Amelia Earhart

by Doris L. Rich

  Putnam also bartered Amelia’s name for goods and services. In a single feature written by Allen for the Herald Tribune, benefactors mentioned included Bausch and Lomb (nine pairs of sunglasses and a light meter), Vincent Bendix (a radio direction-finder), Standard Oil (fuel depots and services of their representative, Vicomte Jacques de Sibour), Pan American (for flight plan assistance), and Amelia’s franchised luggage (she would carry one Amelia Earhart overnight case on the flight).

  In addition, G. P. tested the Hollywood waters for a feature film, although Amelia said she would not act in it; he would have to find someone else for the starring role. Lectures and guest appearances were already scheduled for her return. Gimbels had assumed promotion of the six-thousand five hundred cacheted covers Amelia would carry, to be sold at $5.00 each if autographed and $2.50, if not. Even the kitchen of the Toluca Lake bungalow was paid for with Amelia’s name. When she showed the room to Allen she explained that G. P. had arranged for a mailorder house to outfit it. In the exchange, Allen observed, “the firm had permission to tell America’s housewives all about its ‘Amelia Earhart kitchen.’ ” Amelia, Allen claimed, would never have had the gall to look for the deals G. P. found or created.

  The first week of March, while Amelia was still in Hollywood, the Bureau of Air Commerce’s coordinator for the flight, William T. Miller, arrived in Oakland. Superintendent of airways for the bureau, Miller was the man who had assessed Jarvis, Baker, and Howland islands for possible emergency landing fields in the summer of 1935 on an expedition for which he was cited for bravery and “putting the mission before personal interests.” A pilot and lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, he had already worked on Amelia’s flight arrangements in Washington. Miller was a master of government paperwork and protocol, a man who thought of everything.

  He suggested that G. P. write to the secretary of war for permission to use Wheeler Field in Hawaii. He secured orders for a naval aerological officer and two mechanics to be sent to Howland to assist Amelia there, then advised Capt. Kenneth Whiting, commanding officer of the Fleet Air Base at Pearl Harbor, that a run-in cylinder assembly and a full set of spark plugs for the Electra would be sent along with the three men. He sent strip maps of the Caribbean landing fields and advice on what radio bands Navy and Coast Guard ships transmitted as well as received. He arranged for thirty drums of oil to be shipped by the Coast Guard to Howland and sent a dozen cans of tomato juice to Honolulu with instructions to keep six for Amelia’s flight to Howland and to send on the remainder for the flight from Howland to her next destination, Lae, New Guinea.

  As soon as he arrived at Oakland, Miller set up an office at the airport and hired a local woman, Vivian Maatta, to be Amelia’s secretary. Although the twenty-seven-year-old Oakland woman worked most of the time for Miller or G. P., who paid her salary, she soon knew all of the flight team members. Maatta thought Amelia was “quiet but nice,” much prettier than her pictures, and very energetic. In a new, informal division of labor—a fortunate one for Amelia—Miller had taken over the flight arrangements while G. P. worked on finances. She spent most of her time with Miller, poring over maps and charts at his desk.

  Just before Amelia brought the Electra from Burbank to Oakland in early March, she met her old friend Gene Vidal in Los Angeles, where G. P. arranged to have them photographed for the newspapers examining an emergency signal kite that Jackie Cochran had given Amelia. It was rumored that Vidal, who was on a vacation after resigning as head of the Bureau of Air Commerce, would join Amelia and G. P. in a business venture. Although he would neither confirm nor deny the rumor, he had really stopped in Los Angeles to see Amelia and to talk about the flight because he knew it would please her. His visit gained more publicity for her and on his return to Washington soon after he discussed the flight with reporters. Amelia was capable of making it, he told them, but added with a smile that he doubted she would contribute much to research on “the human element” because, he said, “what is easy for Amelia might be awfully difficult for the rest of us.”

  At Oakland Amelia moved into the airport hotel, where she became the center of attention from a group of students of the Boeing School of Aeronautics who were living at the hotel. Amelia chatted with them every morning at breakfast in the coffee shop and she permitted one of them, Harkness Davenport from Clyde, Ohio, to take pictures of the interior of the Electra with his new 35mm camera. The morning conversations with Amelia ended abruptly for Davenport and his fellow students when G. P. arrived from Hollywood. “He’d go screaming through the lobby—the great George Putnam—” Davenport complained, “and it was ‘out of the way, boys.’ ”

  On the day Amelia flew to Oakland there was a message from Air Commerce reminding her that her license would expire on April 15. Two days later she qualified for her instrument rating. Young Davenport, who had taken his the year before and barely passed, said the inspector who gave it remarked that he hadn’t given it to anyone else so inept since Amelia Earhart, who also barely passed. There is no evidence as to whether she had improved since that previous rating. She didn’t take her written and radio tests until March 14, a day after she had originally planned to take off. Delayed by bad weather, she took and passed both and the Electra was also certified by Air Commerce for the flight.

  When Carl Allen arrived to do his preflight features for the Herald Tribune, he met Amelia and G. P. for breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. After they were seated Allen saw Amelia reach for her orange juice and G. P. push it away, replacing it with a stack of cacheted covers and a pen. “Don’t forget our agreement, darling,” he said. The agreement, Amelia explained to Allen, was for ten autographs before her orange juice, fifteen more before her bacon and eggs, and twenty-five each night before retiring.

  Amelia was willing to do whatever G. P. said was necessary to promote and pay for the flight, but she was upset when he meddled in technical matters. When she was alone with Allen for the first time she told him that she was leaving for a long weekend at the Cochran-Odlum ranch. “I’ve just got to get away for a couple of days by myself,” she said, “before it drives me crazy.” G. P. was trying to do everything he could to help, she explained, but he was “trying too hard,” especially with Mantz.

  G. P. and Mantz had never been friends. Putnam tended to treat Mantz as an employee rather than a colleague, putting pressure on him and demanding instant solutions to complicated problems. G. P. and Mantz were too much alike, egotistical, shrewd self-promoters, skilled at their work, with their sights fixed on private profit and public recognition. G. P. claimed that Amelia no longer trusted Mantz and intended to terminate their partnership as soon as she returned.

  If Amelia had misgivings about Mantz, Jackie Cochran certainly reinforced them. Cochran did not have Amelia’s patience with Amelia’s chauvinist mentor nor did Mantz like Cochran. When Cochran’s plane broke down and she withdrew from the 1936 Bendix race, Mantz told Amelia he was not surprised. “She never won a race or finished a flight in her life,” he insisted years later, after she had done both.

  In addition to the growing tension between G. P. and Mantz, Amelia was also worried about her choice of Harry Manning for navigator. She liked Manning, who had taught her the principles of navigation in 1928 while he was captain of the liner that brought her back from the Friendship flight. But she had doubts about his skills as an aerial navigator, doubts shared by Cochran who thought he was a nice fellow but “not up to high speed navigation in a plane.” Cochran suggested that Amelia take him out to sea on a clear night and see if he could find his way back. “She did,” Cochran observed, “and he couldn’t.”

  For once Mantz agreed with Cochran. Weeks before Manning arrived at Oakland with Amelia, Mantz wrote to G. P. that he had enjoyed meeting Manning but that ocean navigation differed drastically from aerial navigation and he would like to see Manning “intercept a ship two or three hundred miles out to sea.”

  Not until March 13, four days before she left for Honolulu, did Amelia
consent to a backup for Manning, a man G. P. wanted to hire. He was Fred Noonan, a slim, good-looking man with a long, weatherbeaten face and engaging grin. Noonan had made eighteen trips across the Pacific as navigator of Pan American clipper ships as well as taught other navigators for the airline before he was fired for alcoholism. Once again Amelia was threatened by the disease that had caused her father to abandon her and Bill Stultz to risk her life on the Friendship. Noonan assured Amelia he had conquered it, but even Vivian Maatta, who was hardly a confidante of Amelia’s, noticed that she “had her doubts.” James Bassett, the Los Angeles Times man covering the story, thought that G. P. wanted Amelia to take Noonan because another navigator was needed and the reputed alcoholic would work for very little money.

  Reluctant to hurt Manning, Amelia announced she would take “two hitchhikers,” Mantz and Noonan. Mantz would relieve her at the controls as far as Honolulu, where he planned to meet his fiancée, Terry Minor. Noonan would relieve Manning as navigator as far as Howland, so that Manning could spend more time on the radio. From Howland, she and Manning would continue to Darwin, where he would leave her to finish the flight alone.

  On March 17, after lunch and a nap in the offices of a naval hangar, Amelia was bustled into a naval car and rushed to the waiting plane. The six thousand five hundred cachets she was taking were already on board, handed to Amelia earlier in the day by Oakland Postmaster Nellie G. Donohue, with news photographers recording the event, material to boost Gimbels’ stamp sales.†

  Once aboard and the hatch down, Amelia changed places with Mantz, who took over the throttles from the lefthand seat while Amelia handled the flight controls in the copilot’s seat. Although she had taken the Electra up more than two dozen times by then, Mantz wanted to demonstrate the process once more. “Never jockey the throttle,” he told her. “Use the rudder and don’t raise the tail too quick.”

  A few minutes later the Electra roared down the field, plowing through one sheet of muddy water after another and rising slowly into the slate-grey sky at 4:37. Bill Miller sent a telegram to the White House immediately, following it with other more detailed reports to the Bureau and Richard Black aboard the Shoshone at Howland Island. Miller said she had taken off in twenty-five seconds in a fourteen-mile-an-hour wind using 1,897 feet of runway, “an excellent takeoff on a muddy runway.” The takeoff was really Mantz’s.

  After they leveled off at eight thousand feet Mantz again changed places with Amelia, who insisted on flying fifty minutes out of each hour for the next fifteen hours. She held to the magnetic compass headings, compensating accurately when she was off a degree or two, but Mantz thought she seemed tired and unusually upset by Manning’s repeated appearances in the cockpit to shoot a string of star sights through the upper hatch or to reach over her head for the radio controls.

  Just before dawn on March 18 Mantz took a reading on the direction finder, locating them off Makapu Point on Oahu. “Do you want to land it?” he asked.

  “No, you land it,” she answered.

  “When we got to Wheeler Field I wrapped it around and took a look at the wind direction,” Mantz said later, “and Amelia yelled, ‘Don’t! Don’t!’ ”

  “What’s wrong?” Mantz asked.

  “Some people get exhausted after a long flight,” she murmured.

  “What do you want me to do,” he asked, “drag the runway area and make the regular approach?”

  “Would you?” Amelia sighed.

  “That,” Mantz said, “was pilot fatigue.”

  Several hundred people were waiting in the predawn light—some of them still in evening clothes—when the Electra, which had broken a record, rolled to a stop at Wheeler Field.‡ Amelia immediately told reporters that Mantz had landed the plane, and added, “I’m terribly tired,” before leaving the field with base commander Lt. Col. John McConnell.

  Her original plan was to leave for Howland that night after sleeping a few hours at McConnell’s house. Fortunately, adverse weather conditions forced another postponement and she went with Mantz to the Waikiki Beach house of his friends, Chris and Nona Holmes. The Holmeses had arranged a party for Amelia and Mantz’s fiancée, Terry Minor. Minor thought Amelia was “awfully nice but not very social,” an observation borne out by Amelia’s refusal to attend the party. Instead she remained in her room until morning.

  Early the next day, Amelia went to Wheeler Field with Mantz to move the Electra to the larger and better surfaced Luke Field, which was shared by the Army Air Corps and Naval Fleet Air Base. At Luke, Mantz discovered that the gasoline trucked from Wheeler was contaminated. He had to get permission from the military to buy 590 gallons of aviation gas. There were other problems. The weather reports continued to be less than promising and the Honolulu representative of Pratt and Whitney, Wilbur Thomas, discovered the propeller bearings of the Electra were almost dry. They had been improperly lubricated at Oakland, Thomas claimed, and might have forced the Electra down at sea if Miss Earhart had taken off for Howland immediately as she had planned. Amelia might have wondered just how good Mantz’s maintenance of the plane was, but to her a more immediate cause for worry was her new navigator, Noonan. That same day in a confidential talk with Jim Bassett, who had gone to Honolulu for the story, Amelia said that Noonan had been drunk the night before in his hotel room and she did not want him on the flight.

  Almost superstitiously wary of preflight revelations, Amelia wrote in her first story for the Herald Tribune before the flight, “So many things can happen … to change plans.” She was right. Before dawn on March 20 she cracked up the by then one-hundred-thousand-dollar Electra.

  In the early morning darkness seventy-five civilians and Navy and Army men who came to watch her take off saw the plane begin to sway as it sped down the runway. Seconds later the left wing dropped, the right wheel was ripped off, and the landing gear collapsed. For a moment spectators froze while a single flame that shot into the air was reflected in the fuel-soaked runway, but there was no explosion. Amelia had cut the switches before the plane came to a halt. Neither she nor her two companions were injured, but when she pushed back the hatch cover and emerged from the cockpit her face was white, her hair wet with perspiration, and her voice shrill. “Something went wrong,” she wailed to the first of the spectators to reach her. “It seems as if I hit a wet spot. The ship began to go off course and I couldn’t stop it.”

  A few hours later she changed her mind, claiming that the left tire blew out and she reduced power on the opposite engine, swinging the plane from right to left but the load was too heavy, the momentum continued, and there was nothing she could do but let the plane ground-loop.

  There were other versions of what went wrong. The Associated Press man agreed with Amelia that the left tire blew out but the New York Times said it was the right tire. There were spectators who said the plane was overloaded and others who claimed the opposite—that with only nine hundred gallons of fuel in tanks which could hold more than eleven hundred, the gasoline had sloshed around, increasing the momentum of the swerve.

  Air Corps Brig. Gen. Barton K. Yount said Amelia’s first comment about a “wet spot” was incorrect. The field was in perfect condition and, while it could have been a blowout, her tires had been checked just ten minutes before takeoff. Referring to her prompt cutting of all switches, the general said he had never seen anyone with “cooler nerves.” Yount’s conclusions were both gallant and self-serving. Miss Earhart was very brave and the Air Corps was in no way responsible for the accident.

  Two of her severest critics were her mentor, Paul Mantz, and the young Army Air Corps officer-of-the-day, Lt. William C. Capp. Mantz was certain she had done just what he had told her not to do—“jockeyed,” or overcompensated on the throttles. Capp said she was an inept pilot who would not take the advice of experts. He did not cite whose advice she had failed to take or in what way she was inept except as a navigator. She had, he said, been lost on her Hawaii-Oakland flight in 1935, so lost that the captain of th
e liner Lurline had to turn his ship around to point her in the right direction.

  Capp did allow for several possibilities that might have made the takeoff more difficult. There could have been a cross wind or unusual wind currents, or a sloppily loaded plane. There was also a peculiar arrangement of buildings at the end of the runway, he said, which created a threatening illusion similar to that of sailing under a bridge. But basically Capp thought Amelia was not a good pilot.

  His disapproval was reinforced by what he considered her discourtesy to the naval base commander, Capt. Kenneth Whiting, who had been at the airfield by 4 A.M. to see her off. Whiting was the same man who was commandant of the air base at Norfolk in 1933 when Amelia overturned her Vega. On that occasion Whiting said she had arrogantly assumed that he would crate and ship her damaged plane for her. This time, as she walked off the field with him, Capp heard her say, “Every time I see you I get into trouble.” Her attempt at humor was perceived by both men as undeserved sarcasm.

  Amelia also failed to report the accident, an offense subject to a five-hundred-dollar fine, which the Bureau inspector at Honolulu, Emil Williams, chose not to levy. Both her remark to Whiting and her violation of a basic rule of aviation indicate that she was still in shock, induced more by the sight of the shattered Electra than by her narrow escape from a fiery death.

  Two hours later Amelia had recovered enough to write her account of the crackup for the Herald Tribune in an automobile returning to the Holmeses’. From there she made reservations to return to California on the Matson liner, Malolo, sailing the same day at noon. She also called G. P., who had already received the first damage estimate from Mantz. Although Bill Miller requested a second one from an Air Corps officer at Wheeler, it was soon obvious that the Electra would have to be shipped back to Lockheed for repairs.