toy houses, clustered beads of cities: such was the Lilliputian world
of men. Cruising along over New York and New Jersey into Pennsylvania,
she knew that she would have to do right by the little Avian. Lady
Heath had flown it back and forth between London and Cape Town for a
record 12,000 miles; now AE would have to add to that record some 6,000
miles of the United States.
She spread her map across her knees and noted the penciled circle in
western Pennsylvania that marked Rogers Field in Pittsburgh, her first
stop. She began her letdown from cruising altitude. The airport, she
observed, had a grass runway.
Amelia dropped down for a closer look. She dragged the field, hoping
to spot rocks, or holes, or ditches. The way seemed clear. She tipped
up one wing in a tight turn and came around for a landing. She reduced
throttle and glided in to what looked like the best part of the field.
The plane started to settle; AE chopped the throttle, pulling back
hard on the stick. At that moment the landing gear hit a shallow ditch
hidden in the grass. The Avian swung up and over, the propeller
cracked and splintered, the tail thumped to the ground. Amelia hung
upside down on the safety belt. Calmly she felt along the instrument
panel and cut the switch. She was unhurt.
The headlines in the morning papers, however, told a different story:
“AMELIA EARHART NEAR DEATH IN CRASH.” AE read the front page, was
irritated and mad. The accident of sex again. If the pilot had been
a man, nothing would have been said about it, especially if he had
walked away from his plane unharmed. Amelia folded the paper and
slapped it against her leg. Why couldn’t they leave her alone? All
this emotionalism about women fliers, as if a female neck were more
important than a male neck.
Amelia went to the phone and called New York. Another plane, twin
sister to the Avian, would be ferried in, so that parts from it could
be used to repair her plane. The following day four mechanics worked
around the clock for a day and a half until the Avian was repaired.
Dayton, Terre Haute, St. Louis, Muskogee followed in uneventful
succession. Then came the towns that were small and displayed no signs
on barns or roofs to tell her where she was. Not recognizing any of
the landmarks and flying by at 100 miles an hour, AE noted that one
small town seemed like any other. She checked her map, then scrutinized
the terrain under her wing. It was no use. Each town was just another
checkerboard of streets and roofs, trees and fields, railroads and
highways. Frankly, she admitted to herself, she did not know where she
was.
Her confusion mounted as she flew west, but at last she found an
airport which, she was happy to discover, was in Fort Worth. She now
decided to stay on course. Once off the ground, however, the light
plane hit bumpy weather. It lurched and climbed and dived; and to
Amelia’s constant annoyance, her map kept slipping from her lap. Flying
the plane with one hand, she found with the other a safety pin in her
handbag. She picked the map up from the floor and clumsily pinned it to
her dress.
AE fought her plane through the updrafts and downdrafts. She scanned
the instrument panel, then noticed that the gas-gauge needle was
leaning toward empty. She reached up to pump fuel from the reserve tank
to the gravity tank. During the refueling the pin loosened from her
dress, a gust of wind swept into the cockpit, and the map started to
blow against the side of the fuselage. Amelia let go of the stick and
grabbed for the map. The plane angled into a sharp dive. Quickly taking
the stick again, she pulled back too hard; the Avian went into a steep
climb. The map, flapping against and over the side, whipped out of the
cockpit. Amelia grumbled. Now she could not possibly determine where
she was. She held her last known course, south of west, and kept on
flying. She hoped that something would turn up.
Finally, to the north, she noticed a highway. It was busy with cars
crawling into the slanting sun. Amelia turned the plane and followed
the road, her only guide across the state; when it ended, abruptly and
with disheartening finality, she was completely without bearings. The
sun sank behind the mountains in the west, leaving a swath of purple
haze along the length of the horizon. It began to get dark too fast for
her to establish any orientation with the ground. Amelia decided that
she would have to find a place to land--soon.
Ahead in the dusk she noticed some houses grouped about a solitary
oil derrick. She hoped that they would yield to a small town nearby.
She throttled back and eased the plane down into a shallow dive, then
circled low, looking for possible places to land. There were none, and
her heart sank as she thought of running out of fuel and having to make
a forced landing. Then, flying over the town, her spirits revived as
she considered an alternative, at once brilliant and desperate. The
main street, which was blessedly empty of traffic, was long enough and
wide enough to accommodate her plane. With decision born of necessity,
she swung the Avian into a low, wide turn and came around, nose down,
over the trees that marked the end of Main Street. Because of the high
altitude of the land, the plane came in fast, but Amelia dropped the
tail smartly, held the nose up straight, and stalled expertly onto the
dirt road. A grin creased wide across her face as she rolled through
the center of the town. She was, she soon discovered, in Hobbs, New
Mexico.
The people of the town turned out in force to see who the sudden and
unconventional visitor was. They were not only surprised to see a plane
parked in the middle of Main Street, but aghast to find a woman seated
at the controls. And when the woman flier took off her helmet and
goggles, they were shocked at her appearance. The sun had burned a red
outline on her face, and when Amelia looked out to greet her welcoming
committee, she looked exactly like a wide-eyed owl.
Amelia climbed out of the plane and asked some of the men to help her
fold the wings and park the Avian off to the side of the street. Then,
as if in ironic commentary on the way she looked, she walked to the Owl
Café for something to eat. She made a dinner of breakfast--fried eggs,
bread and butter, and milk.
After a night of cool and refreshing sleep in the high altitude, Amelia
rose early the next morning in the hope of getting off at dawn. Again
she planned to negotiate reliable Main Street. Down she rolled over the
dirt road for the take-off. Then the left tire blew out. AE chopped
the throttle and cut the switch. She shook her head, then grinned.
It seemed that her troubles would never stop. The nosing over in
Pittsburgh, the loss of the map, the emergency landing in town, and now
a flat tire. She laughed at her new predicament.
While the tire was being patched, Amelia went back to the Owl Café and
had the same breakfast of the night before. When she climbed back into
the cockpit, she felt that the repaired tire was getting soft. The men
who had done the job assured her that she was in error. Convinced but
still suspicious, she took off once more down the street and happily
into the air.
She had been told in Hobbs that if she flew to the southeast, she
would find in about a hundred miles either a river to the right or a
railroad with a highway to the left. Or was it a railroad to the left
and a highway to the right? Which one, they had carefully explained to
her in town, depended on whether she was more west than east or more
east than west. As it had often happened when she became lost in her
car and had asked for the way to a certain highway or town, she didn’t
pay close attention to the directions. Now she wasn’t sure which was
which and what was what. She looked down for guidance from the rivers
that coursed through the land, but they snaked such a confusion of
meanderings that she did not know which one to follow.
Late that morning she found a railroad that led her back to Texas and
into Pecos. Remembering that she might have one bad tire, she circled
to land. She set the Avian down gingerly. The left wheel plopped and
wobbled; the tire was flat! Fortunately the plane was light and rolled
clumsily, but safely, to a stop. Amelia sat in the cockpit, looking
enigmatically straight ahead. Someone asked her if there was anything
wrong. She looked up and smiled, then shook her head. How could she
tell anyone that she had been trying to understand an inscrutable fate?
While the tire was again repaired, Amelia had lunch with the Rotary
Club. That afternoon she started for El Paso, her original destination
of the day before.
Tire trouble now became engine trouble. At 4,000 feet the motor
coughed, then sputtered, and finally stopped. In quick reflex action,
Amelia jammed the stick forward and brought the plane into gliding
turns. She looked for a place to make a forced landing. Noticing a
small clearing among mesquite bushes and salt hills, she nosed the
plane in and landed.
She now wondered if she weren’t having a contest of wills with some
higher power who was trying to keep her earth-bound, or if she weren’t
being tested to see if she had yet the skill and courage to meet and
overcome any danger for the privilege of continuing to fly. She liked
the second possibility better. She much preferred a challenge, for the
joy that lay on the other side of conquest was far superior to any she
had ever known.
Fortunately, AE had landed near a road. Cars began to gather almost
at once; men and women came running to the scene of her emergency
landing. The men, Amelia felt, she could handle in such a situation;
but the women, with their shaking heads and fluttering moments of undue
concern, she dreaded.
The plane had to be towed back to Pecos, where new engine parts could
be ordered from El Paso. Slowly, at a mere ten miles an hour, the Avro
retraced its course, cruelly on the ground, back to the Texas city of
its morning take-off. It was late and dark that night before the plane
was parked behind a garage, there to await repairs.
It took three days before the parts could come the 187 miles from El
Paso and before the engine trouble could be located and repaired.
Amelia was impatient to be off across the mountains to the West Coast.
Thankfully she arrived in Los Angeles in time to see the start of the
National Air Races and to visit friends she had not seen since her
early days of learning to fly in California.
On the way home across Utah, she again had to make a dead-stick landing
because of engine failure. She landed in a plowed field, and again
nosed over and escaped unhurt. As in Pittsburgh, as in New Mexico
and Texas, she rose to fly anew, like the phoenix from its ashes.
With skill and courage she had once more conquered her adversary, the
challenge.
The challenge, she had often reflected upon her luck in flying, had
been with her from the very beginning, and she had always, sometimes
through the workings of a mysterious fate, won out.
3. _The Kinner Canary_
In 1922, when she was twenty-four years old and the owner of her first
plane, a yellow Kinner Canary, she had tried for her first record. She
decided that the ceiling of the Kinner should be tested, and asked an
official from the California Aero Club to seal the plane’s barograph--a
revolving cylinder for recording altitude. The little three-cylinder
Lawrence engine took the plane to 14,000 feet, and a new altitude
record before the 60-horse-power quit. The fault, AE learned when she
landed, had not been with the motor but with the spark control lever.
It had become disconnected during the test run.
Undismayed, Amelia tried again for a higher altitude a few days later.
She hoped this time that everything would work smoothly. The Canary
climbed quickly and easily to 10,000 feet, but ran into a layer of
thick clouds. At 11,000 feet she hit a driving wall of sleet, and at
12,000 feet she looked into a blinding blanket of fog.
AE now did a very stupid thing, she later confessed, one that should
have cost her her life. It was a miracle that she survived the
experience. Rattled because she could not tell her position without
instruments and because she had no outside landmarks for check points,
she did the first thing that came into her mind: she pulled the stick
back and kicked the plane into a spin. She spun, down and around,
winding the Kinner through the overcast until she broke out of it at
3,000 feet. Seeing the ground at last, Amelia straightened out of the
spin and pulled the plane out of its headlong dive.
After she landed, she nonchalantly climbed out of her plane and started
to walk away. She snapped off her helmet and shook her close-cropped
head. From the edge of the tarmac one of the old-time pilots rushed
over to her. He cussed her out roundly.
“Suppose there had been fog all the way to the ground?” he shouted
at her, flailing his arms. “You would have screwed yourself into the
ground.”
“I guess I would have,” Amelia said, refusing to be alarmed. She
held her head high, turned, and walked cockily away from any further
discussion about the incident. She had set a new record of 14,000 feet
a few days before, and that was good enough for her.
Luck had been with her before in other accidents, the kind she liked
to call the “blowout” variety in flying. Once in her early instruction
with Neta Snook, her first instructor, the motor of the Canuck cut out
shortly after take-off. Neta nosed the plane down for an emergency
landing and glided into a nearby cabbage patch. For Amelia the crisis
had produced a slow passage of time, time enough for her to reach
over and calmly cut the switch before the plane hit the ground. The
propeller and landing gear were smashed, but the women fliers walked
away from the crash unharmed.
Another time, on a solo flight, she had to make an unexpected landing
in a field drenched with rain. The wheels had stuck in the mud, and the
plane up ended and nosed over. Unhurt, Amelia hung upside down from the
safety belt.
In yet another emergency landing she had hit dried weeds more than
six feet high. The plane flipped over so suddenly and with such force
that Amelia broke away from the safety belt and went flying out of the
cockpit. Again she had walked away from her aircraft without a scratch.
4. _Aviation Editor_
By the autumn of 1928, after Amelia had returned to New York and
concluded her first cross-country flight, she had survived seven
crack-ups in as many years of flying. But she looked back upon the solo
trip with great satisfaction: it was the first time a woman had made a
transcontinental flight, alone, east to west, and west to east.
The press had closely followed her adventures across the country and
when she was resettled in New York, she was flooded with business
offers of all kinds, many of them having nothing to do with aviation.
Simply because she was a news figure, she had the opportunity to join
many advertising agencies and to take part in other enterprises for
which she had no qualifications.
She had at least two offers to write for the magazines: one was from
_McCall’s_; the other from _Cosmopolitan_. Because AE had endorsed a
cigarette advertisement, _McCall’s_ reluctantly withdrew its contract;
the magazine did not at that time carry any advertising for cigarettes,
and apparently did not approve of women smoking. Ray Long, president
and editor of Hearst’s _Cosmopolitan_, wanted Amelia to join his staff
as aviation editor. Amelia did not deliberate for very long. Realizing
the opportunity she would have to reach many readers because of the
enormous circulation of the magazine and the rare chance she was
getting to write every month about what she knew and liked best, she
accepted. She had now established herself permanently with her one
great love--aviation.
Working for _Cosmopolitan_, Amelia divided her time equally between
writing articles and answering letters. Letters poured in from
everywhere and from everyone. Men, women, boys, girls; teachers,
mechanics, laborers; inventor, realtor, office boy: all had questions
and problems they wanted answered and solved. Some said:
“Do you know the name of a good school of aviation?”
“Why is the monoplane faster than the biplane?”
“I have quarreled with my boy friend and have decided to take up
aviation. Please tell me how.”
“Do you know Colonel Lindbergh?”
“I want to fly, but my mother won’t let me.”
Many of the letters AE answered in the magazine. She cautioned the
young girl who had quarreled with her boy friend and advised her
against taking up flying: no one should take up flying with what
appeared to be thoughts of suicide! She cajoled a youngster and told
him to bide his time; the day would come when he could start flying
lessons without parental approval. Yes, she did know Colonel Lindbergh
and his wife, but she had not yet had the opportunity to know them well.
AE enjoyed the queries from her readers, but one complaint from the
younger ones made her chafe with irritation: restraining parents. “Why
not _now_?” she would say to the mother who refused to let her daughter
fly until she was sixteen, and she continued to ask it of any parent
who had established an arbitrary age somewhere in the future.
She began the _Cosmopolitan_ articles with the November, 1928, issue.
They continued somewhat erratically until one year later. Amelia sat at
her typewriter and pounded out her thoughts and feelings about flying.
Her own sex was often her target for the month: “Try Flying Yourself,”
“Here Is How Fannie Hurst Could Learn to Fly,” “Is It Safe for You to
Fly?” “Shall You Let Your Daughter Fly?” “Why Are Women Afraid to Fly?”
In the same issues other counterpointing writers sounded their
convictions: “I Don’t Want to Be a Mother,” “I Wish I Were a Man,”
“Could You be a Platonic Friend?” “Clinging Vine? Ha!” “I Have My
Rights, Too.”
This was only part of the exciting 1920’s in America. The postwar
period of the disillusioned lost generation, the new place of women
in society, the Freudian explanations for behavior, prohibition, the
automobile, the worship of speed, the idolization of heroes: out of
such an era Amelia Earhart came and conquered.
“I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,” wrote O. O. McIntyre in an
enthusiastic introduction of AE to his _Cosmopolitan_ readers. In a day
when young women went from “gin-guzzling to calculated harlotry, here,”
he said, was a “wistful slip of a girl” who would be a “highly moral
reaction from the inflamed tendencies and appetites which have aroused
so much alarm. Amelia,” he concluded, “has become a symbol of a new
womanhood--a symbol, I predict, that will be emulously patterned after
by thousands of young girls in their quest for the Ideal.”
Every woman’s goal at the time was the slender, boyish figure, the
flattened breasts, the close-cropped boyish bob, the long, youthful
waist. In Amelia every woman found her image, cleanly liberated in
the speed of solo record-breaking flight. Here was a woman who could
satisfy in an acceptable way the cravings of any woman blocked at home,
of any housewife chained to a husband, home, and children.
She was a product of her times and a reaction to them, too caught up in
them to realize they were driving her to impossible achievement. For
the present, however, she was having a gloriously good time doing what
she wanted to do for “the fun of it.” And what she was doing was well
within her capabilities.
In the spring of 1929 Amelia sold the little Avro Avian and purchased
a used Lockheed Vega--a high-wing monoplane with Whirlwind engine. She
itched to test it out. California beckoned again, not for a visit this
time, but for the chance to enter a race.
5. _The First Women’s Air Derby_
In August the first Women’s Air Derby was held. Amelia left New York
and joined the field of nineteen planes in Santa Monica. This was the
kind of competition she liked. A women’s transcontinental air race had
never been held before. It was something brand-new for fliers, judges,
committees, those in charge of every point.
Early on the morning of the eighteenth, AE rolled her Vega onto the
field and turned into a double row of planes. To her left and right the
planes gleamed under a clear California sky. The lighter planes, six of
them, took their positions in front of her. Amelia counted: hers was
one of thirteen heavier planes lined up in the rear rank.
The starter dropped his flag. At one-minute intervals the planes roared
into take-off. Part of the National Air Races, the women’s event would
terminate eight days later at Cleveland, Ohio. Certain stops had to be
made each day, and no one could fly at night.
As Amelia had done, women from all over the country flocked to take
part. Wealthy women, sportswomen, businesswomen, wives, mothers; all
were young; many of them pretty. Some came with old planes, others with
new; some flew stock planes, others racers. All carried a few canned
goods, enough food for three days in case of a forced landing in the
desert.
From Santa Monica the women headed for the first stop at San
Bernardino. All made it, Amelia learned, except one. Mary Elizabeth von
Mack, flying one of the heavier planes, had found the landing field
overcrowded and turned back to land at Montbello.
The next day, according to plan, the last woman in from the day before
was the first off the ground. This prevented any lagging behind. One by
one the women fliers headed toward the San Bernardino Mountains.
Following in turn, AE slipped through Cajon Pass and headed across the
desert to Yuma, Arizona. Coming into the Yuma airport, Amelia crashed
into a sandbank and damaged a propeller. She escaped unhurt. The other
women, seeing what had happened to AE’s Vega, voted to stay three hours
instead of an hour and a half, until the propeller was fixed.
Amelia loved this kind of sportsmanship. It saved time for her, she
reflected, because her flying time was supposed to be counted from the
starting time, regardless of repair time. Off they flew to Phoenix,
where they would stay for the night.
For all the women the event promised adventure, for many danger, for
a few disaster. Claire Fahy, of Los Angeles, withdrew because someone
had been tampering with her motor. Marvel Crosson, from San Diego and
holder of the women’s altitude record, was the only fatality. She was
killed when she jumped from her disabled plane and her parachute failed
to open.
One of them, her plane out of gas, went down in the sagebrush and
cactus of the desert; another turned back because of engine trouble;
one had to wait for a damaged landing gear to be repaired; another had
wrestled with a whirlwind. Amelia, less fortunate than most because
of the broken propeller, nevertheless thanked her luck that she had
survived yet another crash, her seventh since she first started flying.
The days clicked by. The third day they remained overnight in Douglas,
Arizona; the fourth, in El Paso, Texas. Everywhere they landed, the
women, worn out with weariness, would find hundreds of autograph
hunters and souvenir seekers waiting for them. The crowds thronged to
Amelia’s plane more than to the others. AE despaired to hear that some
of the other women had pencils punched through the fabric of their
planes by the inquisitive. Her friend Blanche Noyes had discovered
fire in her cockpit because of a carelessly thrown cigarette, and was
forced to make an emergency landing.
At many of the fields there was no place to rest, no more than a table
to sit on. At other airports there were banquets to be rushed to and
back from. On the good days AE was happy to find luncheons served at
the field and hotels to go to for the night. Many fields provided soap
and water, clean towels, cold cream, powder, combs.
At the luncheons and dinners Amelia chuckled at some of the names the
speakers used for the women fliers: “sweethearts of the air,” “flying
flappers,” “angels,” “sunburned derbyists.” All they wanted to be
called, AE insisted in vain, were “fliers,” and, if necessary, “women
fliers.”
The press called the race “Lipstick Derby,” “Petticoat Derby,” “Powder
Puff Derby.” The last one stuck and has continued to the present time.
At El Paso, the fourth stop, the women waited for a storm to pass,
rather than risk some of them not having enough fuel to fly around
it; for the next leg, to Fort Worth, was the longest and most
hazardous--600 miles, much of it over mountains.