Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  For the flight, Mantz stripped the Vega of its ten seats and installed fuel tanks, increasing fuel capacity to 470 gallons of gasoline and 56 gallons of oil. In the cockpit he installed and checked magnetic and aperiodic compasses, a directional bank and turn indicator, an ice-warning thermometer, fuel and temperature gauges, a tachometer, and a supercharger pressure gauge. The engine, the same Pratt & Whitney S1D1 Amelia had used to cross the Atlantic, was overhauled by Mantz’s chief mechanic, Ernest Tissot.

  With the plane in good hands, Amelia juggled a half-dozen other preflight tasks. While she looked for a house to rent, she stayed with Jack Maddux, most of her time there spent in a one-room building behind the main house, poring over maps with Maddux and Clarence Williams, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who was charting her course for her. On November 21, a permit for a radio was issued her in Washington, one that could be used “only for communication with ships and coastal stations when in flight over the sea.” In New York, G. P. denied to reporters that she was planning an overseas trip, saying she wanted it for experimental radio work. A month later Amelia was licensed as a third-class operator of a radio telephone, hardly the degree of expertise warranting experimental radio work.

  After Amelia moved into the house she had rented at 10515 Valley Spring Road in the Toluca Lake district of Hollywood, she sent for her mother to come and stay with her. G. P. joined them in mid-December. Amelia spent most of her time at United Airport in or near Mantz’s shop, watching him work on the Vega and listening to his detailed instructions, but was relaxed enough to enjoy the company of other pilots at the field, among them Bobbi Trout. Trout introduced Amelia to the joys of motorcycle riding, and they raced up and down the airstrip on two Indian Pony bikes.

  In early December Amelia was in Oakland, where she had her picture taken with Flight Lt. Charles T. P. Ulm, who intended to fly from Oakland to Australia.† He took off for Honolulu on December 3 but didn’t make it. Forty-eight hours later an extensive search near the Hawaiian Islands began for Ulm and his two companions. They were never found. The news did not change Amelia’s plans, which were still supposed to be very secret.

  It was a strangely kept secret. On December 22 Amelia boarded the Matson Line’s luxury liner, Lurline, for Honolulu.‡ With her were G. P., Paul Mantz and his wife, Myrtle, mechanic Ernest Tissot, and the Lockheed Vega, NR965Y, lashed to the aft tennis deck.

  On the day after Christmas Amelia wrote a long letter to her mother. It began with an apology for the formula Christmas greeting cabled her, one sent to a long list of people and signed “Amelia and George.” Amy was number seventeen on the list. Amelia also apologized for what was obviously a miserable evening for everyone the night before her departure. “My indisposition of the night before leaving wrecked everything the last hours.” Before every long flight Amelia was always tense in the company of close friends or family members, yet among strangers able to sleep. She had slept in a hotel room in Boston before the 1928 flight but with Amy in the house this time she could not. So deaf that she could not take part in a normal conversation and shunned by many, Amy was querulous and stubborn, an unhappy, frustrated woman with a younger daughter who needed her too much and an older one who didn’t need her at all. In her letter Amelia told her, “Please try to have a good time. You have had so many squashed years, I know its hard to throw them off. But it can be done. I’d like you to take this trip and I am going to plan to that end.” G. P., Amelia wrote, “said you were an awfully good sport to stay alone in the little house. I said I had known that a long time.”

  For the first time Amelia also gave Amy details of her plans. She wrote that she had used the radio on the plane, picking up airway stations, one as far away as Kingman, Arizona. If all went well, the Mantzes would be back in Hollywood in ten days. (The Mantzes were neighbors who would help Amy if she needed it.) Amelia would have G. P. cable when she actually started, but Amy might not see her on her return if she decided to fly on to Washington. Amelia also included her customary instructions to Amy on how to deal with reporters. “Reporters may call you. If so, be pleasant, admit you’re my mother if you care to, and simply say you’re not discussing plans. If they ask you what you think of my doing such things, say what you think.” This is followed by Amelia’s saying what Amy ought to think: “It is better to do what want [sic]—etc.”

  When the Lurline docked in Honolulu on December 27, Amelia gave reporters even less. She brought the Vega along, she said, in case she wanted to use it. “Maybe we’ll use my plane to fly to every one of the islands.” Then again they might take advantage of “the kind invitation of Stanley Kennedy and fly on Inter-Island planes.” If she decided to make a transoceanic flight, she said, she would not take Mantz. She would not “take a cat along.” She insisted she was on a vacation with her husband. Paul Mantz was a family friend. She and G. P. would stay at the Waikiki Beach house of millionaire Chris Holmes, Paul’s friend.

  The press notices that first day were filled with conjecture about her plans but warmly welcomed her to the islands. Twenty-four hours later they turned harshly critical. In an era without airmail service the latest issue of Editor and Publisher had arrived along with Amelia on the Lurline. In it was an article claiming that Amelia’s projected flight from Hawaii to California was a stunt to provide publicity for the territory,§ sponsored by the Pan Pacific Press Bureau. The story stated that a confidential memo had been inadvertently sent to Editor and Publisher by Pan Pacific, an organ of an advertising and publicity firm working for sugar interests. The memo said, “Before the time of the flight we will put into circulation rumors that it is to take place and at the same time deny the rumors. This will create a situation of immediate suspense of very high news value.”

  Although G. P. had denied more than once that Amelia was planning a long flight, now he denied designing the campaign of rumors and denials. Amelia insisted that she had come to the islands on a vacation. While it was true, she added, that she was equipped for a long-distance flight she did not know if conditions for it would be favorable and to announce flight plans in advance would be foolish. It had been a toss-up, she said, as to whether she and G. P. would fly from New York to Mexico City or visit Hawaii.

  A few days later the San Francisco News added to the charges leveled by Editor and Publisher. Pan Pacific’s campaign, the paper said, was part of the fight by Hawaiian sugar interests against quotas on sugar exported from Hawaii to the mainland. G. P. had accepted a payment of ten thousand dollars in exchange for the use of Amelia’s name and her complimentary remarks about the islands. Releases on the flight by Pan Pacific would emphasize the theme of the territory of Hawaii being an integral part of the United States. If so, a quota or tariff on its products would be unfair. Pan Pacific had already released a story stating Amelia was interested in the inauguration of an airmail express service between Hawaii and the mainland because it offered “an opportunity to emphasize … that Hawaii is an integral part of the United States, ready for statehood.” Amelia repeated the theme before boarding the Lurline when she said, “Anything I can do, to help close the time gap between Hawaii as an integral part of the United States, will be work into which I can throw myself heartily.” She had expressed different sentiments to her mother. “I suppose,” she wrote, “… tomorrow we shall slip on grass skirts and never leave the island paradise. (Chamber of Commerce, travel agencies, press are worse than the California species.)”

  There was worse to come. John Williams, the reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin who had written the story on the accusations made by Editor and Publisher, followed it with one claiming that “if Amelia Earhart intends to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland, responsible authorities should stop her.” A single-engine plane was very poor equipment for a transoceanic flight that would prove nothing not already known, he wrote. If she failed, “the ghastly Ulm search would be repeated.” Williams also claimed that Army airmen were uneasy about the flight. He was right. On December 30 Lt. Leroy Huds
on cabled the Bureau of Air Commerce in Washington, asking if there were restrictions regarding equipment on transoceanic flights by licensed U.S. pilots. There was, Lieutenant Hudson added, “a rumor of a flight by Amelia Earhart to the West Coast.” The answer was that the bureau had no authority or control over the proposed flight. The Star-Bulletin followed up with an editorial asserting that, although no laws forbad the flight, the concern for Amelia was really a tribute to her and a wish for her to avoid needless risk.

  Williams kept up the pressure. Why, he asked, did the Army let her use Wheeler Field? Why was the plane completely overhauled by Army aviation mechanics? Army radio experts were making radical changes in her radio, work which neither she nor Mantz could direct because they didn’t know enough about it, Williams charged. The Army had installed a sending unit adaptable to telegraph work but Amelia did not know how to send. Quoting “Army experts,” Williams wrote that the plane would have to take off with 450 gallons of fuel over a very rough field, too risky a feat with only one engine. If Amelia were forced down at sea the search could cost a million dollars in taxpayers’ money.

  Williams was not the only critic. Others recalled the Dole race of 1927 when only half the eight starters from California reached the islands and two were lost at sea, one of them a woman. On January 6 Capt. Frank A. Flynn, an NAA member, sponsored an open letter to Amelia, asking her to abandon the flight in memory of the ten aviators who had already lost their lives in attempts to fly from California to Hawaii.

  Under pressure like this, the businessmen who had put up ten thousand dollars for the flight asked Amelia to reconsider. She would not. At a private meeting she accused them of listening to unsubstantiated rumors regarding political influence that she did not have. Flying, she said, was her business. She had already spent half of the ten thousand on preparations. She would fly to California with or without their support.

  While her backers worried and reporters criticized, the University of Hawaii’s students gave her an overwhelming vote of confidence when she gave a lecture at Farrington Hall. Those who could not get a seat in the packed hall listened to the broadcast of the speech on their car radios. Parked outside the hall, they hoped to get a glimpse of her when she left. Aside from this one lecture and a day’s air tour of the islands, she avoided public appearances and refused the invitations of islanders eager to entertain her. While she waited for takeoff, which depended on favorable weather and the delivery of needed fuel, she spent part of each day at Wheeler Field where Mantz worked and G. P. hovered.

  G. P. was angry about a delay by Standard Oil in delivering the promised fuel. If the weather cleared Amelia would need to leave within hours, before it closed down again. G. P. held Mantz responsible for this because Mantz had advised using Standard, both for its “fine service” and possible endorsement fees after the flight. As perfectionistic, impatient, and egotistical as G. P., Mantz was annoyed with both Standard and Putnam.

  Amelia spent hours walking on the beach near Holmes’s place or stretching out on a beach chair, basking in the hot, tropical sunshine. She no longer worried about the damage already done by sun and wind to her delicate skin. Although her youthful figure belied her age, seen close up, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the freckles over her nose and cheeks made her look all of her thirty-six years. Waiting, she thought about death as she always did before each of her long flights. She had already written to her mother, telling her to take possession of the contents of a zipper compartment in her briefcase. “Put it away until I turn up and if I don’t, burn it,” she wrote. “It consists of fragments that mean nothing to anybody but me.”

  On January 8 she wrote to G. P., “As you know the barrage of belittlement has made harder the preparations in many ways. I make the attempt to fly from Honolulu to the mainland of my own free will. I am familiar with the hazards.… If I do not do a good job it will not be because the plane and motor are not excellent nor because women cannot fly. Though I have taken off with excessive loads a number of times there is many a slip—well, anyway, here’s hoping and cheerio.”

  Preceded by the consignment of very personal papers to her mother, it was a curiously impersonal letter to G. P. and may have reflected her annoyance with his apparently bungled efforts to capitalize on the flight.

  Along with G. P.’s letter she left a note to be delivered to a Major Clark at Wheeler Field, only if she did not survive. “If the ‘test take-off’ proves satisfactory,” she wrote, “I plan to try for the mainland.… It is clearly understood that in assisting me the Army is in no way chargeable with any responsibility connected with the flight.… You did for me only what you would do for any other responsible pilot … properly pointing out the risks involved.… The entire responsibility for the flight I assume.”

  The “test take-off” was on Friday, January 11. That morning she rested at the Holmes house until noon, when G. P. took her to the house of Lt. and Mrs. George Sparhawk at Wheeler Field. The Army’s radio expert at Wheeler, Sparhawk had invited Mantz and Navy Lt. E. W. Stephens to join them at lunch. A heavy rain, which had started at eleven o’clock, did not let up. Amelia retired for a nap and Stephens, a Navy aerologist, continued to check the weather for her.‖ G. P. rushed back to the field with Mantz to check on the Standard Oil employees. Having finally brought the gasoline, they left the field for lunch in the midst of filling the tanks. Mantz rounded them up but, when the tanks were nearly full, discovered they were short by two drums. Two more were finally produced but G. P. was frantic. Amelia needed a Friday departure and Saturday arrival to make the Sunday papers. She would need the break because the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of the Lindberghs’ child was claiming the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  At 4:30 Amelia arrived from the Sparhawks. She had obviously said her goodbyes to G. P. earlier, for she scarcely looked at him while she slipped into a fur-lined flying suit and walked to the plane. Mantz had it warmed up for her. She climbed the ladder, slid into the cockpit, listened to the motor, gunned it, and looked at the instrument panel. There were no more than one hundred people there to see her off, most of them Army men and their wives. She did not look down at G. P. who paced below, but grinned at the crowd, then waved at the ground crew to remove the blocks under the wheels. The plane rolled slowly toward the end of the field followed by two cars, G. P. in one and a group of Army officers in the other.

  In her own account of the takeoff, she said that while she taxied to the runway she looked out the cockpit window and saw Ernie Tissot running alongside. Mud came up over the tops of his shoes and he looked gloomy, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his face “as white as his coveralls.” She also saw three fire engines and one ambulance lined up in front of the hangars, “and all the Army men seemed to be holding fire extinguishers while their wives had handkerchiefs out, obviously ready for an emergency.”

  At the end of the rough, sodden field she lined up the cumbersome plane and began her takeoff, the Vega swaying from side to side, its wheels sinking several inches into the mud, the propeller flinging a stream of mud over the fuselage. Three thousand feet down the field, the plane rose, seemed to stall momentarily in midair, then ascended into the grey, cloud-laden sky. She had taken off in half the distance needed by Kingsford-Smith two months earlier.

  The flight pushed her to the limits of her courage and endurance. There was almost continuous fog. Banks of clouds rolled in under or over her. A ventilation cover blew off, admitting a continuous, stinging stream of air that blew into her eye. Without equipment for blind flying, and unable to execute celestial navigation, she had nothing but dead reckoning to go on and could not check her course. She was four years older than when she made her last transoceanic flight, she tired more rapidly, and was troubled by what she called a “mental hazard”—the criticism of her reasons for making the flight and of her Vega as inadequate for it.

  Two and a half hours out she spoke on her radio to G. P. in Honolulu,
reporting that the skies were overcast and she was flying at five thousand feet. She wanted to climb to eight thousand to save fuel but four and a half hours later she was at three thousand in a fog. Seven hours later she radioed she should be halfway. She was actually short of the mark by more than an hour’s flying time.

  Her sporadic reports that “everything is O.K.” left Clarence Williams exasperated because she did not give her location. She couldn’t. She could only guess. And everything was not O.K. After eleven hours up she said, “I’m becoming quite tired.”a An hour and a half later she again reported she was “O.K.” and had descended from six thousand feet to seven hundred, a move guaranteed to make her forget her fatigue. Wiping the stream of tears from her swollen eye, she throttled down to conserve fuel.

  After sixteen hours out she was certain she must be off course. Williams had marked the standard radio beams for guiding aircraft on her chart but she could not home in on any of them. She leaned to the left to peer out the window and saw a small, perfect circle in a solid cloud bank. In the exact center of the circle of blue water was a ship. She flew down and alongside the ship. It was the S.S. Pierce of the Dollar Line, out of San Francisco. She radioed a request that the ship contact a shore station and ask it to broadcast her location. When the shore station came in she knew for the first time in ten hours her exact position.b Her course verified, the last two and a half hours were easy.

  It was 1:31 in the afternoon when she landed at Oakland, two hours behind schedule because she had throttled down to save gas. The crowd at the field had grown to ten thousand, many in it waiting for hours. She surprised her admirers, coming straight in without circling the field for a perfect landing two hundred feet from its center. A roar swept over the rain-sodden field, a mix of cheers, shouts, whistles, and automobile horns, as the crowd broke through police lines and reached the Vega just as the propeller stopped turning. One unfortunate eighteen-year-old freshman from the University of California at Berkeley was knocked down and trampled, suffering a broken elbow and a broken leg. As police succeeded in pushing the crowd back, the isinglass cockpit cover opened and Amelia pushed herself up where the crowd could see her. She smiled and waved, leaning down to take a huge bouquet of roses before airport attendants, fearing she would be manhandled and the aircraft damaged, pushed the Vega backward into a hangar. Inside the hangar her first words were, “I’m tired,” but when someone offered her a chair, she said, “I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting down a long time.”