by Susan Butler
American women waited nervously, impatiently, proudly, for Amelia to take off. The Oakland airport switchboard was being bombarded with hundreds of calls each day of which at least seventy-five percent were from women, “who seem to feel Miss Earhart is a champion of their sex’s ability to accomplish feats of flying equalling those of any man,” according to C. A. Weaver, who presided over the switchboard.
In the Hawaiian Islands, hundreds of outlying islanders gathered on Oahu to attend the unveiling of a plaque for Amelia that was to take place on her arrival.
The headwinds that had kept the Pan Am Clippers from starting out earlier in the week built up again on Sunday, forcing one Clipper that had finally taken off and was a third of the way to Oahu to turn back. In the face of the adverse weather, Amelia postponed her start by twenty-four hours, to the delight of Oakland airport personnel; for them the extra day and the high winds, which would help dry out the field, were a gift from Providence. Paul Mantz, after driving his car up and down the hard surface apron to test it, had found that the unending drizzle had made it much too soft for the Electra, and airport superintendent G. M. Turner had been working frantically with a crew of men and trucks, scrapers, and a steamroller to fill in the soft spots, afraid Mantz would opt for Mills field across the bay in San Francisco.
At a Monday-morning conference at the Pan Am base on the Bay at Alameda with John A. Riley, the Oakland airport government weather forecaster, and Willis Clover, the chief meteorologist for Pan Am’s Pacific Division, Amelia and Paul learned that the low-pressure areas and adverse winds were still sitting some five hundred miles off the California coast and that Pan Am had grounded their Clippers till Wednesday. They had no choice but to do the same.
By Wednesday, March 17, the winds had finally changed; Pan Am prepared to send off its planes, and Amelia began her final preparations. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and from somewhere Amelia obtained a collection of shamrocks. She pinned one on each member of the Electra flight crew, including herself. “Her husband was similarly decorated by the smiling airwoman,” reported the newspapers. They ate a quick lunch perched on stools at the lunch counter, then Amelia repaired to her room for a short nap. Meanwhile, Bureau of Air Commerce executive William Miller and Superintendent Turner staked out the runway Amelia would use with a series of cardboard placards, placed on alternate sides of the takeoff strip every 150 feet.
The crowd, uncertain about Amelia’s departure time, was down to a more managable five thousand or so. She smiled and waved at the friends who were waving at her from the edge of the runway. She appeared relaxed as always and was dressed “as usual,” wrote Carl Allen, in brown slacks, and a brown, gray, and blue plaid shirt, with a brown linen scarf knotted loosely around her throat and a tan leather jacket.
At 3:13 in the afternoon sunshine broke through, and Captain Dahlstrom piloting the Pan Am Hawaiian Clipper took off. At 4:19 Captain Musick, piloting the Clipper on the survey flight to New Zealand, took off. At 4:36 Amelia was in the air. All three planes were bound for Honolulu. Amelia, of course, was taking off from a muddy field, whereas the Clippers, being seaplanes, took off across the water of the bay.
As Amelia moved down the field, George couldn’t resist bidding her one last farewell; as he approached the plane, Paul throttled down the powerful engines. (It must have been at Amelia’s request, for it was not the kind of thing he would have done on his own.) George climbed up on the wing for some final words with his wife—it was, after all, the last time he expected to see her for a long time. Then he climbed back down and got into William Miller’s car, and they chased behind the plane as it roared down the field. The field was still very wet. As the Electra approached the red flags marking the halfway spot, it was throwing up a wake like a hydroplane. Still, it managed to get off in a little over eighteen hundred feet. Pan Am officials purportedly instructed both Musick, bound by way of Kingman Reef, Pago-Pago, and Samoa, and Dahlstrom, in another Pan Am trans-Pacific Clipper Manila bound by way of Wake, Midway, and Guam, both of whom would also land in Hawaii, to reduce their normal cruising speed by fifteen knots so that Amelia would pass them easily and there would be no speculation about a Pacific “race.” An excellent public relations move, it made Pan American look good and obscured the truth about the planes: that Amelia’s was faster.
Back at the field, Bill Miller sent off the cable containing his carefully detailed notes on the beginning of the flight to naval headquarters, and he alerted all ships along the route as well. Some reporters told George that there was a move in Congress to award a congressional medal to Amelia for her flying achievements. He smiled and expressed his hope that he would receive one too.
20
The Beginning
• • • • The Electra made the passage from Oakland to Honolulu in 15 hours, 47 minutes, setting a new speed record. Amelia flew fifty minutes of every hour; Paul kept track of fuel consumption. Manning worked the 500-kilocycle band—so long, noted Amelia, that he blew out the generator. For the last few hundred miles Noonan and Amelia set their course with the aid of the Bendix radio direction finder: Fred directed Amelia to locate the Makapu beacon with the DF and keep it ten degrees to starboard. It worked like a charm. Eighty miles from Makapu, “Fred says start down.” She turned over the controls to Paul Mantz.
Paul circled the field twice; airport personnel watching the plane feared that the winds were causing trouble. Paul admitted to wrapping the plane around “in a steep bank” in order to check the wind sock. The landing was terrible—so hard, in fact, that the impact weakened the landing gear. Amelia was not happy.
Paul would later tell his biographer that Amelia complained about his landing because she was exhausted, “very fatigued and kind of exuberant,” but it was actually he who was in a high state of bother. He landed the plane without cutting the engines on the ramp, as was expected; instead he taxied into the hangar, thereby leaving the welcoming committee, which included three generals plus a squad of men, waiting in the drizzle, according to First Lieutenant K. A. Popers, Station Engineering Officer at Wheeler field. Paul was actually in such a state that he left the field without giving comprehensive instructions: “Mr. Mantz departed with the rest of the crew with no word whatsoever as to what was to be done to the plane in the way of service and check-over. Mr. Thomas, the Pratt and Whitney engine man for this territory, was present and he and the Engineering officer took it upon themselves to do what is usually done to put an airplane into suitable condition for the continuance of such a flight,” according to army records. Paul flung out as he left that for the last six hours of the flight, the right-hand Hamilton constant speed propeller had been frozen in position. And yet he didn’t bother to mention it in his flight log. He also told them, “insisted,” that the generator had blown because the control box was “out of order,” but the mechanic traced the trouble to a blown fuse—a piece of information Paul should have relayed to Amelia, but never did.
Certainly Amelia exhibited no fatigue. Immediately after they landed she made the photographers who were intent on snapping her with Paul wait until Harry Manning and Fred Noonan were also standing alongside. Then she went off and ate a huge breakfast. “And speaking of breakfast, a bright particular memory ... were the so-fresh scrambled eggs miraculously awaiting us,” she recollected.
Paul and Amelia were not getting along, and within a very short time, Amelia had all but fired him—in her own fashion, which is to say, she referred to him in Last Flight as still being her technical adviser but in fact was consulting him only when it was absolutely necessary. Paul took great pride in being her adviser as well as her business partner; he wasn’t used to such treatment, and from then on he never spoke of Amelia except condescendingly. The wound, the rejection, rankled for the rest of his life, causing him, after she died, to tell a number of untruths about her, denigrating her intelligence and competence, with the aim of inflating his role and his guidance. There is no other explanation for the studied lies and the am
azing male chauvinist tone that exists in his biography—Ruth Nichols called it the last grumblings of a jealous colleague. None of which would be worth mentioning if so many people hadn’t swallowed it whole and used his comments as the basis for an assault on Amelia’s piloting skills.
Amelia went off to Christian and Mona Holmes’s house at Waikiki to rest and to write her story for the Herald Tribune; it appeared next day on the front page. Before she left Oakland, Amelia had given George an estimated flight time; her prediction turned out to be almost on the nose—she was only five minutes off. (After she landed, George sent her a teasing cable, “Please try to be more exact.”)
Army mechanics disassembled the self-adjusting pitch mechanism on the propeller and found that an improper lubricant had been used that had congealed when the Electra had briefly hit icing conditions. Since they didn’t have the necesssary tools at Wheeler to fix the problem, both propellers were removed, and taken to the Hawaiian Air Depot at the navy’s Luke field, where they were worked on through the night. It took hot kerosene to loosen the frozen blades. At two A.M. the propellers were returned to Wheeler and reinstalled on the plane, working perfectly.
Mantz showed up at eleven o’clock accompanied by his fiancée Terry Minor and Christian Holmes, and took off in the Electra with his companions, first announcing that he would land at Luke field to see if the concrete runway there would be better for the final takeoff than Wheeler’s dirt runway. This, of course, seriously affected all the armed forces’ preparations, but responding to the situation, the Luke group operations officer immediately recalled all planes and cleared his field. After landing at Luke, Paul decided its runway was preferable to that at Wheeler and that Amelia should take off from there. He ordered the plane to be gassed up. Then he left, according to government records. Lieutenant Arnold, the Luke depot inspector, was watching as Standard Oil began the refueling, which was being executed as usual through a chamois strainer. The lieutenant immediately noticed “considerable sediment” on the chamois and ordered the gas flow stopped. Military aviation fuel was subsequently used.
By the time the plane was loaded it was after seven P.M. Nine hundred gallons of gasoline were now in the Electra, slightly less than the plane had lofted into the air at Oakland. Even that was more than Amelia needed for an eighteen hundred mile trip; Howland was six hundred miles closer to Honolulu than Oakland, and the Electra had had four hours’ worth of gas left when it landed at Honolulu, but Amelia was simply taking normal precautions; weather patterns could always change, and she wanted enough gasoline aboard to be able to turn around eight hours out “if it became necessary.”
Amelia had called up during the afternoon to say she would either leave at eleven that evening or at dawn. At nine-thirty the decision was made to start at dawn. Depot personnel who remained to work on the plane spent the night on cots in the final assembly hangar at Luke.
At 3:45 A.M. the officer-of-the-day reported with a guard detail of twenty men and established a rope barrier around the plane. Another officer was sent with sixteen men to establish a line of sentries at two-hundred-foot intervals along the west side of the runway and to relight and relocate certain of the lights. Sometime between four and four thirty, Amelia, Paul, Fred, Harry, Chris Holmes, and Terry Minor arrived. It was still dark; Amelia ordered the runway lights on, surveyed the field, and then announced that she would wait till daylight to start. At Howland Island, the coast guard cutter Itasca waited.
At five thirty the motors were started, and Captain Manning and Noonan took their places, and at five forty Amelia taxied out to the northeast end of the runway, preceded by Paul in a car.
As the Electra roared down the runway gathering speed, it swung slightly to the right, whereupon Amelia throttled down the left engine. The plane then started swinging left, and as it did, it tilted outward, throwing all the weight onto the right wheel. Suddenly the right-hand landing gear collapsed, and “The airplane spun sharply to the left sliding on its belly and amid a shower of sparks from the mat and came to rest headed about 200 degrees from its initial course.”
The official crash report described the accident. But the official report did not mention that army aviators thought the wet runway had added to the problem, that after the heavily loaded plane began skidding, it would have been almost impossible to straighten it out.
Amelia immediately shut down the engines, thereby preventing a fire. She would later write that the plane was moving so easily down the runway “that I thought the take-off was actually over. In ten seconds more we would have been off the ground, with our landing gear tucked up and on our way southwestward. There was not the slightest indication of anything abnormal.” She studied the accident, naturally, and listened to the comments of witnesses who said the tire blew, but she thought the fault lay in the landing gear, weakened by Paul’s hard landing. “Possibly the landing gear’s right shock absorber, as it lengthened, may have given way,” she wrote for publication. Her first intimation that something was wrong was when she felt the plane pull to her right: “I reduced the power on the opposite engine and succeeded in swinging from the right to the left. For a moment I thought I would be able to gain control and straighten the course. But, alas, the load was so heavy.”
It was a disaster of the first magnitude—and totally unexpected. All the preparations, all the people, all the hoopla—there was nowhere to hide. The first thing she did was call George.
“It is amazing,” she said later, “how much can happen in one dawn.”
Amelia left the next day at noon aboard the SS Malolo, having given brief statements to reporters that she would resume her flight later. A week later the air force put the plane aboard the SS Lurline; “based on the written request and authorization of Miss Earhart,” its destination was the Lockheed plant at Burbank.
The mechanics at Lockheed found that the right wing, both engine housings, the right-hand rudder, the underside of the fuselage, and both propellers were seriously damaged. The oil tanks ruptured. In the process of repairing the plane Lockheed strengthened the landing gear—tacit acknowledgement that a full load of gasoline subjected it to “excessive” strain.
The accident was such a stunner that many just couldn’t cope with it, least of all Amelia and George. Back in California, they were faced not just with the fact of the accident, as unsettling as that was, but with the incidental expenses, which were huge. Six mechanics were on the verge of setting out for various parts of the world to service the plane, at least one had left; their travel expenses and salaries had to be paid. Then arrangements had to be made to safeguard the supplies and the fuel that were in place. Then the Air Corps demanded that George pay $1,086 to the Hawaiian Air Depot as payment for the materials used in the overhauling, repairing, and preparing for shipment of the plane. Then there was the cost of transporting the damaged plane back to Lockheed, and the cost of the steamship tickets for Amelia, Harry Manning, and Fred Noonan. And there was the plane itself; Lockheed’s bill came to $14,000.
Amelia and George needed help to get back on track; they went to Harry Bruno, pilot and public relations adviser—a genius at raising money. Harry had been Charles Lindbergh’s press agent in 1927 and had gone on to represent everyone in the flying world from Anthony Fokker to Richard Byrd.
Amelia visited him first, and told him how sorry she was that the accident had happened “because she thought it would mean a lot to aviation.” The next day George went to see Harry and asked him to help raise money, which Harry quickly did—$20,000 from Vincent Bendix and $10,000 from Floyd Odlum. That kept the project alive.
“On the prosaic dollar-and-cent side friends helped generously, but even so, to keep going I more-or-less mortgaged the future. Without regret, however, for what are futures for?” wrote Amelia in Last Flight. It was charmingly put, but still, it was one of the rare times when she talked about money. She dedicated her book to Floyd Odlum, who opened his deep pockets to her; he, too, wanted to keep the project alive.
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br /> Then Harry Manning pulled out, for the repairs would take till mid-May and he had to get back to work. Rumors had it that Amelia was relieved. She took to spending hours every day at the Lockheed plant, keeping herself “busier than ever before.” She had again started working with Kelly Johnson, getting his take on the causes of ground looping and working to get the most out of the Cambridge analyzer, which was so crucial to fuel consumption.
Then she made a big change in plans: she decided to fly east around the world instead of west. The reasons were several. First, if she proceeded west, the delay meant she would reach the Caribbean and Africa—the last leg as planned—at the start of the monsoon season, but if she reversed, she could fly through before they started. Second, changing direction would afford her the luxury of flight-testing the plane as she flew from Oakland to Miami, the revised jumping-off place, thereby saving the time of running such tests in California. And a third, a huge advantage, she would be flying around the world with the prevailing winds instead of against. Many pilots agreed that this route was more sensible, but the change also meant that she would be taking the most difficult navigational stretch—the long Pacific hop to tiny Howland Island—at the end instead of the beginning. But that meant another adjustment: Fred Noonan had to be along for the entire flight, for to fly the Pacific and hit such a small island required celestial navigation, and it wasn’t possible to pilot and take sun and star sights at the same time. Nor was she trained to do it.
Paul Mantz was not consulted.
She sent off mementos: to Gore, the blue-and-white-checked leather belt he had often seen her wear; to Gene, her old watch. She sent the flight coat in which she had flown the Atlantic, plus a fine buffalo coat that William Hart had given her and other personal belongings to Carl Dunrud to store for her. She attached a note to the buffalo coat: “To you Carl. I know of no one that can put this to better use than you.”
