you and the boys are O.K.” it said, “the rest doesn’t matter. After
all, it’s just one of those things. Whether you want to call it a day
or keep going later is equally jake with me.”
The reporters now pressed her for a statement. “Nothing has happened,”
she announced, “to change my attitude toward the original project. I
feel better than ever about the ship, and I am more eager than ever to
fly again.”
Amelia turned and walked to the window of the operations building.
She looked up. High above the center of the field a black bird swung
through the air in lazy widening circles.
2. _New Route, New Preparations_
“Hamlet would have been a bad aviator,” Amelia once said. “He worried
too much. The time to worry,” she added, “is three months before
a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks
involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard.
It retards reactions, makes one unfit.”
Contrary to her injunction, AE, like the melancholy Dane, worried, but
only for two months before she reattempted the world flight. In May the
Electra would be repaired and ready again.
After the accident at Luke Field, messages offering encouragement
poured in from everywhere. Loyal friends helped her to pick up the
pieces and start again.
The brush with death she had taken as a fatalist. “Someday,” she told
GP, “I will get bumped off. There’s so much to do, so much fun here;
I don’t want to go. But when I do go, I’d like to go in my plane.
Quickly.”
The old plans, most of them, would now have to be scrapped. Routes and
weather conditions would have to be restudied. Where rains had been in
March, there were now none; where winds had once proven favorable, they
would now prove adverse; where monsoons had been predicted, there would
now be dust storms.
For a world flight beginning in late May, the advantage seemed to lay
in flying west to east. To beat the bad weather predicted for the
first legs of the route, she would have to be through the Caribbean
and Africa by the middle of June. If she left from Miami, the flight
to Florida could serve as a final shakedown for the Electra. Amelia
decided on a west-east route.
The reversal of flight plans brought on countless difficulties and
greatly added expense. Fuel, oil, spare parts, mechanics would now
have to be relocated. Typical was the change involved in one engine
overhaul. A mechanic had been dispatched from London to Karachi; he
would now have to be reassigned elsewhere.
Having taken the warning of Bradford Washburn about radio facilities on
the ground, AE had made arrangements with the Coast Guard to have one
of its cutters stationed at Howland Island, so that the Electra could
home in on the ship’s radio signals. All this had to be worked out
again, and GP contacted Richard Black of the Department of the Interior
to rearrange the necessary coordination.
Credentials had to be re-examined and reacquired. New approval for
plane and pilot was secured from the Bureau of Aeronautics. Charts were
replotted for the new routes, and hours had to be spent at Lockheed
consulting with the engineers and the mechanics.
In blessed relief from the pressure of the many details, AE would slip
out to Indio, in the California desert, to visit her flying friend,
Jacqueline Cochran. Miss Cochran and her husband Floyd Odlum had
greatly helped in the financing of the world flight. At the desert
retreat Amelia could rest and bathe in the sun, swim in the pool, or
ride horseback.
On one such visit AE and Miss Cochran discussed, as they had before
on other occasions, the experiments going on at Duke University in
extrasensory perception. Amelia was extremely interested in the
subject, as Miss Cochran had indicated her own ability at ESP.
Curiously, the two women pilots had heard that night on the radio about
a passenger plane that had been lost somewhere in the mountains between
Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. Amelia asked Jacqueline if she could
locate the plane. Her friend gave the location of the plane and other
specific details of roads and mountain peaks in the area where the
plane had gone down. AE called Paul Mantz, who verified the details
on an aerial map. Excited, Amelia sped back through the night to Los
Angeles, and took off early the next morning. She searched the area
for three days and verified the names and locations in Miss Cochran’s
descriptions; but she could not find any trace of the plane. That
spring, however, when the snows had melted, the wreckage of the plane
was found just two miles from where Jacqueline Cochran had said it was.
At other times subsequently Miss Cochran demonstrated again her
extraordinary extrasensory powers. At AE’s request, she located another
missing airliner, crashed and pointing downward from a mountain peak.
The plane was found at the exact location.
Before one of her flights with GP in the Electra, Amelia asked her
friend to record the details of the flight. Miss Cochran gave exact
dates, times, and locations near Blackwell, Oklahoma, where AE had
landed to remain overnight.
As a result of these experiences, the two friends decided that in the
event AE should go down and get lost on the world flight, Jacqueline
would tell the rescuers where to look for Amelia and her plane. That
she failed when Amelia went down in the Pacific is one of the deepest
sorrows of Jacqueline Cochran’s life. Yet many of Miss Cochran’s
perceptions about the disappearance were correct.
Upon returning from Indio to plunge again into her preparations,
Amelia immediately concerned herself with finding a new navigator.
Captain Harry Manning’s leave of absence had expired and he had to
return to the command of his ship. AE turned to Fred Noonan, Manning’s
co-navigator for the Honolulu-Howland leg of the aborted east-west
flight. Noonan agreed to sign on.
There had been some anxiety from some quarters as to whether Fred
Noonan was capable of the expert, high-speed celestial navigation
needed on the long over-water legs of the world flight. Jacqueline
Cochran, in particular, was most anxious, and convinced Amelia that she
should take Noonan far out over the Pacific, fly him around in circles
until he was disoriented, then make him take her back to Los Angeles.
AE obliged. Noonan gave her the course back. The Electra hit the
California coast halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Apparently, Amelia was undisturbed by the navigation error, even in
view of the irrefutable and just-demonstrated fact that a mistake of
one degree on the compass could, on a long flight, take her miles off
her course. That she still engaged Noonan, knowing as she did that
tiny Howland Island was just two miles long and only three-quarters of
a mile wide, a mere fifteen feet above sea level, and more than 2,550
miles from Lae, New Guinea, is testimony to an unshakable confidence in
her own ability.
On May 19, two months to the day after the crack-up on Luke Field, the
Electra, repaired and gleaming, was rolled out of the Lockheed hangar.
Two days later it was flown up to Oakland where the letter covers were
quietly and secretly placed on board again, then flown back to Burbank.
Amelia had made no public announcement about the reversed direction of
the flight. To all appearances, therefore, when she, Fred Noonan, her
mechanic “Bo” McKneely, and her husband George Putnam took off the next
day for Miami, the trip was just another routine flight.
Actually, it was the final shakedown flight. If it proceeded without
mechanical difficulties, Amelia decided, she and Fred would continue
around the world from Miami; if not, she could bring the plane back to
Burbank for further adjustments.
Late that afternoon they landed in Tucson, Arizona. The summer heat of
the desert rose from the concrete ramp in wave after stifling wave.
Discharging her passengers, AE taxied to the refueling pit. After
having her tanks topped, she restarted the Wasps. The left engine
stuttered, caught, then backfired, and finally exploded into a burst
of flames. Amelia cut the switches and hit the left fire-extinguisher
button. The men on the ground sprayed the burning engine with foam. The
fire suffocated and died.
AE climbed out of the Electra to examine the damage. Wisps of smoke
rose from the Wasp. The acrid smell of burned rubber filled her
nostrils. The engine and prop were black with dirt and grime, the
cowling caked gray-white with bubbled foam. The heat from motor and
ramp cloyed the air.
Early the next morning, when Amelia and her three men returned to the
ramp, the engine had been repaired and the plane thoroughly washed. Out
of the west, winds charged with sand began to swirl and sweep over the
field. Amelia wanted to be on her way. “Let’s see if we can get up and
over it,” she said.
They took off and climbed to 8,000 feet. All the way to El Paso, on the
western edge of Texas, the sandstorm below, like a golden turbulent
sea, billowed and eddied. On they pushed across Texas. That night they
were in New Orleans. The next day, after crossing the Gulf of Mexico to
Tampa, they turned southeast to Miami. At Miami the final decision had
to be made.
Now began a week of final preparations. The Electra, Amelia decided,
would not have to be returned to Burbank; the Pan American mechanics in
Miami, she happily discovered, had all the skill needed to make a last
tune-up on the plane.
While the men worked on the Electra, Amelia was ostensibly calm,
patient, unhurried. She would sit on a service stand to watch an
adjustment being made on one of the engines, sprawl on the tarmac to
help with a bothersome strut, or join the mechanics for lunch at the
“greasy spoon” restaurant across the street. The men, noticing her
ready smile and easy ways, admired her as a pilot who knew her plane
and as a woman who knew what she was about.
Fred Noonan renewed his old acquaintances among the Pan American
personnel. “Poor old Fred,” they had said about him initially, “flying
around the world with a woman pilot.” But growing to know Amelia as she
calmly went about her tasks, they finally conceded to Fred that he had
the pick of women fliers for his pilot.
Their acceptance of AE on an equal footing with the men of aviation
reflected Fred Noonan’s personal views. “Amelia is a grand person
for such a trip,” he wrote to his wife. “She is the only woman flier
I would care to make such an expedition with. Because in addition to
being a fine companion and pilot, she can take hardships as well as a
man--and work like one.”
For Amelia there was criticism from the press that she was just another
“stunt flier,” despite her statements to the contrary that she was
conducting an experiment on the human level. The press was partially
right.
“When I have finished this job,” she said in confidence to Carl Allen,
“I mean to give up long-distance ‘stunt’ flying.” Then a smile creased
her face. “I’m getting old,” she added. “I want to make way for the
younger generation before I’m feeble, too.”
There were serious conversations with GP at the hotel where they were
staying. He was anxious about her safety on such a long trip. Life held
out so much else for her, he asked her if she could not give up the
idea.
“Please don’t be concerned,” she said. Her voice was low and soft. She
parted the bangs of her dry mop of hair. “It just seems that I must try
this flight.” She walked to the window and watched the waves in the
distance breaking on the shore. She turned slowly. “I’ve weighed it all
carefully. With it behind me, life will be fuller and richer. I can be
content. Afterward, it will be fun to grow old.”
George Putnam knew from the look in his wife’s eyes that her mind was
made up irrevocably. Such was the woman he had married. She had to
prove to herself, and to the world, that women could do as men could do.
Amelia made the final inspection of her aircraft. She was concerned
about all the weight the plane had to carry and looked for ways to
lighten the load. After she checked again each item of equipment, she
finally decided to remove the 250-foot trailing wire antenna from the
plane. It was too bulky and it was too much trouble to reel out and
reel in while she was trying to fly the plane. One had to take chances.
3. _Miami to Africa_
Shortly after five o’clock in the morning of June 1, 1937, AE and Fred
climbed into the Lockheed Electra to begin their flight around the
world at the equator. Amelia started the engines. The dials of the
engine instruments--rpm’s, oil pressure, fuel pressure--swung into
place; then she noticed that the needle for the left cylinder-head
pressure failed to respond. AE shut down the motors. The left Wasp
would have to be checked.
Bo McKneely scurried up a ladder, removed the cowling, and quickly
spotted the trouble. It was a broken lead to the thermocouple--a
thermometer coupled to one of the cylinders. AE and Noonan rejoined GP
and his son David on the ramp, while McKneely resoldered the lead. The
sun edged over the gray line on the horizon.
As Bo McKneely replaced the engine cowling, AE and Fred remounted the
wing on either side and again climbed into the cockpit. GP, climbing
up after Amelia, leaned in to bid his wife good-by. It was their last
farewell.
Amelia slid the hatch shut, started the engines, and signaled for the
chocks to be pulled from the wheels. She taxied to the southeast corner
of the field and turned into the take-off runway. At 5:56 A.M. the
Electra broke from the ground, bound for California by the longest way
possible. The last flight was on.
The Lockheed climbed slowly to cruising altitude, then swung southeast
to the course for Puerto Rico, the first stop. Amelia, settling back in
her seat, looked out under the left wing. The blue waters of the Gulf
Stream shaded into the green off the coast; against the light ocean
floor, fish flitted darkly.
Shortly after six o’clock she tuned in on Miami’s WQAM to find out what
weather conditions were ahead on course. She heard, in addition, a
breath-taking account of her own take-off. Such a dramatic rendering,
Amelia reflected, would awaken any man. She turned to Fred in the right
seat. They laughed aloud.
The sea was misty against the rising sun, and clouds swiftly scudded by
under the wings. Then she saw the great reef that was the Bahama Banks
loom into view, followed by the bright green tapestry of Andros Island.
Fred had crawled over the catwalk back to the navigation room.
Amelia locked in the Sperry automatic pilot, then from a brief case
took out her logbook--a secretary’s dictation pad. She jotted down
fleeting impressions: “... little rocks and reefs just poke their heads
above the water. So few lighthouses in this mess ... trees in black
silhouette against the burnished sun path.... The shadows of clouds
(white clouds in the blue sky) are like giant flowers, dark on the
green sea ... curtains of rain clouds aloft....”
Layers of cumulus clouds built up and sandwiched the Electra between
them. Amelia nosed down to 1,000 feet and caught the sun again off to
the left. Fred Noonan had estimated the time of arrival at San Juan as
1:10 P.M.
Shortly after twelve o’clock Fred sent up a card clipped to the end of
the fishing pole. Amelia read: she was too far south of course. She
swung the plane into a corrected heading. Through the haze she could
not distinguish between sea and sky. She looked at the indicated air
speed: the needle pointed at 150 mph. She was nursing the engines for
the long trip.
Through the mist the island of Puerto Rico came into view. Amelia
followed the coast line to San Juan. As the Electra closed in on the
city, she spotted the airport and began her letdown for a landing.
She lowered flaps and gear and eased into a long glide into the wind.
Anchored off the near end of the runway was a four-masted schooner.
Amelia skipped over the masts and rounded out in a three-point
touchdown.
After she had taxied to the parking ramp, she suddenly realized that
she had forgotten to eat any of the sandwiches placed on board the
plane. Breakfast had been pre-dawn and 1,000 miles ago. She was hungry;
and from the abrupt release of tensions, tired.
Friends waiting at the airport came to the rescue: Mrs. Thomas
Rodenbaugh with food and Clara Livingston with rest. At the Livingston
plantation, twenty miles from town, Amelia turned in at eight o’clock.
The sound of the surf outside the window, “charm’d magic casements,
opening on the foam / of perilous seas,” surged over her and drowned
her in a deep sleep.
For the 3,000-mile stretch, south and east down the coast of South
America to Natal, there were only four satisfactory airports; between
them, the grim alternatives of ocean or jungle. The first stop was to
be Paramaribo, 1,000 miles away.
At four the next morning Amelia bounded out of bed, determined to make
a dawn take-off. But occasion conspired against her. Repair work on
the take-off runway would necessitate a shorter run to get airborne;
to get airborne, she would have to reduce the fuel load; to reduce the
fuel load, she would have to forego Paramaribo. She would have to push
through to another, closer stop.
“_Push through_,” she wrote. “We’re always pushing through, hurrying on
our long way, trying to get to some other place instead of enjoying the
place we’d already got to.”
As she had skipped from place to place as a little girl, and from job
to job and interest to interest as a young woman, so now she skimmed
over the world to touch and go. “Sometime,” she said, realizing that
her schedule prevented long visits, “I hope to stay somewhere as long
as I like.”
By the time the Electra was ready for take-off the sun was in full view
above the horizon. The leg would have to be a short one; strong head
winds had been predicted. Once in the air Amelia watched the green
mountains of Puerto Rico change to white clouds and blue sea. From
8,000 feet the little clouds looked like white scrambled eggs. Far
into the distance, and dead ahead on course, the hazy outline of the
land mass of Venezuela came slowly into focus.
South America, the second of five continents to be flown over, was a
complex of densely timbered mountains, valleys of open plains, and
thickly tangled jungle. Amelia, looking at her first jungle, shuddered
at the thought of the Electra having to make a forced landing--“the
getting away would be worse than the getting down.”
Fortunately, Fred had flown the region many times before. He would get
them through. Such were the advantages of flying the Pan American route
with a former Pan American navigator.
A dirty red-brown river snaked through a mountain pass. Amelia followed
it inland to a town of red roofs and black oil tanks. It was Caripito.
The airport offered a long, paved runway. AE eased the Electra down.
They lunched at the hangar and stayed overnight at the home of Henry E.
Linam, general manager of Standard Oil for Venezuela.
The next morning--it was June 3--mountainous rain clouds hemmed in the
town. Determined to get on, Amelia plowed through them, then skirted
around them back to the coast. She climbed through showers to 8,000
feet and broke into the sunlight. The gray, dank world lay below.
AE pulled out her log and scribbled her sensations of the moment: “The
sun illumines mystic caves,” she scribbled on the pad, “or shows giant
cloud creatures mocking with lumpy paws the tiny man-made bird among
them.”
Over sea, jungle, and shore line Amelia played tag with the clouds.
From well out to sea she recognized off the right wing a muddy river
spilling into a wide dirty fan; together they formed the Nickerie River
and delta that separated British from Dutch Guiana. She turned inland
toward the coast; and rather than follow the coast in true Pan American
fashion, she now cut across Jungles. A strong head wind was reducing
her ground speed: she advanced the throttle to make a true air speed of
148 mph.
Another river cut across the course line. It was a curling thread of
silver with green beads of islands. Amelia spread the sectional map
across her knees. It should be the Surinam River, she concluded as she
ran her finger along the blue line on the map. Paramaribo must be 12
miles in from its mouth; and the airport, another 25 miles farther.
Alongside the river on the map a cross-hatched line indicated a
railroad. Instructions from Fred were to follow it; like Casey Jones,
Amelia did.
On either side of the railroad track were jungle and now and again rice
fields and mud huts. From the clothes swinging from the lines behind
the huts AE tried to determine the direction of the wind, but she was
too busy following the course of the river to get an accurate reading.
Expecting to find a small hacked-out clearing for a landing field, she
was delighted to find one of the best airport facilities she had ever
seen. Paramaribo had gone aviation-modern! A wind sock marked the wind
direction; strips of white cloth indicated the best landing strip;
smoke from a bonfire, set ablaze when her plane came into view, showed
the wind velocity. How thorough are the Dutch, Amelia thought, as she
began her letdown.
Amelia and Fred were hot and tired when they climbed out of the
Electra. Coffee, orange juice, and sandwiches were quickly provided.
Refreshed, they went to the Palace Hotel, one of Fred’s old Pan
American stopping-off places.
At the hotel pilot and navigator discussed possible delays from rain
and mud at the field. Amelia was eager to get on; Fred, calm and
stoical.
“It’s all a matter of comparison,” he said to her. “We’re impatient
about a day’s delay. That’s because that lost day’s flying might see
us across a continent or an ocean. But a swell way to learn patience,”
he assured her, recalling one incident in some twenty years of
sailing the seven seas, “is to try a tour of sailing-ship voyaging.
Back in 1910”--he stretched his long, slender body across a chair and
footstool--“I was on the bark _Compton_ which was then the largest
square-rigged ship under the English flag.”
Fred’s eyes crinkled at the corners into crow’s-feet as he smiled about
what he was going to say. “We were weather-bound for 152 days on a
voyage from the state of Washington, on the Pacific coast, to Ireland.
After nearly half a year on one vessel on one trip you become pretty
philosophical about the calendar.”
Amelia’s concerns about delay were somewhat alleviated by Fred’s
story, and, as she discovered the next morning when the day broke
clear, unfounded. Ceiling and visibility were unlimited, except for a
diaphanous mist that clung to the Surinam River. Happily they took off,
bound for Fortaleza in Brazil, to fly over 960 miles of jungle and 370
miles of ocean.
They had left Paramaribo too early to receive any weather reports; as a
result, what the weather would be like on course was strictly a matter
of wait and see. Amelia hoped she would not have to turn back: of all
possibilities, this would be the most exasperating.
The first of four projected crossings of the equator lay ahead.
Unbeknown to Amelia, Fred had planned appropriate ceremonies for the
occasion. He had set aside a thermos bottle full of cold water, and at
the right time he was going to crawl across the catwalk and pour the
water over her unsuspecting head. But Fred became so occupied with his
navigation that the Electra had winged across the zero line of latitude
before he could play his role of baptismal King Neptune. When Amelia
learned his plan she laughed in victory, but shuddered to think of the
next three crossings.
The broad banks of a long river wound through the jungle. It reminded
Amelia of the Mississippi, which she had flown over many times. This
South American cousin could only be the Amazon. Under the right wing
yellow and brown currents stretched out and in to the lower delta.
Like so many toothpicks, thousands of uprooted and broken tree trunks
flowed, gathered, and spread over the moving stream. The shadow of the
Electra skimmed over the surface.
Bragança, São Luís, Camocim: Amelia checked off on the map each city
as she passed over it. According to Fred’s dead reckoning--determining
position by speed in a given direction for a definite elapsed time--she
should soon be in sight of Fortaleza. He had given her ten hours to
make it.