by Susan Butler
On March 13 Pan American announced the imminent opening of its aerial service to New Zealand. The Pan Am plan was to fly from San Francisco to New Zealand in four travel days. Captain Musick was poised to make the first survey flight over the seven-thousand-mile route in one of the new Sikorsky Clippers, to check out weather patterns, seaplane landing facilities, and the new direction finders. He also had to see if the refueling station—actually a six-thousand-ton motor ship, the North Wind, anchored next to the coral outcropping of tiny Kingman Reef—would do to fuel, provision, and service the seaplanes. Pan Am was also surveying and planning to begin a run from someplace on the East Coast to Bermuda, as well as airmail service from Manila to Hong Kong. Captain Musick was twiddling his thumbs at Alameda waiting for the weather to break so he could set off across the Pacific on the first leg of the trip to New Zealand. To Gene and the others, it seemed like the perfect time to challenge Juan Trippe and his still-nascent airline with some heavyweight competition.
Amelia had been practicing blind flying with Paul Mantz, who had equipped his flying school with a Link trainer—an earthbound zero-view cockpit that simulated blind flying. On the thirteenth an Air Commerce inspector tested her blind flying skills and passed her after flying with her in the Electra for an hour with the cockpit covered. “She can do it,” he said as he stepped from the plane. Someone asked Amelia if she had been scared. “Scared?” she repeated. “No just thrilled.”
George didn’t like Paul Mantz; the feeling was returned. Paul thought he was “a boor,” while George treated him quite casually. Paul was, nevertheless, Amelia’s hundred-dollar-a-day technical adviser, and perforce they got along. Indeed, Paul had flown George from Los Angeles to Oakland and back in the Electra so he could observe the various instruments and the Bendix direction finder in action. He had worked out the installation of fuel tanks and helped with the design of the instrument panel, as well as advising which instruments should be installed; he had also suggested other special gear Amelia would need. (On the other hand, he suggested that the Electra be painted orange or red—a suggestion that Amelia simply ignored, as she disregarded George’s thought that the plane should sport Purdue’s colors. Its aluminum skin remained gleamingly unpainted, except for black, orange, and red stripes painted on the backs of the wings to increase visibility.) In his capacity as Amelia’s advisor, Paul himself had needed help: he enlisted the aid of Amelia’s old friend Clarence Belinn, still working for Paul Collins and the Boston-Maine Airways in Boston, who was an authority on debugging gasoline tank cross-feed problems and laying out auxiliary gas tanks, to help him plan the Electra’s tank configuration. He went to Kelly Johnson at Lockheed, the young engineering genius who translated all the plans into actuality. Kelly, although Paul didn’t admit it, instructed Amelia on the use of wingflaps on takeoff. Kelly would say, “She was very sensible, very studious, and paid attention to what she was told.” She didn’t drive him crazy cross-checking on every single thing, the way his neighbor Laura Ingalls did.
The Electra cockpit was four feet eight inches high, four feet six inches wide, and four feet six inches fore and aft, with dual controls and two seats. Amelia had found that having to observe instruments on an angle, out of her line of vision, was a large factor in eye fatigue, particularly at night. So the instrument panel had been planned with particular care: there were some fifty dials and gauges altogether, but the most important and most often used were placed directly in front of Amelia’s eyes. There were two groups of instruments, those having to do with the engines (duplicated for each one) and the flight and navigation instruments. The flight instruments included turn and bank indicators, rate of climb, air speed, and artificial horizon. The navigation instruments included two magnetic compasses, directional gyros, the Bendix radio direction finder, the Western Electric radio, and the cuplike microphone that hung beside the window to the left of her head, which transmitted at 500, 3105, and 6210. Amelia planned to broadcast on 3105 and 6210. As far as Harry Manning was concerned, however, the 500-kilocycle band, the standard frequency used by ships, was “the most important of the frequencies ... because ships at sea and shore stations operating in code on this wave length [would] be practically his sole source of radio assistance after leaving Honolulu.” In the center of the instrument panel was the Sperry gyro pilot.
The navigator’s station was in the rear of the plane, behind the six fuel tanks, on the right side of the plane, adjacent to the aftermost window. A window had been added in the cabin ceiling, and the normal windows had been replaced with panes of flat, distortion-free glass so that the navigator could take star sights through them also. The chart table was wide and low, about eighteen inches off the floor. Beneath it under a glass inset was visible the face of a master aperiodic compass. Next to the table was an altimeter, an air speed indicator, and a temperature gauge. A Pioneer drift indicator, which measured the direction and distance of markers dropped into the sea to indicate wind direction, had been installed in the rear, near the navigator’s station, in the cabin door, which by an ingenious arrangement could be held open four inches. The markers were presumably similar to the ones Pan Am used: by day, when the sky was clear and the sea visible, thin glass jars filled with aluminum powder that when dropped into the water burst upon impact, creating twenty-foot-long metallic spots. By night, canisters of acetylene gas were dropped—which ignited as they hit the sea. Communication between navigator and pilot was via a cut-down bamboo fishing pole; a paper clip at its end held cards upon which messages were written. There was also a catwalk over the tanks connecting the cabin to the cockpit, providing awkward but adequate access.
Amelia and George and Harry had daily conferences with Pan Am meteorologist John Riley, Paul Mantz, and Willis Clover, the Oakland airport weather forecaster, as well as William Miller. G. M. Turner, superintendent of the Oakland airfield, who was personally supervising the arrangements to make sure everything went perfectly, was also usually present.
First-day covers were all the rage and not just among stamp collectors. When the China Clipper made the first transpacific airmail flight the year before, the public went wild, buying a record 277,728 of the new twenty-five-cent airmail stamps the first day. Because demand was so great, to help pay for the flight, Amelia signed as many of the coveted covers as she could. George had provided for ten thousand in all—and each cover that was signed meant five dollars, twice the amount of an unsigned cover. The stamps were to go on sale at Gimbel’s in New York, so the more Amelia signed, the more money it meant. But either signing the covers was a last-minute thought or they were late being delivered, because days before her planned liftoff, there were still a mountain of them to be done; as Amelia and George took their meals in the airport restaurant, usually with Carl Allen in attendance, between courses Amelia signed her name in the upper-left-hand corner of each envelope. In fact, according to Carl Allen, she and George had it down to a system: in the morning ten autographs before orange juice, fifteen before the bacon and eggs, then a few more in any spare moments, then twenty-five before she turned in at night. “She and Putnam exchanged conspiratory grins as though they were letting me in on an amusing secret,” wrote Allen much later, when he began to blame George for everything. “Their little joke, if that was what was intended to be, had all the sprightliness of the proverbial lead balloon.” But as he noted at the time, “as she writes she carries on conversations about her forthcoming flight or on any other topic with complete detachment from what her hands are doing.” It was undoubtedly the most effortless but the most boring task extant. Signing all ten thousand would have taken her something on the order of sixteen hours, but writing ten signatures before orange juice took just one minute. In spite of the covers, noted Carl Allen, Amelia was as patient as ever with autograph seekers who broke through George’s interference—“she hardly ever refuses a signature once someone reaches her side.” George, on the other hand, was succumbing to the pressure and was decidedly impatient. Just as Jake
Coolidge had found George “irascible” in the final days in Boston before the Friendship took off, so now Allen found him hard to take. Allen himself was there taking meals with them and staying at the inn because George had sold the rights to the round-the-world voyage to the Tribune, knowing that Allen was the one reporter whom Amelia thoroughly enjoyed having around and also that Allen was an excellent observer as well as a first-rate writer. “He was good company, never preyed on her nerves with importunate questions, never waved any deadlines in front of her, often had suggestions to contribute out of his excellent knowledge of aviation,” wrote George, not having the slightest idea what a huge role Allen had played in Amelia’s decision to marry him.
Pan American’s Pacific Division head, Clarence Young, was also working with Amelia. The previous January, when Pan Am had inaugurated service from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, she had lent her presence to the event. Now Juan Trippe ordered Pan Am personnel to put every facility that Pan Am possessed, as well as every bit of weather information they collected, at Amelia’s disposal for the duration of her flight. It was hoped, wrote Allen, that the Pan Am long-range direction finders could track her as far as Port Darwin. To this end Pan Am personnel had been instructed to stand watch twenty-four hours a day while Amelia flew the Pacific. Manning, meanwhile, was more intent on working the standard steamship radio channel of 500 kilocycles, which would enable him to communicate with ships at sea and most of the shore radio stations, including the coast guard radio station near San Francisco. He planned to rely on it almost exclusively.
On Friday Paul Mantz took Manning up for a last-minute radio check, but Manning was “perturbed” to find that he could not raise the San Francisco coast guard station on the 500-kilocycle frequency. The other two frequencies, 3105 and 6210, worked perfectly, but Manning was only interested in the 500-kilocycle band. A radio expert was summoned.
On Saturday Amelia and Mantz and Manning took the plane up for a two-hour radio and compass check and flew almost a hundred miles out to sea; the radio equipment and the direction finder worked perfectly. “All were in high spirits when they landed,” according to Carl Allen.
Before she left Burbank, Amelia had also been working with Kelly Johnson ofLockheed. He was a hands-on engineer, who believed in flight-testing all his “babies.” Only twenty-seven, he had already worked with all the great pilots—Jimmy Doolittle, Wiley Post, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, and Roscoe Turner. Amelia learned from him to master a device called a Cambridge analyzer, which by analyzing exhaust gas allowed the most efficient use of fuel: “You used it repeatedly, resetting mixture control and leaning out engine fuel to get maximum miles per gallon.” Flying together, he and Amelia worked out the absolute maximum mileage that could be gotten from the plane. She was as thorough as he, according to Kelly: “The two of us, she as pilot and I as flight engineer, would fly her Electra with different weights, different balance conditions, different engine power settings, different altitudes.” Kelly listed distance, fuel loads, and gross weight for each leg of the flight, and from them Amelia knew that she could add one or even two people for the California-to-Honolulu segment.
If she had worked well with Kelly Johnson, she was beginning to have doubts about Harry Manning’s ability. As she told Carl Allen, Manning said that the double duty of acting as navigator and radio operator “imposed a greater physical strain than any one man should be expected to stand.” This factor was accentuated when it was decided that the “flying laboratory” should send out periodic signals as focal points for Pan American Airways’ long-range direction finders, since this arrangement and the necessity of receiving the position fix radioed back by the airline’s operators added still another job to the already overworked Captain Manning’s list of activities.
“Miss Earhart said,” he continued, “that with Captain Manning trying to do the work of a radio operator and navigator it kept him ‘jumping around all the time.’ ”
Knowing she had no weight problems, she decided to add another navigator, Fred Noonan.
Pan Am navigators were regarded with respect by everyone in the flying world. They were the best, so good that a few years later, when the U.S. Air Corps decided to teach its cadets serious navigation, it sent them to Pan Am’s facility in Coral Gables, Florida, to learn. Now it was announced that Pan Am’s Fred Noonan would be relief navigator as far as Howland Island.
A tall dark Irishman, Noonan had started out a sailor, had rounded Cape Horn three times on a windjammer, and four times on a steamship, and was torpedoed three times while in the Royal British Naval Service in World War I. He became a transport pilot with New York Rio and Buenos Aires Airlines, flying from New York to Buenos Aires.
When Pan Am bought NYBRA, it moved Fred to Alameda, California, the Pan Am headquarters and jumping-offplace for the new China Clippers, with which Pan Am was about to span the Pacific. The company put Noonan in charge of its navigation school. He was the navigator on the epochal first flight of the China Clipper. The planning and execution of the flight were virtually flawless; everything went like clockwork, not only on that first flight but on all the ones that followed. By the end of 1936, Noonan had made eighteen air crossings of the Pacific. According to Page Smith, one of the youngest, at twenty-three, pilots working for Pan American, he was regarded by all the Clipper personnel with awe—they thought him the world’s top celestial navigator.
But something went wrong in his life; he had started to drink—and Pan Am let him go. Since the circle of fliers in those years was so small, “everyone” knew about it. Amelia certainly knew about it; Clara Livingston, a member of the Ninety-Nines, a pilot and a friend with whom she and Fred would later stay with in Puerto Rico, “didn’t think he was a great risk” as Amelia’s navigator. “He was a pleasant person, you know.... He had tried so hard to reform.” Not everyone was convinced that he had succeeded. Gene Vidal thought that including Fred Noonan on Amelia’s flight was a great mistake, and he told her so. She then asked Gene to go in his place, but Gene demurred on the grounds that he wasn’t a good enough navigator.
Pan Am pilots, who presumably knew what they were talking about, believed that although Noonan “might have missed a trip or something,” he never drank on the job. It was planned that he would leave the flight at Howland, having done the “lion’s share” of navigating up to that point, letting Manning mainly concern himself with operating the radio. But he had had an automobile accident in the recent past. Amelia wasn’t bothered by this knowledge; she knew that he was in the process of changing his life, that he and his first wife had gotten divorced just that spring, and that he had a new, serious lady friend.
Once Noonan had signed on, he made one request: for an octant to shoot the sun and stars—it was his principal tool. Amelia asked the naval station at San Diego to loan her one. “Amelia Earhart urgently requests air station loan Navy octant for projected trans Atlantic flight and shipment air express to Oakland immediately,” they cabled Washington. Clearance was granted on Tuesday, March 16, by the secretary of the navy.
Amelia hadn’t any thought of bringing Paul Mantz to check things out in Honolulu, but there he was sitting it out with her in California because of the weather, and at the last minute he asked to come—to help her out, he said, but also to join his fiancée, Terry, who was on her way by boat to Hawaii. Amelia could hardly refuse. He could be co-pilot for the first overnight flight, allowing her to rest and be fresh for the difficult Honolulu—Howland passage, and he could be counted on, as Carl Allen noted, “to assume complete responsibility for preparing the ‘flying laboratory’ for the next stage of the trans-Pacific flight.” Obviously Allen thought including Mantz was a splendid idea, or he wouldn’t have mentioned it. In light of later developments, it is instructive to make particular note of Allen’s thoughts. Amelia made a similar assessment: “By the end of this first long hop any incipient mechanical troubles should show up. It will be fine to have him on hand for a final check before I shove off westward
.”
Government vessels were on the move. Richard B. Black, of the Department of the Interior, was aboard the coast guard cutter Shoshone at Howland Island and reported that the three runways there were ready and waiting. The navy minesweeper Whippoorwill was steaming into position between Honolulu and Howland Island; the navy tug Ontario was moving into position between Howland and Lae, New Guinea.
In hopes that a Sunday takeoff might be possible, loading began. Between two and three hundred pounds of equipment was weighed and stowed in the plane as Amelia watched and made mental notes so that she would be able to locate anything without effort. Five vacuum bottles for hot drinks, water canteens, a desert waterbag for keeping water cool in hot climates, a life preserver for each person, a rubber life raft with oars and a kite sail (which could serve as an emergency radio antenna), more chocolate bars, raisins, canned tomato juice, standard army emergency rations, fishing tackle, a hand-operated battery charger for use if the motor-driven generator failed, a spare tail wheel, and the small package of “no-fog” that she was supposed to test for its ability to dissipate fog (which Fred Noonan would eventually make her get rid of).
All the activity heightened the tension and public’s interest. A crowd estimated at nearly ten thousand camped behind the steel fence near the navy hangar that housed her plane.
