by Susan Butler
On the way home from the army-navy game at West Point with Gene and Gore the previous fall, she had talked about her round-the-world flight. Gore had asked her what part of the flight most worried her. “Africa,” she had answered. “If you got forced down in those jungles, they’d never find you.” At that point Amelia was envisaging a solo flight across Africa, having dropped her navigator after landing in Australia and being alone above the jungle. Gore and his father each responded with worries about the Pacific. Amelia, though, planning to have a navigator aboard on that leg and in love with Gene, answered “Oh, there are always islands,” then continued, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just go off and live on a desert island?” Marooned on an island, she added, she could finally write the two books she had in mind. One, based on learning at Denison House that sometimes parents got it all wrong, was going to be about bringing up children; the other one—she had an aversion to bankers—would be on the capitalist system. Gene was quite dubious, according to Gore. “Then,” Gore remembered, “they discussedjust how you could survive; and what would you do if there was no water? and if there was no water, you would have to make a sunstill and extract salt from sea water and how was that done?” So there was no doubt such thoughts were in her head.
Carl Allen thought the flight was a dangerous undertaking. It wasn’t that she wasn’t well prepared or skillful enough, he told her when she asked him what he thought her chances were. She was as well prepared as anyone, and her flying equipment just as good. Still, he answered, he thought her chances of completing the flight successfully were fifty-fifty. She replied:
I hope your guess is a good one ... No one really could expect better chances on such a flight. Actually, I’m not worried about the percentages except for my navigator. As far as I know, I’ve got only one obsession—a small and probably typical feminine horror of growing old—so I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back.
She never talked about God. Once she was asked by another pilot, who admitted to praying “like crazy” when she was in a tough spot, if she ever prayed in like circumstances. “No-o-o I don’t believe so,” Amelia replied slowly, a ghost of a smile flickering across her face. “I guess I think it would be a little unsportsmanlike, to wait and only send God a hurry call when I was in a jam.”
On Thursday, May 21, 1937, at 3:50 P.M., ten years and one day after Charles Lindbergh had taken off on his solo flight across the Atlantic, five years and one day from the time Amelia had taken off on hers, Amelia lifted her Lockheed Electra off the runway of the airfield in Oakland, and officially began her flight around the world. The sky was clear and the temperature was mild as she winged her way toward Tucson.
A key player—Bill Miller of the Bureau of Air Commerce—was no longer working with Amelia. His absence was not Amelia’s choice, however: Gene Vidal was no longer head of the Bureau of Air Commerce, and Bill had been sent off on another assignment. Nor was Paul Mantz with her; he was in St. Louis, flying competition acrobatics. He hadn’t even known she was going to start. He was furious he hadn’t been in on the plans and called it a “sneak departure.”
Because the plane had just come out of the Lockheed plant in Burbank, Amelia was able to get away with calling what was her first leg a “shakedown” flight and keep all publicity to a minimum, much more in keeping with all her earlier flights. With her were George, Fred Noonan, and Bo McKneeley, flight mechanic; the plan was to fly eastward cross-country and if all went well, if they could shake out all the bugs, to take off from Miami for the first transoceanic leg. And bugs there were: after landing in Tucson, when Amelia restarted the engines to taxi to the fuel pumps, the left motor, still hot, backfired and, in the afternoon heat, burst into flames. The fire went out almost immediately; the damage was “trivial, mostly some pungently cooked rubber fittings.” Amelia shrugged it off as due to the Arizona summer weather. The engine was cleaned and the plane hosed down, and the next day they started out into the teeth of a sandstorm.
They put down that night in New Orleans, their landing unannounced. The first anyone knew of her presence was when she radioed ten miles out at Plaquemines that she was approaching. Then she “streaked out of the setting sun, circled Shusan Airport three times, set down on the runway at 5:55 PM.... her hair tousled as usual.” “I’ve never been on the ground at New Orleans,” she told the reporters waiting for her at Shusan disarmingly. “I’ve flown over your airport here numerous times, and it looked so nice from the air that I decided to land and see how it looked from the ground.”
It was partly cloudy and in the seventies when they took off the next morning at 9:10, bound for Florida. They landed just after midday at Miami municipal airport. The landing was a hard one because the shock absorber fluid had leaked out of the landing gear—another bug to correct. The next week or so would be spent preparing, checking, and fixing the Electra, working out minor adjustments in components and radio, and waiting for parts. They had brackets fitted to the side of the fuselage just behind the door to hold a “sky hook,” into which the metal rods supplied by the Department of Agriculture were fitted that trapped air and microorganisms for study. (Fred coughed in one and would have thrown it away, but Amelia insisted it be put with the others, because “I thought it would give the laboratory workers something to ponder when they came upon its contents among the more innocent bacteria of the equatorial upper airs.”) Maintenance work was done by Pan American mechanics. Amelia, George, and Fred moved into a two-bedroom suite at the Columbus Hotel, the Putnams having a bedroom off one end of the living room, Noonan off the other.
Amelia spent most of her time at the Pan Am hangar with the plane, although she did accept one offer to go deep sea fishing. She also attended a reception honoring Captain H. T. Merrill and his copilot Jack Lambie, held across from the hotel in Bayfront Park, who had just completed, in a sister ship to Amelia’s Electra, the first commercial transatlantic round trip from New York to London. Carl Allen, conscientious reporter, still on the job for the Herald Tribune, accompanied Amelia on a tour of the big hangar-workshops at Pan Am’s Dinner Key facility, where the Sikorsky Clipper ships were hauled out and inspected after each flight. Both Carl and George observed that Pan Am personnel changed their opinion of Amelia for the better after observing her firsthand. Many at Pan Am had been feeling sorry for their former confrere, Fred Noonan, whom they all respected, reported Carl, but after they observed Amelia in action, “they were willing to concede that ‘poor old Fred’ needed no sympathy, that he evidently had signed up with the pick of the lot of women aviators.” Carl went on: “she knew exactly what she wanted done, and had sense enought to let them alone while they did it. There was an almost audible clatter of chips falling off skeptical masculine shoulders”
When Allen first arrived in Miami and caught up with Amelia at the airport, one of the first things he did was to go over the equipment list to see if there had been any changes since Oakland. He noted one change that he wasn’t sure he approved of—the elimination of the marine frequency radio that operated on the 500-kilocycle bandwidth. “Oh,” she said, “that was left off when Manning had to drop out of the flight. Both Fred Noonan and I know Morse code but we’re amateurs and probably never would be able to send and receive more than 10 words a minute.... The marine frequency radio would have been just that much more dead weight to carry and we decided to leave it in California.” That made sense to Carl, for as a pilot he knew useless weight could mean the difference between life and death: between having enough fuel and not having enough to complete a journey against unexpectedly adverse winds.
A new, powerful antenna had been installed to maximize the 6210 to be used during the day and the 3105-kilocycle frequency to be used at night. But Pan Am radio technicians decided to replace the antenna with yet another one after she was unable to communicate with either the local broadcasting station or with the Bureau of Air Commerce airways station at the field in a test flight. She planned to broadcast every half hour, fifteen
minutes before and after the hour, all the way around the world.
Fred Noonan had a friend in Miami by the name of Helen Day. An attractive young businesswoman, she knew him from the time he had lived in Coconut Grove, Florida, and flew for New York Rio and Buenos Aires Airlines, the line Pan American had bought. He had spent a considerable amount of time with Helen, then a college student, and with her circle of friends. Helen was now the accountant for a chain of stores. With time on his hands, even though he had recently remarried, Fred called her up and asked her to dine with him and to come early to meet Amelia.
She went up to the suite the last afternoon and met Amelia and George. She found George much as Edna Whyte described him: tense and preoccupied. He ventured a brusque and minimal “How do you do” and “Good-bye” to her as he wrestled with final arrangements. His immediate problem, according to Helen, was that Amelia had no cash, and the banks were closed—a problem that was solved when someone thought of asking The Miami Herald whether they would cash a check, which they did. Then Helen listened as the plans for where they would spend the next night changed. Clara Livingston, a pilot, one of the original Ninety-Nines and a friend of Fred and of Amelia, called up and offered to put them up at her sixteen-hundred-acre sugar plantation in Puerto Rico, promising, according to Fred, “not to have a party.... It would be a quiet restful evening.... You can believe her.... She doesn’t have a reporter up her sleeve.” Amelia and George and Fred discussed it and decided it was a great idea.
Helen found Amelia very relaxed; if the the imminent departure weighed heavily upon her, it didn’t show. Amelia wore a light chocolate brown housecoat that had two stripes, one ivory and one orange, that went from shoulder to hem—an outfit Helen thought very attractive. It speaks volumes about Amelia’s mindset, as well as her relationship with Fred Noonan, that Amelia now queried Helen about her blind mother, about whom Fred had told her a great deal, who was unusual for her alertness and interest in life. Then Amelia’s social work training came to the fore—she wanted to know what the Lighthouse for the Blind was doing for the blind people of Miami.
Helen and Fred went out for an early dinner at a restaurant up the boulevard a little way from the hotel. During dinner he told Helen that he had had a drinking problem, but that it was over, he had stopped, and that he viewed this trip as his opportunity to show everybody else that he’d turned his life around. He also told her that he was being paid “considerable” money. She came away feeling that he had indeed turned the corner, and didn’t think there was a great risk in having him for navigator. Nor did Clara Livingston. Nor, evidently, did Amelia.
He did feel, however, that it was a dangerous adventure. He said, Helen recalled, “Amelia can take care of herself; if we were forced down anyplace I don’t feel that she would lean on me unnecessarily—you know—she would carry her own weight. You know, I wouldn’t fly across the Mississippi River with Laura Ingalls.”
Helen told him that there had “been some stuff in the papers about romance.” “Forget it,” he said. “There’s no romance going on—just two people doing a job.”
Helen, being the local with a car, drove him back to the hotel and on the way offered to drive him out to the airport the next morning. Fred declined, thinking it too much of an inconvenience. She dropped him back at the hotel and drove on home, only to find out upon arrival there that he had been calling her. It transpired that Amelia wanted Helen to have breakfast with them and so Fred decided it was a wonderful idea to add Helen and her car to the entourage. So at three A.M., pushing her way through the knots of reporters jammed in the lobby Helen gave her name and was allowed up the elevator to their suite, where she found Amelia, George, George’s son David and wife Nilla, Eustace Adams, an author and old friend of the Putnams’ who lived in Florida, and Fred Noonan, all busily gathering equipment. Helen helped them carry down their things—various items that included pith helmets, thermos jugs, and a machete in case they were forced down in the jungle. Someone carried Amelia’s small suitcase, which contained five shirts, two pairs of slacks, a change of shoes, a light working coverall, a weightless raincoat, linen, and toilet articles. Fred carried only his octant.
They went down and pushed their way through the lobby, then drove to a Greek restaurant and had breakfast. Helen listened, fascinated, as Amelia asked for hot tomato juice to be put in two of the two-quart thermos jugs, and asked Fred, “Are you going to drink that stuff?” To which he replied, “No, she is.”
They arrived at the airport just after four A.M. It was still dark when they got to the small hangar; a light was burning. The mechanic Bo McKneely was there, having spent the night with the plane. Since except for Bo there was no one about to help get the plane out of the hangar, everyone got out of their cars and pushed. By the time they were finished, police had arrived to cordon off the area, and a crowd estimated at five hundred were sitting in their cars with their headlights beamed at the hangar. Helen had said good-bye and was some distance away when Fred called her back and gave her letters and three dollars in money orders for her to send on to the postmasters of Hollywood and Oakland for his July rentals for two post office boxes in those cities, “in case he was late.” By four thirty the small amount of luggage carried by Amelia and Fred had been loaded into the plane, together with the thermos bottles of hot tomato juice and, for Fred, coffee. Amelia, exercising the utmost care, warmed up the ship’s two engines. Then she shut them down, another glitch: a thermocouple, which registered cylinder-head temperatures from the left motor, refused to work. Bo McKneely set about repairing it. The rising sun was brushing back the silver gray of dawn, Amelia noted.
Just before takeoff, George as usual couldn’t resist another good-bye. He climbed up, leaned into the cockpit for a last kiss, and shook Fred’s hand. It could be seen that Amelia “exuded confidence and smiles.” George did not.
At 6:04 Amelia closed and fastened the hatch; thirty seconds later, the Electra was airborne. Standing on the roof of the administration building with David, George paced nervously back and forth until the silver plane rose and wheeled and disappeared to the southeast.
21
The Flight
• • • • They were off on June 1, the pilot who was afraid of nothing, who just wanted to make the first globe-girdling flight touching the Southern as well as the Northern Hemisphere and knew it had to be done before she was forty, and the navigator out to show the world that his life was back on track.
They started out in easy stages. The flight to San Juan took a little over eight hours. Their mutual friend Clara Livingston met them at the airport and drove them out to her sugar plantation to spend the night at Mi Casa, her dramatic colonial hacienda with its twin staircases curving down to the beach.
They were up and at the airfield before dawn for the planned flight to Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, but they had to settle on Caripito, Venezuela—much closer—because construction work at the field shortened it too much to allow them to take off with the planned fuel load. When they landed in Caripito, the general manager of Standard Oil took care of them and put them up in his home. From Caripito they flew the 1,330 miles to Paramaribo, which Fred knew well from his Pan Am days, and they stayed at the hotel where he had stayed then. Their next stop was Fortaleza in northeast Brazil. In both of these places they were, Fred wrote happily to Helen, “besieged” with invitations of hospitality and showered with kindnesses—to the extent that when they went shopping in Fortaleza for sponge rubber and liquid cement to plug a small leak in the cockpit, the shopkeeper wouldn’t let them pay, insisting they take the items as his gift.
He was pleased, Fred wrote, that Amelia had flown the most direct routes rather than the established trade routes to reach Fortaleza, even though that meant they were flying over impenetrable jungle, for it gave him a chance to brush up on celestial navigation.
Gradually he and Amelia became friends. Wrote Amelia, “little by little I came to know my shipmate’s full story.” As they crossed the
equator (the first time for Amelia), they were so busy that Fred forgot to dunk her with the thermos of cold water he had been saving for the purpose. He wrote to Helen of this part of the flight:
Those routes took us across hundreds of miles of unexplored dense virgin jungles. Nothing visible but solid carpets of tree tops, with frequent wide winding rivers cutting through them. The weather was uniformly good—over the Orinoco River we encountered a few heavy tropical downpours, but we were able to circumvent them.
They were planning to spend an extra day at their next stop, Natal, so that the plane could be serviced before the long overwater hop to Africa, but the facilities were so good in Fortaleza that they decided to change and have it done in Fortaleza instead.
Two mornings later they took off at 4:50 A.M. and were in Natal—only 275 miles distant—by seven. Air France used Natal as its jumping-off place for the South Atlantic and had two ships permanently stationed in the ocean to give them weather updates. The airline offered to make the information available to Amelia; at the same time advising her that it was already too late in the day to start across the ocean.
They took off from the pitch-black field at three fifteen the following morning—destination Dakar. The flight went smoothly for most of the way. While over the ocean Amelia broadcast her position every half hour. She and Fred tended to the air canisters, sealing and labeling more than a dozen with the place and time of exposure and stowing them away.
But they didn’t land at Dakar, because Amelia second-guessed Fred, thinking him wrong. Fred’s instructions were to head south—“change to 36 degrees”—but a thick haze was obscuring the African coast, “and for some time no position sight had been possible,” as Amelia explained, so when she received his note (by way of the bamboo pole), she turned north instead, and they landed at St. Louis, Senegal.
