The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller

by Carol Baxter

  The weather forecast was better the next day, although it predicted a strong headwind during her water crossing. She dismissed the recommendations that she again delay her flight. Her Pittsburgh sponsors were keen for her to return so as to maintain public interest in the flight, particularly as she was carrying a letter from General Machado to Pittsburgh’s mayor. And, after the interminable weather-induced delays at Pittsburgh, she didn’t want to risk any more ‘Cautious Lady’ jibes.

  At 9.11 am on Friday, 28 November 1930, Chubbie took off from Havana in her flame-red Bullet and headed out over the deep blue waters of the Florida Strait.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Miami authorities refused to worry. A Havana to Miami crossing usually took two hours so Mrs Miller’s plane should have arrived between 11 and 11.30 am. However, that same day a Pan American Airways pilot had been propelled across the strait by a strong tail-wind to achieve a record-setting one hour and thirty-five minute flight from Miami to Havana. Since that tail-wind was her head-wind, it could delay her plane until midday.

  But noon came and went without any sighting of the Bullet, not at Key West or Miami or anywhere in-between. One o’clock passed. As the clock neared 2 pm, the Miami authorities accepted the worst: Mrs Miller was missing. With less than four hours until nightfall, it was time to activate a search.

  Pan American officials ordered one of its pilots to search the East Florida coastline between Miami and Key West, while the pilot of a passenger plane was told to leave his scheduled course and search the west coast. Officials also questioned pilots who had flown near her flight path.

  One reported seeing the Bullet when it was about twenty-five minutes out of Havana. Not only was it flying slowly because of the stiff headwinds, it was flying low, which had troubled the Pan American pilot because of the poor flying conditions and rough sea.

  When Havana’s aviation authorities heard the report, they expressed surprise that she had been flying so low. Before she had set out, they had told her to climb to 8000 feet to escape the headwinds and had no idea why she hadn’t done so or where she could be.

  Federal customs agents had their suspicions. They hadn’t wanted to give the Australian aviator yet another re-entry visa. Could she be carrying illegal contraband: alcohol, humans, dope? They contacted all the Florida airports to see if she had landed somewhere unannounced in order to slip past the mandatory custom checks.

  In the meantime, Pawley in Havana dispatched aircraft to search the Cuban coastline and to follow her route to Miami. Miami’s marine base ordered a seaplane to search as far west as the Dry Tortugas, which would take the pilot across the uninhabited Marquesas Keys, the only other sizeable islands in the Florida Strait. Every available plane belonging to private owners, the coastguard and the United States Navy set out to scour the Florida coastline and the sea between Miami and Havana.

  The Key West naval station and Miami’s Tropical Radio station broadcast radio messages every hour, asking ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean to look out for a downed plane or traces of wreckage. Coastguard patrols based at Miami and Key West headed out to conduct their own searches. Even the Florida East Coast Railway staff were ordered to keep a look-out as they crossed the waters between the keys. Everything was being done that could possibly be done.

  As the afternoon’s light dimmed, the search planes returned to their bases for the night. By 7 pm, the reports were grim. Mrs Miller carried only nine hours of fuel, so her tanks would have long run dry. She had flown from Havana into what proved to be the worst storm of the season, one that had unexpectedly swept through the strait soon after her departure. If she’d been forced down while travelling over the strait, she would have faced serious problems. Her high-speed land plane would be extremely difficult to ditch safely onto any body of water, particularly the white-caps that had covered the Florida Strait. The Bullet would probably have lived up to its name and shot straight down to the ocean floor.

  If she had somehow managed to land on the surface, the Bullet wouldn’t have remained afloat for long even with the buoyancy of empty fuel tanks—if they hadn’t been damaged upon landing. Even a stout seaplane wouldn’t have stayed afloat for long on those waters because the winds had whipped the sea into a frenzy. She had already expressed doubts about her ability to inflate her rubber lifeboat, even in the best of situations. And if the Bullet had indeed sunk carrying her with it, the Gulf Stream would carry away the wreckage and her fate would never be known.

  While nightfall limited any airborne activities, water vessels didn’t give up the search. As dawn broke with no sign of her plane or person, only the most optimistic dared hope she might still be alive. Nonetheless, planes and boats from both sides of the strait headed out again to continue the search.

  In Havana, her colleagues were cursing themselves. They knew that her plane lacked any navigation instruments except a compass and that she had set her course for Key West without allowing for the boisterous winds that could push her north-west. Without a drift indicator, she could have been blown off course into the Gulf of Mexico, where there was nothing to land on but water. And her concerns about her lack of instruments and the state of her plane could have spawned a festering fear that acted as a mental hazard if she encountered trouble. With the clarity of hindsight, they asked themselves why they hadn’t stopped her—forcibly if necessary—from beginning her flight.

  Her sponsors and American friends, though, refused to consider the worst. She was an experienced pilot used to dealing with emergencies, and she carried a small supply of food and water, enough to keep her alive for a few days. Perhaps she had landed somewhere else in Florida, in a place with no outside communication. The remote islands in the Florida Keys, for example. There were 1700 of them, mostly unpopulated, and she might have become confused when she flew among them. Or the Florida Everglades, west of Miami. The large shallow lake contained thousands of thicket-covered islets—and alligators. Or she might have landed successfully in the water and been picked up by a boat that had no radio.

  When other airmen were asked for their expert opinions, they tried to be tactful. Her plane’s fast landing speed would require a much longer landing strip than anything that could be found in the smaller keys or the Everglades. Her chances of landing safely in any of those places—or at sea—were slim indeed. And while she always wore a parachute, it would be of limited help if she had bailed out over the water.

  Then a pressman for Havana’s Diario de la Marina newspaper revealed that she’d told him, just before her departure, that if the weather conditions were bad, she might not stop at Miami but instead continue as far northwards as possible. Since she had more hours of fuel than was required for the sea crossing, she might have travelled further into continental America than anyone had expected and landed in some out-of-the-way place that made contact with the rest of the world difficult. She had been presumed missing just a week earlier, during her flight to Havana. Perhaps she had been similarly remiss in failing to advise others of her safety.

  No one mentioned the other possibility: that she had travelled further north than anyone expected and had been forced down—or crashed—in such an out-of-the-way place that no one would ever find her.

  Her mother, who was visiting from Australia and staying in Chubbie’s New York apartment, told the press, ‘I am very anxious about my daughter but I shall not give up hope that she is safe.’ When asked about Chubbie’s alleged premonition, she dismissed it out of hand. ‘My daughter is not morbid and did not fear anything before leaving here.’

  Ruth Nichols, on her transcontinental record attempt, was scanning newspapers at her landing places, hoping to read that her friend had been found alive. Laura Ingalls, the one-time transcontinental record holder, was in Miami planning an endurance flight and had experienced the lousy weather conditions firsthand. She told pressmen it would be a grievous mistake to stop searching, and she reminded everyone that some missing aviators had been discovered al
ive after three or four days.

  Bill, too, refused to consider the worst. ‘She is far too plucky a little woman and too much of a flier to have gone down on the flight from Havana,’ he advised the journalists. He said that he wouldn’t accept she was gone until he found either a crashed plane or floating wreckage.

  He ensconced himself in the Pittsburgh Press office the night of her disappearance so he would instantly hear any reports that came through. He told the pressmen that he had complete confidence in her abilities as an aviator, provided she received enough warning of an impending disaster. If so, she could have ditched her plane beside one of the many vessels that crossed the Gulf Stream, or she might have landed on one of the many keys. He had flown the stretch himself, so he knew that the keys were low and sandy with jagged coral outcroppings. While no plane could land on them intact, a skilled pilot like Chubbie could pancake in with little or no personal injury. If she had indeed come down on one of the barren keys, it shouldn’t take long to spot her. Hopefully, once dawn’s light allowed the search to continue, they would soon receive word of her survival.

  Gale force winds, poor visibility and high seas battered the search zone on Saturday. Despite the risk to their own lives, pilots and seamen alike continued their search.

  Bill headed south to join them. He asked his Pittsburgh Airways pilot to stop in Washington overnight so he could drum up support from the navy and war departments. After successful meetings, he retired to a hotel and tried to sleep.

  At midnight, he gave up and returned to the Naval Air Station where the biplane was parked. Although it had no lights and wasn’t supposed to be flown at night, he couldn’t bear to waste any more search time. He had taught Chubbie to fly and understood the way she thought and reacted, both as a person and as a pilot. If anyone could find her at this late stage, it was him.

  He swung the propeller and listened for the reassuring thrum. All he had to do was to get the plane off the ground and he would be halfway to Miami by daylight.

  The propeller swung loosely; the engine failed to fire.

  He woke the officer in charge and begged for his help. Aware of the tragic circumstances, the officer roused six sailors from their beds. In the night-time gloom, they inspected the troublesome motor and repaired a leaking fuel tank. When they turned to Bill and silently pleaded to be allowed to return to their beds, he begged them to crank the propeller so he could take off. The engine still refused to fire.

  The sailors swung the propeller over and over again as Bill paced the field, tearing at his hair like a madman. Seeing him in such a frenzy of grief and stress—more like an anguished husband than a business partner—they kept cranking. At 5 am, a Pittsburgh Airways pilot arrived at the airport and found Bill looking almost insane with grief. The pilot refused to allow him to fly the airline’s plane to Miami. Bill was stranded.

  Meanwhile, a Colorado newspaper report had been picked up by the nation’s press. ‘The Bullet plane in which Mrs J.M. Keith Miller disappeared was known here as a “jinx craft”,’ revealed a Colorado Springs journalist, whose colleagues had seen firsthand the disastrous consequences of the Bullet’s accreditation test flights. ‘Two test pilots lost their lives in crashes with it during experimental work more than a year ago. The ship was reconditioned, fitted with larger fuel tanks and presented to Mrs Keith Miller by an aviation company.’

  In fact, Chubbie’s Bullet wasn’t one of the four crashed planes but an identical model. Still, the journalist’s point was clear. The buffeting from the gale-force winds might have pushed her plane into the same lethal spin that had proved so disastrous for the test pilots. Her plane might have been as fast as a bullet, but it was also just as deadly.

  Other newspapers were repeating Chubbie’s comments about her plane being an ‘un-airworthy crate’. During her unexpected stopover on her flight to Cuba, she had told journalists that her plane had been an abandoned wreck and was difficult to fly. She said that on her turbulent flight from Pittsburgh, she had wanted to remove her heavy coat, but the plane was so unstable she couldn’t take her hands off the controls.

  Aviators who had flown low-wing monoplanes knew about their instability issues. In fact, future aviation magazines would offer suggestions for changes in wing design to overcome this serious problem.

  As for her ability to successfully parachute out, she’d told journalists that the extra fuel tanks made it almost impossible for a parachute to be used. They asked why she carried one.

  ‘It makes people feel better.’

  Late on Sunday, the search operation’s leader, Karl Voelter, advised the press that he was winding the operation back. ‘Further search for Mrs Keith Miller is useless. We have scoured every inch of territory to the south-east and west of Florida Peninsula, also the islands to the southward. We have flown low over swamps, glades and keys. The land is desolate, the winds are strong and the waters are running high.’ He said that, if she had come down in the sea, too much time had passed for her survival to be likely. If she had come down in the sea and had reached land, she had probably died of exposure. And if she had safely come down on land, they would have received word from her by now.

  He added that Captain Lancaster had wired to say he was coming to Miami to assist in the search. ‘I will do all he asks of me,’ Voelter told the press, ‘but the case seems hopeless.’

  Back in Washington, Bill’s anguish was so great that the navy took pity on him, providing a plane and pilot to fly him to Miami. Darkness forced them down at Georgetown, South Carolina, on Sunday night. When they stopped at Jacksonville for refueling on Monday morning, he told the press that he remained confident she would still be found.

  His haggard looks belied his words.

  He said that he hoped to reach Miami that afternoon, although poor weather conditions might delay him until the following day.

  No one mentioned that by then she would have been missing for four days.

  As hope of Chubbie’s survival was abandoned by all but her relatives and close friends, President Machado prepared messages of condolences to send to Pittsburgh’s mayor and the British government. In Los Angeles, Ruth Nichols completed her transcontinental flight in a record-smashing seventeen hours; however, her delight at booting Chubbie from the record books was marred by sadness at her friend’s disappearance and probable death.

  The nation—indeed the world—began mourning the plucky aviator. ‘A pall of sorrow has fallen on the United States public with the realisation that there is little hope of finding the Australian airwoman alive,’ lamented one journalist.

  Another grieved: ‘There is not one who reads of the disappearance of the woman but who makes a mental picture of the tragic end which searchers have said she met somewhere along the treacherous route from Cuba to Florida. There is not one but who feels a tightening of the heartstrings as they think of the lone woman and her un-airworthy plane plunging into the mountainous-like waves which were lashed into fury by a gale that prevailed that day—who thinks of her in her utter helplessness and despair as she realised that she had made the take-off to death, that port from which no pilot ever returns.’

  Then at 5.20 pm on Monday, 1 December, Chubbie’s mother received a telegram: ‘Safe. Notify friends. Love Chubbie.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  When Chubbie took off from Havana on Friday morning, 28 November, the weather forecasts were fair—better than those for the previous few days, at least. Wispy clouds trailed high in the Caribbean sky; however, lower down, headwinds tried to push her back onto Cuban soil.

  She steered towards the twin lighthouses of Key West and Sand Key, a guide for planes crossing the strait, a guard to protect ships. From there, she intended to follow the Florida East Coast Railroad—the steel rope stringing together the sea-shells of the Florida Keys. The railway tracks spanned the sea between the keys, making it look from the air as if the trains floated on water. Once the railway tracks reached the mainland, she would follow the coastline up to Mia
mi, reducing the amount of time she had to spend over the unforgiving water.

  The distance from Havana to Key West was only a hundred miles—about an hour at cruising speed in normal weather conditions, much slower with this implacable headwind. But as the Bullet ate up the miles, she felt a change in wind direction. A blustering easterly nudged her sideways, a wind that hadn’t been mentioned in the weather forecast. She used her right rudder to counteract the westward drift, fearing that the air current might push her towards the landless Gulf of Mexico.

  By the ninety-minute mark, the Florida Keys should have long been visible. Instead, all she could see were wind-whipped waves. Thinking she must have drifted further west than she had expected and was looking at the stormy waters of the Gulf, she continued to bear right, calculating that this would eventually bring her over the Florida peninsula.

  The wind increasingly buffeted her plane, knocking it around as if it were a dodgem car in a sideshow. She wrestled to keep it upright, fighting the low-wing instability issue that wanted to flip it over. Her feet grew numb, her shoulders tense.

  Another hour passed without her seeing any land or boats or other clues as to where she might be. Anxiety crept through her. She wondered if her compass was malfunctioning—but how could she check when there were no navigation features to guide her?

  She pushed her worries aside and continued to fly in the same direction for yet another hour. Still nothing.

  Although visibility remained fair, a brigade of battleship-grey clouds now trooped towards her. Big, angry, determined clouds. The wind howled as it increased to gale force level, pounding at her plane. The sea frothed and churned beneath her, a deadly choppiness for a land plane heading towards its point of no return.