Chapter X: Part THREE: The Last Flight (1)

1. _Crack-up in Hawaii_

Ironically, Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world was her last long flight. “I have a feeling,” she had said to Carl Allen of the New York _Herald Tribune_, “that there is just one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this is it. Anyway, when I have finished this job, I mean to give up major long-distance flights.”

Her plan was to girdle the earth at the equator on an east-to-west flight. The time of departure was set for March, 1937.

For Amelia, the flight was the greatest challenge of her life. No one had done what she planned to do. There had been other flights around the world, but none had been attempted at the equator. Wiley Post, AE’s good friend, had flown around the world twice in his Vega, the _Winnie May_, once in 1931 with Harold Gatty, then again by himself in 1933.

In 1935 Wiley Post tried again, this time with Will Rogers as his passenger. The plane, a half-breed of Lockheed Orion and Sirius with floats attached, was dangerously nose heavy. “You’ll be in trouble,” the engineers told him at Lockheed, where they refused to put on the floats, “if there’s just a slight power loss on take-off.” Post was stubborn and insistent. He found another company to attach the pontoons. At Point Barrow, Alaska, in August, the engine stuttered on take-off. The plane nosed in and crashed, and two of the most famous men of their time were killed.

Wiley Post’s flights had been made well north of the equator, at a distance only two thirds the length of the equator.

There had also been some remarkable distance flights by others. In 1933 the Lindberghs made a 29,000-mile air-route survey of Europe, Africa, and South America. Laura Ingalls in 1934 had flown solo from New York to South America and return, a distance of 16,897 miles. Also in 1934 the Pacific was flown in a first west-east flight, from Australia to California, by Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and Captain P. G. Taylor.

By girdling the globe, Amelia could achieve not only the record for distance, but also fly around the world. She would like to do it alone. It would be fun to be the first to fly the equator.

AE made her plans, the most elaborate and time consuming of her career. The details that had to be worked out, she found, were formidable. But she began simply, almost casually, to map out the 27,000 miles of the flight.

One day early in the winter of 1936 she walked across the living room in her home at Rye. She picked up the globe from the long table behind the sofa. She turned the globe to the Pacific, placed her thumb on Oakland, and spanned her hand to Honolulu; then from Honolulu her long, slender fingers reached easily to two little islands just above the equator. In another stretch of the hand she reached New Guinea. Seven thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean were easy to cross by a span of the hand, but those two little islands, Howland and Baker, were mere specks on the globe.

She looked closely at Howland, and wondered if she could find it flying alone after nearly 2,000 miles out from Hawaii. She swept her hand quickly over her hair and grinned. This was the most exact kind of flying. She would need the best of navigation equipment. She would need a navigator to make it.

When GP came home she told him of her need for a navigator; not for the whole flight, but just for the long over-water legs across the Pacific. George picked up the phone. He always knew whom to call.

GP first telephoned Bradford Washburn, a young Harvard professor who had done some distinguished ground navigation and exploration. Washburn agreed to come to New York for an interview.

AE was sprawled on the living-room floor with her maps when the young professor came into the house. She liked his cut: he was slim, wiry, handsome. She liked the set of his jaw and the look of his clear eyes. She got up from the floor, smiled, and reached out a hand in welcome.

Pilot and prospective navigator sat on the floor and discussed the problems involved. Amelia traced the itinerary she had marked on the map, mentioning, as she moved her finger, the distances between points.

Bradford Washburn examined the first two proposed legs of the flight. He was familiar with the Electra and felt it could easily make the distance from California to Hawaii. The long stretch over the vast Pacific to the tiny dot that was Howland Island: that was an immediate difficulty to overcome.

“How far did you say it was to Howland?” he asked.

“Roughly, about 2,000 miles,” Amelia said.

“Your 50-watt radio isn’t strong enough for that kind of flying. On such a long leg as that one you’ll be out of range of any ground stations.” Washburn looked intently at Amelia. “If you’re off just one degree on your heading, you’ll miss that little island completely.”

Amelia had no intention of being one degree off course. The best navigator available could hit the island right on the nose.

“What kind of radio signals will there be at Howland to home in on?” The professor pursued the point.

“None,” Amelia answered.

For Bradford Washburn the interview was over. The project was out of the question. He did not want to look for a needle in a haystack, especially if the haystack were the Pacific Ocean--and certainly not without a strong magnet to find the needle.

Bradford Washburn was convinced that Amelia had rather not have a navigator, that she had decided on one only as an irritable necessity. Her self-confidence, her belief in her own flying abilities, was for him towering and magnificent to behold; but he wanted no part of it.

“One must take chances,” AE had often said before, and she repeated the same words in the hope of hitting Howland Island.

That she was devil-may-care was perhaps attributable to what seem to have been premonitions, foreshadowings which she blatantly ignored. AE and GP had spent an afternoon examining gyroscopes at the Sperry plant in Brooklyn. On the way home Amelia had stopped the car at a red light on Flatbush Avenue. In the blue dusk of that winter’s day she noticed off to the side an old man step off the curb and start to shuffle across the street. “It’s hard to get old,” the old man muttered as he crossed, “so hard.” Amelia heard every word.

The light changed. Amelia slammed the clutch to the floor and shifted the car into gear. Her lips were closed tight, her eyes intent on the moving traffic. At the next corner she turned into a side street, drove around the block, and swung back up the street to where the old man had stepped off the curb. She looked up and down the opposite sidewalk. The old man had disappeared in the crowd.

That night, before going to bed, Amelia turned to George. Her eyes were level and serious. “It _is_ hard to be old,” she said. “So hard.” She walked to the mirror and sat at her dressing table. She looked hard at her own reflection. “I’m afraid I’ll hate it. Hate to grow old.”

GP said nothing; he waited for his wife to finish.

Amelia turned and faced her husband again. “I think probably, GP,” she spoke slowly and deliberately, “that I’ll not live to be old.”

On the twenty-second of July, 1936, Amelia went out to Burbank, California, to inspect the new Lockheed for the first time. The all-metal plane glistened as it was rolled out of the hangar into the sun. AE examined the plane closely: she walked the 55-foot span of the wings, climbed into the cockpit, worked the controls, and started the engines.

Lockheed, in keeping with its previous stellar designations for its aircraft, had christened the low-winged, twin-engined monoplane the Electra, after the “lost” star of the Pleiades.

Amelia, dressed in a mechanic’s white coveralls and inspecting her new plane, paid no attention to any designations, stellar, mythological, or psychological. She promptly dubbed the plane “the flying laboratory.” That was practical and to the point, for that was what the plane in fact was.

She loved the navigation equipment which had been installed in the passenger compartment. She climbed in to look it over. The fuselage had been cleared of passenger seats. Directly behind the cockpit two large tanks had been bolted in place; they could hold 1,000 gallons of fuel. That would give the plane an added range up to 4,000 miles. Behind the tanks was a complete navigation room.

She walked to the wide chart table set up against the bulkhead and under the far window. Through the round glass in the table she read the master aperiodic compass placed directly below. Mounted at each window was a pelorus, for taking bearings from any land mass. She set her eye to the tube of the one at the window over the table. The special flat plane of the window allowed for no distortions, especially for the readings from the bubble sextant. She noted next to the table a temperature gauge, an air-speed indicator, and three chronometers; and above the table and to the left side of the window an altimeter.

The arrangement for the use of the drift indicator was brilliantly simple. On the cabin door a special latch had been installed to keep the door open about four inches. Down through the opening in the door she swung the drift indicator. By looking through the instrument at smoke bombs during the day or flares at night, a navigator could determine the direction and velocity of the wind. Amelia was satisfied: her laboratory was adequate to the task from the navigation point of view.

The communications equipment, however, was at once delightfully modern and frustratingly primitive. Pilot and navigator had voice radio; but only the navigator had telegraphic key. Both could transmit and receive with ground stations, but not with each other. For intercommunications the navigator would have to use a cut-down bamboo fishing pole, with an office clip nailed to the end of it, to send messages written on cards up to the pilot; if he wanted to talk to the pilot, or if he wanted to dial the radio behind the pilot to a new frequency, he would have to crawl along the catwalk over the two big tanks between the cockpit and the passenger compartment.

The radio had a power of only 50 watts. Amelia was not satisfied, and she tried to borrow a better, more powerful, system. The radio was the weakest link in the laboratory chain.

For weeks she flew the Electra up and down the California coast, working out the “bugs.” In August she went to New York to enter the Bendix Trophy race. The coast-to-coast speed flight, she felt, would be an excellent “shakedown” for the plane.

Other women joined in for the race and gathered at Floyd Bennett Field. Louise Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Jacqueline Cochran, Laura Ingalls, Martie Bowman, Mrs. Benny Howard: all were stiff competitors. Helen Rickey had agreed to be AE’s copilot.

During the race trouble developed in the Electra’s fuel lines, and Amelia had to drop out much against her will. But two women did win the race: Louise Thaden with Blanche Noyes as her copilot.

Preparations moved along for the world flight. Clarence S. Williams of Los Angeles was engaged to get ready maps and charts. He laid out compass courses, the distances between points, the exact times at which to change headings: he prepared sectional after sectional for the many legs of the flight. His work was invaluable.

Paul Mantz was technical adviser, as he had been for the Hawaii-California flight. He supervised the mechanical readiness of the plane, and took it up on many test flights.

GP managed the far-flung problems, and they were many, of stopping places and alternates for the caching of fuel, oil, spare parts. Red tape of international length had to be cut and unsnarled. Innumerable credentials were needed: permissions to land from foreign governments, passports, visas, certificates of health and character, negative police records, medical papers. George made all the official advance arrangements. Before he was finished, he had spotted fuel and oil at thirty different locations along the route, and had collected several thick folders of papers for his wife.

Amelia made more and more notes on her charts as new information poured in. Airports, alternates, emergency landing fields, winds aloft, weather, terrain, altitudes: each had to be entered at the proper place. She took the maps and carefully marked the stop-off points, then drew lines to a double row for entering the exact amount of gas and oil that would be available along the way.

In preparing for previous flights she had revealed her plans only to closest friends, but this time Amelia did not shroud her activities in secrecy. The press received broad clues, and then were blamed, half-jokingly, as the cause of it all. Late in 1936 AE said to reporters in Los Angeles, “I’m nearly sold on the idea of flying around the world because I’d like to do it; but I’m a busy person this year. I have a lot of other things to do. Next year? Well, one never knows.”

On February 11, 1937, Amelia had flown to New York from California. Newsmen had surrounded her at the Hotel Barclay; they wanted a confirmation or denial of all the rumors they had heard about her plans for a world flight. With AE was the man who had agreed to be her navigator. He was Captain Harry Manning, her old friend from the _Friendship_ days, on whose ship, the _President Roosevelt_, she had returned home.

Amelia smoothed at the hips the dark-blue wool dress she had changed into. The press rarely saw her in “feminine” clothes. “Well,” she said, “I am going to try to fly around the globe.” She toyed with the bright scarf about her neck. “The flight will be as near to the equator as I can make it, east to west, about 27,000 miles.”

The press moved in. Reporters fired questions at her, photographers shot pictures at close range, newsreel men turned on their bright lights and rolled their cameras. Somewhat flustered by the sudden excitement she had caused, Amelia laughed. “You know,” she said to them, “I feel you men have pushed me into this. You are the ones who have kept saying that I was going to fly around the world, until finally you’ve compelled me to think seriously about doing it.”

Carl Allen, her friend from the New York _Herald Tribune_, would have none of it. “Oh, come now,” he protested, “nobody has pushed you into it. You know you’ve been wanting to do it all the time.”

Captain Manning, stolid and silent beside AE, smiled uneasily. Amelia quickly relinquished her ground. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I guess I didn’t get away with that, did I?”

“What are you going for?” one reporter abruptly asked.

AE thought for a moment. The question was one she had heard many times before. “Well,” she answered, “I’ve seen the North Atlantic. And I’ve seen the Pacific, too, of course; at least a part of it. But”--she hesitated--“well, just say I want to fly around the globe. And I think a round-the-world flight just now should be at the equator.”

She turned to the quiet man beside her. She looked at his thick, curly black locks. “Captain Manning is going with me part way,” she explained, “because I don’t believe the pilot on such a flight can navigate, too.”

Interview over, reporters broke for the nearest telephone. The world heard and waited.

Amelia dived again into the myriad details of preparation. She was still dissatisfied with the radio equipment. She realized that a 50-watt transmitter and receiver could reach only about five hundred miles under normal conditions. On the Hawaii-California flight the Vega radio had reached up to 2,000 miles, but only because of skipping--a radio phenomenon in which radio waves bounce up and down from the ionosphere and move forward for incredibly long distances.

But skipping was something that could not be depended upon. Some of the ground stations would be much farther than 500 miles apart. The distance between Hawaii and Howland was 1,940 miles; between Howland and New Guinea, 2,556 miles. The other navigation equipment was good, and worked well in test after test. How to strengthen the weakest link?

The problem continued to plague her while she gained more and more experience flying the Electra during most of the year 1936. Often she flew cross-country until she attained that assured feeling of confidence that came when the plane became an extension of her own body and limbs.

It was during the late morning of one of these flights, with Jacqueline Cochran acting as copilot, that Amelia landed at Wright Field in Ohio. The women pilots were met by Manila Talley, AE’s friend from Denison House days, whose husband was stationed at the field. The three of them climbed into Manila’s car and drove to the Officers’ Club at adjoining Patterson Field for lunch. Mrs. Talley noticed that AE seemed somewhat distraught.

When they sat down to lunch Amelia told her companions how she had hoped to borrow desperately needed radio equipment. She had been unable to get better radios from the manufacturers. They told her they had lost all they could afford on flights that didn’t make it. And, she was reminded flatly by them, regulations absolutely forbade lending government equipment.

Mrs. Talley and Miss Cochran tried to dissuade Amelia from making the flight with inferior equipment.

AE was adamant. “I have to meet my obligations,” she said. “We’ve sold letter covers to pay for the flight. I have to carry them.” She had earned $10,000 by selling and carrying letter covers for the Pacific flight. And for the world flight, Gimbel’s in New York had sold to collectors 10,000 covers, which had realized some $25,000 to meet expenses.

Amelia straightened her back against the chair and popped her crumpled napkin onto the table. “I will simply have to make do,” she said with a stamp of finality, “with what equipment I have.”

Other equally important matters occupied her days and nights. One at a time problems had to be faced, solutions had to be worked out. The preparations were the part of the iceberg that didn’t show.

Paul Mantz wrung out the Electra in shakedown flights and final tests. GP surveyed the extra-long runway at Oakland, waited for the final word about the emergency field being completed at Howland Island, and coordinated final arrangements with the Department of Commerce, Pan American Airways, and the Coast Guard.

For two weeks Amelia pored over weather maps, waiting for the one which would let her go: it didn’t have to be completely satisfactory, only acceptable.

There was plenty of help for the flight to Honolulu. Paul Mantz would be her copilot, and helping Captain Manning in the navigation room would be Fred Noonan. They were a right good crew.

Captain Harry Manning, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner for heroic daring in having rescued thirty-two men from the sinking steamship _Florida_, had taken leave of absence from his ship to be the navigator. Paul Mantz, expert pilot, movie stunt flier, aviation instructor, owner of a flying service, dependable technical adviser, was as familiar with the Lockheed as AE herself. Fred J. Noonan, a veteran of twenty-two years of ocean travel before he joined Pan American Airways, transport pilot, instructor in aerial navigation, had pioneered routes for PAA flights across the Pacific.

The plan was to drop Mantz off in Honolulu, where he could join his fiancée; to leave Noonan at Howland, where he could take the Coast Guard cutter back to Hawaii; and finally to drop Manning at Brisbane, Australia. From that point on Amelia hoped to continue solo for the rest of the way around the world.

On March 17, 1937, Amelia and her plane were ready. The Electra waited in the Navy hangar at Oakland. There was Gaelic festivity in the air: it was St. Patrick’s Day. In deference to Fred Noonan, AE pinned shamrocks on the men and herself. But the weather was not favorable; it drizzled, on and off, all day.

Amelia went to the window of the Navy office and looked out. Time and again she had waited at windows before, watching and waiting for the weather to clear. She drove her hands into her brown slacks, then adjusted the collar of her plaid wool shirt, then twisted the brown linen scarf about her neck. She turned up the collar of her brown leather flying jacket. Crow’s-feet gathered at the corners of her eyes as she squinted at the wet grayness outside.

Several showers passed over the field. Shortly after 3:00 P.M. she watched the low scud beginning to clear, and heartened as a thin strip of blue appeared in the higher overcast. The crew was alerted. It was time to go.

Paul Mantz started the engines, taxied the plane out of the Navy hangar, and stopped on the apron. Manning and Noonan ran out and climbed into the passenger compartment. To avoid reporters and well-wishers, Amelia sneaked into a Navy automobile and was driven out to the plane. GP drove out with her. Quickly she was hustled up onto the wing and into the cockpit. GP bent in and wished his wife a final farewell.

For five minutes AE and Mantz revved up the engines, checking the rpm’s and magnetoes of first one and then the other, then both of the powerful Wasps.

The Electra taxied to the east end of the field, to the 7,000-foot runway. On alternate sides of the take-off strip, cardboard placards had been staked out every 150 feet. Small puddles of water splotched the runway. Throttles were advanced and the props blasted back. The take-off roll was short: the five-ton Lockheed eased into the air after 2,000 feet. It was 4:37 P.M.

The flight to Honolulu proceeded without incident. At 5:40 A.M. the next morning, 2,410 miles, fifteen hours, and forty-seven minutes after Oakland, the Electra touched down at Wheeler Field.

Despite the long flight just completed, Amelia, teeming with energy and anxious to be on her way, wanted to take off for Howland without delay. But the weatherman dampened her zest.

Bad storms, she discovered, had started to move in from the southwest. Resigned, Amelia went to the home of a friend and slept. There was no point in worrying about the weather. “Weather permitting” had always qualified her every flight plan.

Paul Mantz, meanwhile, moved the plane to Luke Field, for the use of the longer runway there. Although the Electra would not use the full fuel capacity of 1,151 gallons to get to Howland, the weight of 900 gallons was still considerable. At Luke, a Pratt and Whitney mechanic made a thorough final inspection of the two Wasp engines. There was no time to spare: AE had sent word that she wanted to take off at dawn on the following day.

Amelia rose early that morning of March 19. Light began to break over the hills of Pearl Harbor as she drove out to the field. Expecting her, Paul Mantz had warmed up the engines; and Captain Manning and Fred Noonan had taken their places in the navigation room.

Amelia climbed into the cockpit. Before her lay the 3,000 feet of runway. The concrete shone in the morning light, and here and there gleamed patches of water. AE signaled; the mechanics pulled the chocks away from the wheels.

She lowered the flaps, held the wheel firmly, then slowly inched the throttle forward. The 1,100 Wasp-stung horses fought to go. The Electra started to roll. Halfway down the runway one wing dipped.

Amelia applied opposite aileron. The plane pulled to the right. AE yanked the left throttle all the way back. The nose swung from right to left, but the wing would not lift. She watched helplessly as the wing tip hit the runway and scraped the concrete in a shower of sparks. Then the right landing gear collapsed, the plane careened, then swung around uncontrollably in a swift ground loop. Amelia chopped the other throttle, cut the switches, and climbed out of the cockpit. On the ground she met Manning and Noonan jumping out from the passenger compartment door. They had not been scratched.

The $80,000 Electra lay like a broken bird upon the pavement. The right wheel had been sheared off; the right wing was battered and crumpled. Amelia was sick at heart as she looked at her damaged plane. “Something must have gone wrong,” she said in an attempt to say something.

“Of course, now you will give up the trip?” someone asked.

Amelia shook her head. “I think not,” she said. “If it’s possible, I’ll try again.” Her voice trailed off. “Repairs. Costs.”

Grave and silent she left the runway. Later she regained her composure and called GP in Oakland. He was relieved to hear that she was safe. “They crashed; the ship’s in flames,” a reporter had told him. The sparks had been mistaken for fire.

A few hours later a newsman came up to Amelia. He tried to be understanding. “Tough luck,” he said. “Anyway, you’re fortunate to be alive. By the way, I understand your husband will be greatly relieved, because now you can’t go on with the flight.”

AE showed him the telegram she had just received from GP. “So long as 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.

She watched the preset chronometer on the instrument panel, and waited for the steady jerks of the dial to click to the designated hour. She then looked out to see if she could recognize any telltale signs below. Just west of what she determined to be Cape Mucuripe she saw a light brown strip of sand that formed an arc between the mountains and the seacoast. She checked the map. It had to be her destination. Fortaleza was the only city on such a topographical boomerang. Fred had hit it on the nose!

The airport was excellent; and when Pan American put all their facilities at her disposal, Amelia decided to ready the plane there for the South Atlantic hop to Africa, rather than at Natal, her actual point of departure.

The Electra underwent a complete inspection: oil change, greasing, instrument check, engine overhaul, scrubdown and washing. Amelia and Fred, after a week of traveling, felt for themselves a similar need for cleaning and overhaul. AE’s one-suitcase wardrobe contained few duplicates. There was much laundry to be done.

They stayed at the Excelsior Hotel. Amelia’s room looked out over red-tiled roofs to the sea. She sat in the cool breeze from the open window, pulled the chair up closer to the desk, and addressed a letter to GP. She chuckled as she wrote:

“The hotel people naïvely put F.N. and me in the same room. They were surprised when we both countermanded the arrangements!... For a female to be traveling as I do evidently is a matter of puzzlement to her sheltered sisters hereabout, not to mention the males. I’m stared at in the streets. I feel they think, ‘Oh, well, she’s American and they’re all crazy.’”

The city of Fortaleza for Amelia was a remarkable study in contrasts. As she explored and shopped, she stopped to notice the carts and donkeys that clogged the streets along with busses, streetcars, and automobiles; the women carrying loads on their heads, as they walked past up-to-date shops; old decrepit buildings standing next to the most modern examples of architecture; and down along the shore primitive catamaran fishing vessels setting sail, while airplanes roared overhead.

The next day, while the mechanics continued to work on the plane, Amelia and Fred set things in order. They repacked gear, sent used maps, gifts, and souvenirs back home, and washed the cloth covers for the engines and propellers.