort her home could not find her and had to return to port without making contact.

  Amelia reached St. Louis on the African coast on June 7, after thirteen hours and twenty-two minutes fighting off recurrent nausea while bucking rainstorms and headwinds, and nursing the Electra’s two engines, which she was reluctant to “open up” for fear of damaging them. She spent that night at the airfield in a barracks-like room where she discovered “a couple of bugs” in her bed and kept the light on all night “thinking the creatures might not venture out under the glare.” The toilet facilities she described as “execrable.”

  Nevertheless that first week was a good one. She had flown more than forty hours for four thousand miles. Added to the official start from Oakland, she had completed one fourth of her journey. Although the story of her flight was relegated to the back pages of most newspapers, on June 8 she was the subject of Eleanor Roosevelt’s widely read syndicated column, “My Day.” The president’s wife wrote that she was relieved to hear that her friend Amelia Earhart was safe in Africa. “All day I have been thinking about Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic,” she wrote, adding that she would be glad when the entire trip was over because she was much more interested in Amelia as a person than as a recordbreaking pilot.

  After a short flight the next day to Dakar, Amelia was held up for two days by bad weather. Too impatient to wait any longer, on June 10 she changed her next destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa [Mali]. She would try to “squeeze between” a tornado to the south and sandstorms to the north. She succeeded, flying eleven hundred forty miles in under eight hours. The next day she flew almost one thousand miles, from Gao over the Sahara to Fort Lamy, now N’Djamena in French Equatorial Africa [Chad], where it was so hot the plane could not be refueled until after sunset for fear of gasoline igniting on hot metal. She left early the following morning for El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan [Sudan] and “pressed on” the day after, June 14, to Assab, present-day Aseb, Ethiopia on the shores of the Red Sea. It was a twelve-hundred-mile flight, a “long day” in which she had lunch and wrote a dispatch at Khartoum in the Sudan and had tea at Massawa, Eritrea [Mits’iwa, Ethiopia]. In two weeks she had flown fifteen thousand miles from Miami and was more than halfway to her goal.

  On June 15 she crossed the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan (then part of British India), almost two thousand miles in thirteen hours and twenty minutes. The trip was without incident except for a broken fuel analyzer. Jacques de Sibour met her at Karachi and G. P. called that night from the Herald Tribune office in New York where their conversation was recorded for a story. He was already pressing her to give him a possible ETA for Howland Island, but she put him off with a promise to give him one at her next stop, Calcutta.

  During the call G. P. asked her if she was the first person to fly from the Red Sea across Arabia to Karachi. She hadn’t thought about it, she said, but she would try to let him know. He didn’t wait. He secured a statement from the air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington who said it was probably the first time the route across the Arabian sea had been negotiated—“a pretty long and difficult one.” This feat did not boost news coverage of the flight. The New York Times ran three sentences on her arrival at Karachi on page 25 with most newspapers following suit.‡

  She stayed in Karachi for two days with little or no rest in the blistering subcontinental heat. She went to the post office to choose the stamps and supervise the cancellation of the seventy-five hundred covers she was now carrying. She also took two camel rides, which added interest to her daily travelogue for the Herald Tribune, before leaving on June 17 for Calcutta. During the first part of the flight across the subcontinent, she found no escape from the heat, not even at fifty-five hundred feet where the temperature was still 90° Fahrenheit. Later there were rainstorms and air currents, which pushed her plane up and down as much as one thousand feet in seconds. At Calcutta there was a telegram from G. P. assuring her that the Dutch airlines KLM which also used the type of fuel analyzer she did would repair hers there or replace it in Singapore. He also asked her to call in her next story to the Herald Tribune.

  Amelia’s old friend from Boston and Maine days, Paul Collins, said there was a second telephone call from India that he and Eugene Vidal overheard G. P. take at his Hotel Seymour suite. Collins heard Amelia say, “I’m starting to have personnel trouble.” When G. P. told her to stop the flight immediately, she said there was “only one bad hop left and I’m pretty sure I can handle the situation.” G. P. did not explain what Amelia meant by “personnel trouble,” but Collins and Vidal assumed that Noonan was drinking.

  On June 18 Amelia took off from a water-logged runway at Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport; the Electra barely cleared the trees at the end of the runway. The monsoon rains “beat patches of paint off the edges of the plane’s wings” while she crossed the Bay of Bengal and headed for Rangoon, Burma, and she had to put down at Akyab [Sittwe] on the west coast. She tried to reach Rangoon once more that day but failed, an effort Noonan described as “two hours and six minutes of going nowhere.” On June 19 they reached Rangoon and the following day went on to Singapore, where Amelia collected twenty-five dollars for winning a race with a KLM plane from Rangoon. In Singapore she was told that KLM mechanics would overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, in the Netherlands East Indies [Bandung, Indonesia]. She reached it on the last day of her third week out of Miami, but not without alarming observers who watched her circle the field for fifteen minutes on a clear day, “apparently unable to see the airdrome markers.” She may have panicked the way Mantz claimed she had at Honolulu the previous March, when she shouted at him to pull up and circle the field once more in a frenzy he diagnosed as “extreme pilot fatigue.”

  She had flown twenty thousand miles by then in 135 hours. For twenty-one nights she had slept in strange, often primitive accommodations, without air-conditioning in a tropical climate. She was always awake by three or four o’clock in the morning, ate very little, and suffered from nausea and diarrhea. She may have realized how near the edge she had pushed herself because she announced that she would remain at Bandoeng for three days for repairs to the Electra but stayed without too much protest for six except for one abortive start that ended 350 miles later in Soerabaya [Surabaya]. Malfunctioning navigational instruments forced her to return to the KLM base for more repairs. At sundown on June 27, three days after G. P. had hoped she would already be at Howland, she landed at Koepang [Kupan] on Timor Island, unable to reach Port Darwin [Darwin] Australia before nightfall.

  At Koepang, high on a cliff where the grass-covered field was bordered by a stone wall “to keep out the pigs,” Amelia and Noonan, with some help from villagers, turned the Electra around and staked it down for the night. “I will rise at 4 A.M.,” she wrote, “and would like to reach Lae but fear headwinds will make it imperative to stop at Port Darwin.” It was imperative. She did not reach Port Darwin until ten o’clock on Monday morning, still Sunday night, June 27, in New York. That same day the Herald Tribune used G. P.’s announcement that she would make three radio broadcasts, the first as soon as she arrived in Honolulu, the second from San Francisco, and the third on WABC’s “Radio Theater” on the first Monday after her arrival at Oakland.

  From the time she arrived in Darwin it was evident that the flight was the most mismanaged she had ever made, and the
most difficult part lay ahead—from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island. This time there was no Bill Miller to take over. Instead management, such as it was, had become a triumvirate: Putnam, Richard Black of the Department of Interior who was G. P.’s representative aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, and Cmdr. W. K. Thompson, captain of the Itasca. These three, often working at odds with one another, could not provide the help Amelia needed. G. P. worked first through Washington, while he was still in New York, and after June 24, through the Coast Guard’s division command in San Francisco. Black did everything he could to oblige Putnam but with an eye on the interests of his own department, which administered Howland Island. Commander Thompson set up a network of weather information stations for Amelia and tried to confirm radio arrangements but he had no control over her decisions and clearly thought the Itasca deserved more significant duties than looking after a “stunt” flyer.

  G. P. sent his messages from the Coast Guard’s radio station in San Francisco to Black on the Itasca to be forwarded to Amelia wherever she might be. Even before she reached Darwin he asked Black to make certain that she brought negatives and motion pictures if any were taken of her arrivals and departures at Lae and Howland. Black was also to remind her to file her story directly from Howland to the Herald Tribune in Oakland and to get some aerial pictures of Howland.

  G. P. wanted her home by the Fourth of July, a Sunday. His first message to her was followed by another Black was asked to forward to Lae:

  FLIGHT CONTINGENCIES PERMITTING IS ARRIVAL SATURDAY LATELY [sic] SUNDAY EITHER PERFECT STOP CONFIDENTIAL WANT YOU TO KNOW VERY IMPORTANT RADIO COMMITMENT MONDAY NIGHT NOTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER.