forward and introduced himself. He was Frank Hawks and he would one day
establish numerous records as a famous racing pilot. Amelia told him
she wanted to go up for a ride.
Frank Hawks glanced at the tall, slight build of the girl in the
high-laced shoes. He was unimpressed. If she wanted to go, he told her,
she would have to suffer another passenger in the same seat with her,
and he nodded to his companion standing by the plane. Hawks didn’t
trust frightened females in his airplane. Amelia saw that argument was
pointless and agreed to the conditions.
The pilots helped her into the front cockpit. Hawks climbed into the
rear seat, and his friend squeezed in beside Amelia. A mechanic swung
the propeller and the plane came suddenly to life. AE watched the
whirling blur before her and covered her ears to shut out the deafening
blast. The plane started to roll over the uneven ground to the far end
of the field, then it turned and stopped.
The wings and fuselage shook as the motor clattered wide open.
Amelia screwed up her face to the noise. The plane began to move
down the take-off run, dipping and bumping as it picked up speed.
Then, suddenly, it broke cleanly into the air. As suddenly Amelia was
thrilled: she felt as if she were floating on a cushion of air.
She looked down from 300 feet. Trees and ground were speeding by;
everything was getting smaller as the plane climbed into the sky. The
automobiles on Wilshire Boulevard looked like black bugs, the houses
like toys.
The plane leveled off. “Two thousand feet,” Hawks shouted from the back
seat. Amelia looked over the side of the cockpit. The oil derricks on
the edge of the city were directly below; farther out, the Hollywood
hills and the ocean.
Hawks nosed the plane into a steep glide, then tipped up the wing into
a turn. The wind whistled over the wings and through the struts and
cross wires.
Amelia braced her arm against the instrument panel. She smiled as she
rose slightly from the seat. The stick in front of her angled forward;
she wanted to hold it. When she reached out a hand, the man beside her
shook his head and pushed the hand aside.
She turned quickly left and right in the seat, then tapped her feet on
the floor. How wonderful to climb and turn and dive through the air!
She felt buoyant, light, free--something she had never known before. A
warm wave of exhilaration surged through her.
The plane had landed and the flight was over too soon. AE was on the
ground but her thoughts were still in the sky. She knew now that she
would have to fly again, whatever the cost. As soon as she had left the
ground on that take-off she had known it. She now understood what had
lured the young Canadian pilots into the air.
That evening she had to tell her family about her plans. “I think I’d
like to learn to fly,” she said finally, when the supper dishes were
being cleared from the table.
“You aren’t really serious, are you?” her father said. “I thought you
were just wishing. I can’t afford to let you have instruction.”
Amelia was by no means defeated. She would find other ways of getting
the money. She would get a job and pay for her lessons by herself. She
was now old enough to decide what she wanted to do with her life. Her
father’s decision forced the issue and broke the financial ties she had
grown to depend upon.
Amelia found a job with the Los Angeles telephone company. It paid
little, but sorting mail and running errands provided enough to get
started with her lessons. She worked five days a week, leaving her with
weekends to spend at the flying field. Neta Snook, an early woman flier
and a graduate of the Curtiss Flying School, was her first instructor.
Early one Saturday morning AE rolled out of bed. She was wearing a
leather flying jacket over her pajamas. For the last several nights she
had been sleeping in it to give it a worn look. She didn’t want the
curious to know that she was a novice at flying. She ate her breakfast
quickly; she wanted to be out of the house before seven o’clock.
The ride out to the airport took more than an hour to the end of the
carline, then she had to walk another three miles along the dusty
highway to the field. Amelia wore her riding breeches, her high leather
boots, and her leather jacket; tucked under her arm was her leather
helmet and goggles. Although she had not soloed yet, she felt like a
flier. And to complete the woman-flier portrait, she had been secretly
snipping away at her hair.
Instructor Neta Snook and student Amelia Earhart must have looked
strange to the casual onlooker. What were these two women doing,
dressing like men and climbing into an airplane?
Neither woman cared. Why couldn’t a woman enjoy the pleasures and run
the risks of flight? Snooky did not trouble herself about how she
looked: she was comfortable in a pair of mechanic’s dirty coveralls.
Tall and slender, Amelia, with her hair pushed under her helmet, looked
like a handsome boy. She was not concerned about her appearance; she
was being practical: the field was dusty and the plane was difficult to
climb into. The jodhpurs and jacket, like the gym suits she wore as a
little girl, made good sense.
Amelia was glad that Neta Snook was her first instructor. With a woman
to teach her she felt less self-conscious about taking lessons; any of
the men fliers, who overwhelmed her with their abilities, would have
scared her away, at least in the first difficult stages of learning how
to fly. Her self-confidence was still shaky and insecure.
AE learned slowly but well. At first Neta showed her how to read the
instruments, how to start and rev up the engine, how to check the
magnetoes, follow through on stick, rudders, and throttle as she took
the Canuck off, climbed, made gentle turns to the left and right, and
came in for a landing.
After a few weeks Amelia had learned how to fly a quadrangular
course. This had been difficult at first in the light plane. She had
to fly around a fenced-off field by keeping the right wing, at a
steady altitude of 1,000 feet, exactly in line with the fence. She
would angle in to the line, move swiftly downwind, turn steeply into
the wind and crab along the cross-wind leg, then level out and move
slowly upwind. The fourth leg was the hardest, for it meant a shallow
turn with the wind to stay on course. The maneuver around the field
demanded coordination of up and down and left and right. But Amelia
could see the point of the exercise: if she could successfully work
stick, rudder, and throttle in getting around the field, she would have
learned the basic requirements for a landing pattern.
Then Neta taught her stalls and spins. These had to be mastered soon
if she hoped someday to solo. Again Amelia followed through on the
controls. AE sat in the rear cockpit and studied Neta’s every move with
stick, throttle, and rudder. Neta reduced throttle, pulled up the nose
until the wing stalled; the plane plunged down, then she jammed the
stick forward and added throttle to pull out of the dive. This was a
simple stall, and Amelia soon commanded the necessary skill to recover
the plane.
A spin was more involved; again Neta proved that the Curtiss Flying
School had taught her well. As before she pulled the plane back into
a stall, but now she kicked the right rudder hard, snapping the wing
over. The plane spun to the right, and Amelia, getting dizzier from
each tightening whirl, tried to concentrate on Neta’s recovery. Neta
applied opposite rudder to the direction of the spin, straightening
the wings; then she thrust the stick forward, adding power, and slowly
came back on the stick to bring the nose back onto the horizon. Amelia
thought the maneuver too complicated to master, but after several
attempts with Snooky patiently guiding her through each step, she
finally learned. Her reactions became quick, sure, and accurate.
Having learned how to take off and land, and how to recover from stalls
and spins, Amelia began to radiate with the new sense of power which
these basic skills and accomplishments had given her. She was eager to
get on with her lessons, but there was never enough money to pay for
them. Much of her instruction from Neta had been on credit, and her job
with the telephone company scarcely paid enough to meet all costs. It
became immediately clear to her that she needed a better-paying job.
She found one a few days later in a most unlikely occupation for a
girl--driving a truck for a sand and gravel company.
By this time Amy Earhart realized that her daughter was serious about
flying, and she decided to help. On the condition that Amelia would
spend more time at home, Mrs. Earhart let her have some of the money
she had been saving over the years. Amelia readily agreed to the terms.
To her sorrow, however, when she returned to the field a few weeks
later to tell Neta Snook the good news, AE learned that Neta, herself
desperate for funds, had sold her plane. Disappointed but not
discouraged, Amelia turned to a man to help her through enough lessons
so that she could solo. Fortunately, her choice of a new instructor was
a good one. He was John Montijo, a former Army instructor with hundreds
of hours of experience in the air. And what was more, he was patient
and unexcitable before the most trying stupidities of his students. He
was demanding, but very knowing and skillful in his ability to teach
others.
Amelia learned quickly from him. And she insisted that he teach her
acrobatics before he allowed her to go up alone. She wanted to have
complete mastery of the Kinner Airster biplane. She knew that if she
could stunt the plane, she would then have the necessary confidence to
recover the plane from whatever attitude it might assume.
Under Montijo’s guidance, her reactions to the most unusual conditions
of flight became as trigger fast as they were in the more normal spins
and stalls. She practiced for hours doing slips and split-S’s, loops
and rolls, lazy-eights and Immelmanns.
Amelia had gained such a sure degree of skill from her new instructor
that when her time to solo finally came she had lost all nervousness
and fear. She reversed the usual procedure for the first flight alone.
Most fledglings she had watched took off with a joyful sweep and
circled the field; then--suddenly ground shy--they kept circling until
the tanks ran dry and they had to summon the courage to land. The
necessary judgment for a good landing is one of the first tests of a
good pilot, and AE hoped that hers would be as smooth as John’s always
were.
On the day of her solo Amelia walked out to her plane with the graceful
ease of newly won self-assurance. Her patent-leather jacket gleamed
in the sun; her high leather flying boots, carefully laced over the
tight-fitting breeches, kicked up the dust as she walked; her white
shirt, jauntily opened at the neck, revealed the inevitable feminine
touch. She stepped onto the lower wing of the plane and swung into the
front cockpit. She buckled her helmet and set her goggles over her
eyes. A mechanic spun the wooden propeller and the biplane headed out
to the runway for the take-off. As the plane rolled down the barren
strip, gaining speed for the take-off, Amelia felt the right wing sag
just before the plane should have lifted into the air. Instinctively,
AE chopped the throttle, pulled back the spark-control lever, and
settled the plane onto the ground. Getting out to see what had gone
wrong, Amelia noticed that one of the shock absorbers had collapsed.
After the damage had been repaired, Amelia, taking courage anew,
tried again. She inched the throttle forward, and when the plane had
more than enough flying speed, she eased back on the stick, waiting
an anxious moment for the plane to break from the ground. The shock
absorber held, and the Airster sprang from the end of the runway.
Gently, almost caressingly, Amelia coordinated throttle and stick,
aileron and rudder, in her climbing turns out of take-off. Suddenly,
as she leveled the wings and straightened the nose, she realized an
overwhelming fact: she was alone, gloriously alone. She was in complete
command of the surging power from the engine and it was just at her
fingertips to obey her will and no other.
Her nerve ends had multiplied, for now the power of the engine was her
power and had become part of her own body, and the wings and fuselage
and _empennage_ were extensions of her own limbs. She climbed and
dived and turned, pranking the air in the thrill and exhilaration
of new-found love. The awareness of soaring flight now struck her
consciousness as if for the first time. She was now the master of her
life, her destiny, and perhaps her death. The realization brought a
bitter joy and a livid loneliness, but beyond them lay a new kind of
freedom and a blessed peace.
Buoyant and elated, she swung the plane into the landing pattern.
Feeling too confident, she neglected to lose enough flying speed in her
final approach to the runway, and when she tried to touch the plane
down, it kept bouncing off the ground and back into the air. Finally,
realizing that she had not cut the power, she pulled the throttle all
the way back and held the stick hard against her middle. The engine
sputtered, the wing stalled, and the plane thumped to the ground.
When she had taxied the plane to the parking area, some of the other
pilots came running over to her. “Congratulations!” they shouted. “How
did it feel?” they asked. “Were you scared?”
Amelia felt guilty and somewhat silly, but she certainly had not been
frightened. She was ashamed of her rotten landing, but took some
comfort in what John Montijo had once told her. All landings are good
ones, he said, if you can walk away from them. Amelia was proud that
she had finally soloed; by flying only on weekends, she had taken
months to do what others had done in just a few weeks of constant
instruction. She turned to one of the men standing near her plane and
asked him to take her picture out in front of the Kinner. She posed
like a wistful maiden who is going to announce her engagement in the
society section of the Sunday newspapers. She smiled softly and held
her arms out from her body, her hands angled, her fingers pointed. The
camera clicked.
12. _The Girl and the Machine_
The remembered sound was enough to snap Amelia back from her reverie.
She looked at the chronometer on the instrument panel of her Vega. Time
had passed quickly. She checked the fuel-flow indicator. Everything
normal. It was 11:30 P.M. She glanced at the air-speed indicator: 180
mph. She wondered what ground speed she was making along her track:
that depended on the direction and velocity of the wind. To the right
of the air-speed dial she noticed the dials of the altimeter; suddenly
they started to spin crazily around and around. In her twelve years of
flying this had never happened before. With the altimeter out, she
would have to fly by carefully watching the air-speed needle.
She looked out. The moon slid behind a tall build-up of clouds. Then
more clouds grew and thickened about the plane. The Vega started to
buffet, then to buck like an unbroken horse. Rain pinged and splattered
against the metal wings and fuselage, hit and spread like gravel
against the windshield, and streamed across the width and off the
trailing edges of the wings. Whips of lightning cracked across the nose
of the plane.
Amelia set her jaw hard and flew the plane by the needle and ball. She
hoped the driving downdrafts of the storm were not nosing her too far
down to the water. She could only trust to luck. For an hour she fought
the plane through.
Fleetingly she saw the moon. If she could only pull out on top of the
clouds. She added throttle and applied back pressure to the stick. She
watched her instruments. For thirty minutes the Vega climbed. Amelia
felt the controls getting sluggish. The dial of the rate-of-climb
indicator fell off. The wings were picking up ice. Slush now splattered
on the windshield. Amelia checked the engine rpm’s. Like the altimeter,
the tachometer now began to spin wildly. It had picked up ice from the
freezing outside temperature. The stick and rudder became sloppy and
unresponsive.
Suddenly one wing lurched up high and snapped over. The plane, heavy
with ice, spun out of control down through the clouds to the ocean
below. Amelia quickly jammed opposite rudder, drove the stick all the
way forward, and slowly brought the nose of the plane up out of the
dive. She looked out. The gun-metal waves of the Atlantic rose and fell
less than a hundred feet beneath her. She inhaled deeply against the
pounding of her heart.
Amelia continued to fly near the water, hoping the lower altitude would
melt the ice. Then fog and clouds gathered and spread over the ocean.
Without the altimeter she dared not fly that low, and she climbed again
to what she hoped was a safer altitude: low enough to escape the ice
and high enough to avoid the water.
She would have to depend on her remaining instruments to make it
across. She did not look out of her cockpit again until morning. The
Sperry directional gyrocompass became her savior. She believed in
it and followed it. Setting the gyro every fifteen minutes to a new
heading, she pursued it across the night and through the engulfing
clouds. For Amelia, it was now a grim, dogged, and stubborn refusal to
be overcome. As long as the Wasp engine kept firing, she would fly her
plane. The last hours became the worst of the flight.
Toward dawn the exhaust manifold began to vibrate badly. Then the
stinging odor of gasoline filled the cockpit. The gasoline gauges of
the reserve wing tanks leaked drops of fuel on the floor by her feet.
Her eyes and nostrils smarted from the strong smell. From about her
neck Amelia brought her kerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears.
Daylight finally dawned. Through the dim light Amelia found herself
between two layers of clouds. Her eyes burned from the ordeal of the
night and she rubbed them briskly with her hand. She fidgeted in her
seat trying to relieve the stiffness and soreness. She rubbed her back
against the back of the seat, and pressed her feet against the rudder
pedals in an effort to stretch her legs. Below, the cloud layer began
to break and clear. Amelia dropped down to examine the whitecaps; from
the spray of the waves she hoped to determine the direction of the
wind. She decided it was from the northwest.
Out on the leading edge of the wings she noticed ice. It had not yet
melted from the heat of the morning sun. She climbed a little higher,
but ran into another cloud bank. Suddenly she broke into the clear; the
clouds were now below her, closely packed in clear white and looking
like fields of snow she had once seen in New England. The upper layer
of clouds began to thin out, and through an opening came the morning
sun, blinding bright against the white snow of the clouds below.
Amelia reached into the pocket of her shirt, under the leather jacket,
and took out a pair of dark glasses. Through the darkness of the
glasses the light was still too bright. She nosed the Vega down through
the lower layer, hoping to find some shade near the water.
Ten hours of the long flight had passed. She reached for the thermos
bottle of hot soup. Pressing the stick firmly between her knees, she
gulped down the hot liquid food. It was her first meal since the
take-off from Harbor Grace. Amelia checked the fuel gauges: 120 gallons
left. Since take-off the Vega had burned 300 gallons.
Amelia looked out across the water for passing ships. None were within
sight. The sunshine and low-hanging clouds persisted. Preferring the
shade, she continued to fly close to the water.
She looked out far ahead. In the distance a thin line of black
stretched across the horizon. Was it landfall or a front of black
clouds? She had been deceived before. Then a dark object moved out
from the black line. It had to be a ship; whether a fishing vessel or
tanker, it was too soon to tell.
The vibration of the exhaust manifold became severe. Amelia saw that
the cracked weld had melted and grown larger from the exhaust flames
during the night. The engine would probably not last much longer. Paris
as a destination, she now decided, was out of the question. She would
have to come down on the first available piece of land.
Gently applying right rudder and stick, she banked into a turn, leveled
off, and held a new compass course of ninety degrees. By flying due
east she intended to hit the tip of the black line on the horizon, the
tip of what she hoped was Ireland.
Doc Kimball in New York had told her she might find bad weather south
of her course during the flight. The fact of last night’s experience
now convinced her she must be south of course, especially if the wind
had been long from the northwest.
The line on the horizon grew in contour. It was definitely a coast
line, and probably Ireland. By maintaining her course she would hit it,
not at the tip as planned, but exactly in the middle.
The coast came into full view below. Amelia screamed in delight;
she had made her landfall. Exultant, she turned and headed down a
long spine of mountains. Crowded against the peaks and knobs were
thunderstorm clouds, growing and spreading up and out.
Knowing that she could not depend on the broken altimeter and realizing
that she did not know the country, Amelia turned north to where the
weather seemed better. She did not want to churn through billowing
clouds whose roots were mountain peaks.
The new course proved a wise one. Ahead she saw a railroad, the blessed
“iron compass” which in any country could bring a pilot home to a city
and perhaps to an airport. Dutifully, Amelia followed the double track.
The worst of the flight, she knew, was over.
Happily she tried to stretch in the narrow seat. She felt like
that Greek traveler Odysseus whom she had read about at school in
Philadelphia--again, she mused, _another_ male hero. He had triumphed
over that sea-god who had tried to drown him--and so had she, over
whatever it was that had knocked out her tachometer and altimeter, and
had tried to drown her in the Atlantic.
Dead ahead on course what appeared to be a large city began to take
shape. Once over it, Amelia circled in wide, swinging loops, looking
for a landing field. There was none. But out beyond the city she saw
grazing pastures, neat, green, and trim. One of them would have to do.
She brought the Vega down low over a pasture dotted with cows. She made
several passes, checking carefully for any obstacles to a landing.
The cattle, frightened by the sound of the plane, scampered in all
directions. She reduced throttle and began her letdown. She brought the
nose up slowly. The meadow sloped upward. The tail skid hit, then the
wheels. The Vega rolled to a quick stop at the top of the slope.
Amelia shut off the switch and locked the brakes. She was weary and
tired but at the same time exhilarated and wide awake.
It was 1:45 P.M. Saturday, May 21. She had flown for fifteen hours and
eighteen minutes.
13. _A Real Heroine_
It was not until after she had climbed up through the hatchway that
Amelia noticed a cottage at the edge of the meadow. Flying over and
making her passes she had not seen it.
A man came running out from the cottage. When he reached the plane,
breathless, Amelia said to him, “I’m from America.”
It took awhile for the farmer to understand: a woman, from America,
flying the Atlantic, all alone? He shook his head in disbelief.
As they walked to his cottage, Amelia learned that she had landed in
Culmore, Ulster, near Londonderry, the city she had circled. There was
no mistaking that she was in Ireland: the accent of the farmer, and
his name, Patrick Gallagher, were sufficient proof. Amelia asked to be
taken to the nearest telephone.
Gallagher commandeered a neighbor’s car and drove her to The Elms, the
home of Mrs. Francis McClure, five miles down the road. Amelia put
through her call.
“I did it!” she said to GP in New York; then she told him about the
altimeter, and the tachometer, and the gas leak, and the broken
manifold.
George Putnam thanked God that she had made it safely.
Amelia then returned with Gallagher to his home. He asked her if she
were tired, if she wanted to sleep.
“I haven’t slept since Friday morning,” she told him. “But I don’t feel
the least bit fatigued.”
She slept until the next day.