by Susan Butler
Neta would never forget her first glimpse of Amelia. On a hot December day in 1920, as she was about to climb into her Canuck to give a lesson, she saw a tall, slender young woman approach, accompanied by an elderly man.
She was wearing a brown suit, plain but a good cut. Her hair was braided and neatly coiled around her head; there was a light scarf around her neck and she carried gloves. She would have stood out in any crowd and she reminded me of the well-groomed and cultured young ladies at the Frances Shimer Academy back in Mount Carroll, Illinois, my childhood home.
The gentleman with her was slightly gray at the temples and wore a blue serge business suit.
“I’m Amelia Earhart and this is my father. I see you are busy, but could I have a few words with you?”
She stated her objective, which Neta remembered because she put it so succinctly: “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” The meeting was mutually agreeable, and the first lesson was scheduled. There was a problem—Amelia’s lack of funds—but it was solved when Neta agreed to take payments when Amelia found the money, “so in a few days I began hopping about on credit with her.”
Neta and Amelia had much in common. They were both from the Midwest, had both attended college (Neta had gone to Iowa State University), and were near the same age (Neta was a year older). Of even more significance, both were elder daughters in families that consisted of two girls only, and both had fathers who approved of and fostered their early childhood activist ways.
It seemed like a perfect pairing, and for a while it was, but they were miles apart in terms of character and personality. Neta was much more single-minded about flying than Amelia. In the middle of her sophomore year at the university, she had suddenly quit to enroll in a flying school nearby. When the school abruptly folded, she was broke, but instead of throwing in the towel and returning home, she walked, hitchhiked, and hopped freight trains across the country to Newport News, Virginia, where the famous Curtiss School of Aviation was located, and talked her way into the all-male program. The United States entered World War I, and Curtiss was forced to shut down before Neta had a chance to solo. After the armistice, Neta bought an old wrecked plane, the Canadian version of the Curtiss JN4 called a Canuck. She brought it to her home in Ames, Iowa, and using the knowledge of plane construction she had gained in the flying schools, where students had first had to build the planes they would fly, she rebuilt it in the backyard. She had never soloed, but when she finished, she took the Canuck up for a trial spin. She wasn’t worried about herself, only about her plane because, as she explained, “I knew I could fly.”
Kinner Airport was a large tract of weeds and grass rimmed by truck gardens in what was then farm country south of Los Angeles. It was reasonably accessible from the city—an electric streetcar ran partway out, leaving only the last few miles, to the intersection of Tweedy Road and Long Beach Boulevard, to be covered on foot or by car. It was a sleepy place, as laid back as a flying field could be. There was only one building—a hangar big enough to hold three planes. A wind sock flew from the roof.
Neta had been at Kinner field for several months by the time Amelia arrived on the scene. The owner was Bert Kinner, a tall, slightly stooped forty-year-old with friendly black eyes and a mop of ragged black hair who spent all his time in the hangar working on a revolutionary new sport plane. Neta did aerial advertising (at one point she had “Wilshire Gasoline” painted in big letters on the bottom of the Canuck’s lower wings), gave lessons, and conducted aerial tours of the neighboring towns of Santa Ana, Corona, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Pasadena, which she grandly publicized as “The Orange Empire Air Voyage.”
On the day of her lesson Amelia arrived at Kinner field dressed in brown jodhpurs, laced boots reaching to midcalf, and jacket. She hadn’t bought it recently, as Neta would learn; it was her riding outfit. The date was January 3, 1921. Amelia, ever the student, ever the library ferret, arrived on that day with a book on aerodynamics tucked under her arm. That book and the many others that followed became the basis for endless discussions between the two women.
Amelia had a splendid time with Neta. In these early golden moments, before anyone she knew was killed, nothing went wrong. There was just the experience of mastery of a new element, the glorious sense of power, and the freedom.
Amelia’s flying outfit was either jodhpurs or slacks, for since planes of the day had no doors, access was via the top—the flier climbed up the side, swung a leg over, and then dropped into the open cockpit. To get into Neta’s Canadian Jenny—every plane, including the one Amelia would shortly buy—meant doing a giant leg stretch, bracing the lower leg against an indented toehold and swinging the upper leg into the cockpit. Since male pilots the world over wore the uniform of the cavalry—breeches and high boots—women adopted it too, rather than simple slacks. Those few who wore dresses did so at their peril.
Amelia had always been acutely aware of her own attributes—and self-conscious about her drawbacks. She was rather vain of her hands, which were beautiful, with long tapering fingers. She didn’t mind her blond hair, except that it was straight and needed constant curling. But she knew she had a problem—she had been aware of it at a very young age: her legs. They were long but far from shapely. The problem specifically was her fat ankles. Her observant cousin Katch Challiss thought she showed great objectivity, that she was quite right not to like her legs, that because of her thick ankles her legs “seemed to be the same all the way down.” Piano legs, they are sometimes called.
Pants were a godsend. With her long legs, she looked superb in pants, and she knew it. In pants she walked unselfconsciously with a graceful, loose-jointed stride, and as a pilot, she had a legitimate reason to wear them. So she seized the chance to wear first the breeks, as breeches were called, and boots and then, as flying styles evolved and “piloting clothes” changed, ordinary trousers, until pants—beautifully tailored—became her signature outfit.
She also knew she would look well in the new shingle haircut suddenly all the rage, but she was afraid the combination of short hair and pants would take her over the edge and that, like Neta, she might look—the word she used—“eccentric.”
She didn’t want Waldo Waterman, pilot and airplane designer on the local scene whom she liked, or any of his friends, to class her with Neta, whom they thought looked just awful. “We were not quite sure as to whether ‘Snooky’ was a man or woman, as few of us ever saw her except in a pair of dirty coveralls, her reddish hair closely cropped, and her freckled face usually made up with the assistance of airport dust and a dash of grease,” Waldo observed. Amelia took a great deal of pride in her appearance, and indeed even Neta thought her friend dressed much better than she, writing that the jacket and breeches she wore made “a beautifully tailored outfit.” Amelia was very hesitant about bobbing her hair. It wasn’t until after a little girl said to her that she didn’t look like an aviatrix because her hair was too long that she finally, irrevocably, cut it short. After that, she would carefully curl her tousled blond “bob,” which looked so natural, no one thought she ever touched it. And she managed to gain even Waldo Waterman’s approval. In contrast to Neta, he wrote approvingly, when Amelia was dressed for flying in riding breeches and boots, she still “looked thoroughly feminine.”
The Canuck had two open cockpits. In each was a duplicate set of controls, consisting of a rudder bar and a stick. Neta, as the instructor, sat in the rear cockpit, and whatever she did in the way of steering was duplicated in the forward seat, where Amelia sat. The rudder bar, manipulated by the feet, turned the plane in the same direction in which it was depressed, and the stick, a lever that rose from the floor, made the plane dive when pushed forward, climb when pulled back, and depress the wing when pushed to the side.
As she began her lessons, what always stuck in Amelia’s mind was how hard it was to make the plane fly level. It was a problem encountered by many student pilots no matter what sort of plane they flew, but it was worse in the Canuck, which h
ad a peculiar tendency—a marked tendency, admitted the Curtiss company—“to nose down on a right-hand turn and to climb on a left one.”
The Canuck was a biplane (two sets of wings) with a maximum speed of seventy-five miles per hour and a landing speed of about forty-five. Although it was slightly lighter and faster than the Curtiss Jenny that was the standard-issue plane Glenn Curtiss had developed for the U.S. Army—and had a more rounded rudder and double ailerons—it was basically the same plane. Neta’s had the engine standard to both, the 90-horsepower, eight-cylinder, water-cooled OX-5. The skin of the plane was linen panels that were sewn together, stretched, and tacked onto the frame, then painted with cellulose dope that shrank the fabric to a drumlike tension and made it waterproof. The plane had no gas gauge, no brakes, and no rear wheel. A tail sked, in place of a rear wheel, dragged on the ground and eventually slowed the plane to a stop. Like all Canucks, Neta’s was notoriously slow to climb and, underpowered, couldn’t go very high.
It rained mightily at the beginning of 1921: seven inches fell the first six weeks, more than usually fell on Los Angeles in the whole year, and as a result, many of Amelia’s lessons had to be canceled. By the end of February she had managed to log only four hours in the Canuck. It was enough time for her to realize she didn’t like it.
Amelia had her eye on the little plane Bert Kinner was still tinkering with in the hangar. Bert was a mechanical and aeronautical engineer who had honed his skills building custom bodies for Model T Fords before getting bitten by the flying bug. In 1919 he formed the Kinner Airplane and Motor Corporation, bought a 230-acre field on Long Beach Boulevard near Lynwood at Tweedy Road, and taught himself how to fly. He planned to build a line of sport planes—light, maneuverable, small enough to fit in a garage, and financially within everyone’s reach. The first prototype, built with the help of his wife Cora, who ran the office and had charge of the sewing, was ready in May 1920, in time to be included in the Industrial Parade in Los Angeles—although it was pulled through the streets on a flatbed truck rather than proceeding under its own power, as most of the other planes did. By June he had worked out the serious bugs and was in business, giving lessons and demonstrations.
The Aero Club of Southern California had scheduled and publicized a “free for all” at the Beverly Hills Speedway for Sunday, February 27, 1921. “Speed kings of the board bowl will vie with pilots of dashing airplanes in endeavoring to throw a few extra thrills into the pop-eyed populace,” ran the teaser in the newspaper. The Washington’s Birthday extravaganza of racing cars and racing planes drew thousands to see the exciting events. A 250-mile nonstop race from Los Angeles to San Diego and back—canceled at the last minute because of fog—and three sprints where the planes circled the grandstand drew the then-unprecedented number of thirty-two civilian entries. The civilian fliers felt they had finally come of age; it was the first time since the war that a large air-racing event had not been dominated by the military fliers.
Bert Kinner entered and flew the Airster, as he called his new plane, in one of the thirty-six mile sprints, racing against the pros—Emery Rogers, Frank Hawks, and Earl Daugherty the latter of whom won, with an average speed of 104 miles an hour. Bert dropped out after the fifth lap, presumably because of engine trouble, but the Airster performed creditably, and he had the satisfaction of having the air world know that Kinner was a name to contend with. Amelia was impressed. She had been absorbedly watching the plane even as she “cut her aviation teeth” at Kinner field. It hadn’t taken her long to see that it took off more quickly, climbed more steeply, and was faster and easier to handle than planes with greater wing spread and more powerful engines. Now she had seen it hold its own even when matched against the best. She wanted it desperately.
In the summer of 1921, for her twenty-fourth birthday, Amelia managed to buy the little plane, with help from her parents, going against the advice of Neta and other experienced pilots. She was more than pleased with her purchase—she was thrilled. The plane responded so perfectly that she bonded to it like a pet, as her mother noticed. “It was like a favorite pony. We said goodnight to it and patted its nose and almost fed it apples.”
It must be taken as a mark of Amy and Edwin’s high regard for Amelia and of their respect for her decisions that they were so supportive of her desire to fly and of her choice of the Airster—for flying was a very expensive sport, and the Kinner Airster a very expensive plane. Following World War I, such a large pool of surplus planes had been dumped on the market that a plane in reasonable condition—aJN4-D (Jenny) or a Canuck—could be bought for less than $1,000. In comparison, Amelia’s Airster cost $2,000. So when she talked her parents into helping her finance flying, it was perilously close to an impecunious young man falling in love with polo and getting his family to help him purchase a string of the best polo ponies.
As her contribution, Amelia took the first paying job of her life, becoming a back-office mail and file clerk with the telephone company, a job she kept for several years. A clerk’s salary didn’t begin to cover the expenses she was incurring, but the small dent it made was enough to win Amy to her daughter’s side. Convinced of the soundness of Amelia’s motives and her seriousness, she agreed to pay for the Airster: “It ... affected mother to the extent that she finally wiped out my indebtedness, on condition I resign and stay home a little,” Amelia later wrote.
The Kinner Airster was a biplane, as was the Canuck, but it was smaller, with a wingspan of 27 feet, as opposed to the Canuck’s 44; it was 19 feet long, as compared with the Canuck’s 27; and in spite of the fact that it had a sturdier exterior than the Canuck, with a fuselage of three-ply mahogany instead of fabric, it weighed only 600 pounds, as compared with the Canuck’s 1,430. The Airster was, in fact, so light and so well balanced that Amelia could pick it up by its tail and easily move it anywhere she wanted. As for performance, the Canuck didn’t even come close. The Airster with two passengers had a range of 200 miles compared with the Canuck’s 100 miles, and a top speed of 90 mph as compared with 75; and it could fly as high as 13,000 feet, where the Canuck topped out at 10,000. It was a swallow compared with a turkey.
The main reason the Airster was so light was that it was driven by an air-cooled engine, one of the first developed in the United States. Amelia, who loved beautiful things (horses, cars, or airplanes) loved the simplicity, the elegance, the very conception of the air-cooled motor, which, substituting for the water-cooling system, made the craft pounds lighter, enabling Bert Kinner to realize his dream of a small light plane.
The designer of the engine was Charles Lawrance, a brilliant aircraft engineer who had graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Yale and was one of the first to see the possibilities of using air instead of water as the engine coolant. He founded the Lawrance Aero Engineering Corporation in a modest Manhattan factory and began to build small air-cooled motors. When World War I started, he enlisted in the navy, where he did further aeronautical engine research, and following the armistice, he began turning out the light, efficient two- and three-cylinder engines that would shortly make him famous. One of his first air-cooled models, revolutionary but still, with a solid six years of experimentation behind it, not untried—a 60-horsepower, three-cylinder engine weighing a mere 149 pounds—was the model Bert Kinner ended up buying to power his first plane.
Lawrance would go on developing and refining increasingly powerful air-cooled engines and within a few years would be acknowledged as the foremost designer of aircraft motors in the country. In 1923 he would fold Lawrance Aero Engineering into the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, of which he would become president, and would shortly be turning out the big air-cooled Wright Whirlwind engines that would power Commander Byrd’s plane to the north pole in 1926 and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic in 1927, as well as all the famous Fokkers, including the Friendship, that would catapult Amelia to fame. In 1928 he would win the Collier trophy, and in 1929 a Wright Whirlwind engine would power th
e plane with which William Brock and Edward Schlee set the world’s endurance record of 150 hours in the air.
But in the winter of 1920-21 an air-cooled engine was such a startlingly radical concept that Neta and others tried to persuade Amelia not to buy it. Neta thought Amelia had had her head turned, having been beguiled because the plane was, as Neta grudgingly admitted, “the prettiest plane we had ever seen.” Neither she nor many of the other pilots had the vision to realize they were looking at the future. Neta was supposed to have been Kinner’s test pilot, but when the moment came for her to fly her first Kinner, she was scared. “I remember thinking, ‘The field is long. I can set it down again if I don’t feel it’s airworthy.’ ” She never lost her feeling of unease. In fact, by her own admission, she flew the Airster only “a few times.” She didn’t like the way it handled; she thought her Canuck, the training ship for a generation of fighters, was dangerous enough. Among other things, she complained, the third cylinder “periodically became clogged.” The real reason was that the Airster was tougher to land than the Canuck because it came in at a faster speed, and was easier to ground-loop because it had a wheel tread of only five feet; it couldn’t be banked as easily, and all in all, complained Neta, “it didn’t have the stability.” So scary did Neta find the plane that when she reconstructed those days in her autobiography, she retroactively and totally inaccurately shrank the Airster’s wingspread from twenty-seven feet to seventeen.
Will Rogers’s definition of an airfield was “a tract of land completely surrounded by high tension wires and high chimneys, adjacent to a cemetery.” The Kinner field almost qualified; it had two sets of high-tension wires on its eastern perimeter. Since the landing field had to be approached from the east because of the prevailing winds, the wires inevitably had to be crossed. Amelia liked to come in high in the little Airster, then drop down and fly between the two sets of wires; she did it quite often. The two wires were close—to Neta’s mind’s eye there was about eight feet between them. It drove Neta crazy with fear. Amelia gave her some soothing explanation about daydreaming and said she wouldn’t do it anymore; Neta accepted the explanation at face value.
