The last three words were both promise and apology.
He repeated this query the next day, asking again if there was any likelihood she might arrive in Oakland by Monday morning. There was also a request from his Honolulu representative, William Cogswell, to Black for word on whether she would arrive at Luke or Wheeler Field in Honolulu. Cogswell needed to know because G. P. had arranged for her to broadcast immediately after her arrival.
While G. P. pressed Amelia for an early arrival, he also gave erroneous information on her radio equipment to the Department of Interior to pass on to Black on the Itasca. Assuming that her five-hundred-kilocycle radio range had been made operative by Pan American in Miami, G. P. said Amelia would broadcast on radio telephone at a quarter to and a quarter after the hour on 6210 daytime and 3105 at night and would also “try 500 close in” (when she was close to her destination). On June 25 he again informed Black that Amelia would broadcast on 500 (no “close in” this time) as well as 3105 and 6210. He added that her DF (direction finder) covered a range of 200 to 1400 kilocycles.
G. P.’s messages were not the only ones handled by the second man in the triumvirate, Black. He also sent and received information from the Coast Guard in San Francisco, the Navy and Army Air Corps in Honolulu, and the Department of Interior in Washington. In doing so Black proved a constant irritant to the Itasca’s captain Commander Thompson.
A by-the-book, seagoing regular Coast Guard officer, Thompson had been ordered to take his ship to Honolulu ahead of its scheduled departure from San Pedro and, once there, to leave immediately for Howland Island “to act as plane guard and furnish weather” to Amelia Earhart. He had also been required to take along four passengers, two reporters, James Carey of Associated Press and H. N. Hanzlick of United Press, an Army Air Corps observer, Lt. Daniel Cooper, and Black. Without consulting Thompson, Black and Cooper borrowed an experimental DF from the Navy to set up on Howland. Thompson let them bring it along but logged an official opinion that the equipment was inadequate and that the Coast Guard did not request and would not receipt it. When Black recruited several additional radiomen from the Navy, Thompson flatly refused to accept them. Eventually he did add one extra radioman second class from the Coast Guard to the ship’s company.
As soon as the Itasca left Honolulu, Thompson began to organize a chain of weather reporting and relay stations reaching across the Pacific from the west coast to Australia and New Guinea, employing stations at Honolulu, American Samoa, Christmas and Fanning islands, and two other Coast Guard cutters, the Ontario and the Swan, also on plane guard for Amelia. Added to this heavy radio traffic were the messages from and to Black, Putnam, the Department of Interior, and the San Francisco Coast Guard. By June 26, before Amelia left Bandoeng, Thompson could endure no more. He demanded that division headquarters give him complete control of communications. He would do his best for Mr. Black, he said, but Coast Guard–Navy procedures would be used with no interference from San Francisco.
Thompson had done what he could to provide Amelia with weather reports although transmission was so slow that the data was never current. For the other part of his mission, to act as plane guard, he needed to know when and how Earhart intended to communicate with the Itasca once she left Lae. He had the information G. P. had forwarded and Black’s assurances that Amelia would send her requirements to the Itasca, the Ontario stationed between Lae and Howland, and the Swan midway between Howland and Honolulu. He had also seen the message Black sent to Amelia at Darwin, giving her the Ontario’s range as 195 to 600 kilocycles (too low for her without the aerial) and the Swan’s (too far away to matter until after she reached Howland).
Suspecting there were too many amateurs providing information, Thompson wanted to hear directly from Amelia. On June 23, the day the Itasca reached Howland, he sent her a message requesting she advise him at least twelve hours before she left Lae of her preferred frequencies and communications schedule. He would conform to any frequencies she wanted, he said, and pass the information on to the Ontario and Swan.
Two days later he received two contradictory messages, the first from San Francisco and the second from Amelia. San Francisco quoted Amelia as saying her DF range was from 200 to 1500 and 2400 to 4800 kilocycles. However the San Francisco command suggested Thompson should try a low range, 333 or 545, because high frequencies for DF were unreliable. The second message from Amelia directly to Thompson stated that she could not give him a definite broadcasting schedule as yet but would probably give a long call by voice on 3105 at a quarter after the hour and “possibly a quarter to.” She asked that the Ontario transmit on 400 kilocycles the letter “N” for five minutes with its call letters repeated twice at the end of every minute and that the Itasca follow the same procedure using the letter “A” on the half hour at 7500 kilocycles.
What was Thompson to do? With the exception of the Ontario, Amelia was asking for high frequencies up to 7500 from Itasca. San Francisco requested he use 333 or 545 for her DF and gave her highest range as 4800, yet she asked for 7500. Thompson opted for the message directly from Amelia. She was the pilot. Hers would be the key message for him, the one on which he would base his future communications with her. Thompson did not know she had left both her CW or key transmitter and her antennae for receiving 500 kilocycles and below in Miami when he radioed to her that the Itasca’s transmitters were calibrated for 7500, 6210, 500 and 425 on CW (of no use to her without the key) and for 3105, 500 and 425 on voice. The last two were out of her range without the antenna, leaving one—3105—on which she could send and receive, not a reliable range at dawn just before the change from nighttime to daytime frequencies. Thompson also informed her that the ship’s DF worked only from 550 down to 270, again too low for her to receive.
While Thompson worried about radio communication and Putnam worried about publicity, Amelia was more concerned about the weather. She sent daily queries to the Itasca and informed the ship that adverse reports kept her from leaving Lae. Impatient to be off, she was delayed from Wednesday, June 30 to Friday, July 2 (Howland time). The weather was not her only worry. In her report to the Herald Tribune, she said Noonan was unable to set his chronometers because of radio difficulties, but in a private message to G. P. she warned that “radio misunderstanding and personnel unfitness probably will hold one day.” “Personnel” had to be Noonan.
In notes she made for her book on the flight she crossed out one line that read, “I think will have recovered tomorrow,” and left, “perhaps was well did not try to fly today.” Paul Collins said that Amelia called in her report from Lae on June 30 to G. P. at the Herald Tribune office. Gene Vidal was with him and told Collins about the call later. Amelia said she was still having “personnel trouble” but she thought the situation had improved and expected to leave the next day.
On their first night in Lae, Amelia had dined with a local couple, the Eric Chaters, and Fred spent the evening at the hotel with J. A. Collopy, the District Superintendent of Civil Aviation for the Territory of New Guinea. Collopy said he and Noonan “forgot to eat” and were up rather late, long after Amelia retired. When Noonan was escorted to his room by Collopy he failed to see the mosquito netting tucked under the mattress and threw himself onto the bed causing “a very loud noise which awakened the whole place including Amelia.” However, Collopy said, on the night before takeoff, both Noonan and Amelia, who had spent most of her time at the hangar or in her room resting, went to bed early. Noonan told Collopy that he had had some differences with Amelia during the trip but the district superintendent thought none seemed of any consequence and neither Noonan nor Earhart appeared unduly worried about the flight to Howland. They should have been. Although Amelia told Carl Allen that Howland was so small “every aid to locating it must be available,” every aid was not.
Even if Noonan was not drinking he faced a formidable task in locating a sand bar in the mid-Pacific that was two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, with a maximum elevation of twenty-fiv
e feet. His chronometers had given him trouble both in Indonesia and again at Lae. His gyroscope, like most at that time, did not always hold a true course when subject to vibration. He would need star sights for celestial navigation but the latest meteorological reports cited headwinds of twenty to thirty knots with rain squalls and overcast skies for most of the way. The government charts on which Clarence Williams relied for Amelia’s course were inaccurate, placing Howland seven miles northwest of its actual location.
Amelia must have been far more worried than Collopy thought. She invited Harry Balfour, the New Guinea Airways radio operator at Lae, to accompany her and Noonan to Howland either because she wanted someone to watch Noonan or because she realized how inadequate her radio skills were and how desperately they might be needed. She was in a hurry. The weather reports were far from promising but G. P. was pressing for her return and she was eager to put this most difficult leg of the entire journey behind her. The Electra would require a full load of fuel, more than one thousand gallons, for the 2,556-mile flight but she had to take off from a one-thousand-foot-long dirt runway. Once airborne, she needed to calculate her fuel consumption with great accuracy but the Cambridge fuel analyzer had already malfunctioned in India and again in Indonesia. Taking precedence over all these problems was her own exhaustion. Since Miami she had flown on twenty-one of thirty days, on three of those days for more than thirteen hours, and on another seven of them, for more than seven hours. Her previous long-distance flights had been a matter of hours, not weeks. She was never physically strong, only determined. This time her once slim body was emaciated, skin over bones. But if pride and willpower could not get her to Howland, they could not permit her to turn back.
At 10:22 on the morning of July 2 at Lae, the heavily laden Electra lumbered down the crude runway for a “hair-raising” takeoff, earthbound until the last fifty yards. The propellers were so close to the ground their turbulence raised clouds of red dust. For a moment the silver plane was lost to view, disappearing behind the dropoff at the end of the runway. When it reappeared, it was no more than five or six feet above the water of the bay, rising slowly to one hundred feet before it vanished into the morning mist.
For the next seven hours, Lae radioman Harry Balfour was in touch with Amelia. She was on course and 750 miles out when he advised her to maintain the same radio frequency because he was still receiving her clearly. Whether she did or not, he lost her soon after. No one heard from her again until after midnight on Howland. She should have passed over the Ontario where three men kept visual watch and the radio operator stood by but they neither saw nor heard her. The weather had been good in that area until nightfall but after midnight there was a severe squall, lasting until dawn. It might have slowed Amelia down considerably or required a dangerous amount of fuel to outmaneuver.
Not until the early hours of July 2 in the United States did others who waited for news hear that she had left Lae. G. P. was at the Coast Guard radio in San Francisco. Amy was at the North Hollywood house with Amelia’s secretary, Margot DeCarie. Muriel was in Medford, where she had mailed a letter to her mother the day before saying she hoped to “get some broadcasting” fees for radio interviews about her sister, money to be paid on an overdue S.S. Pierce bill. Amelia’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt, who had already declared how relieved she would be when the flight was over, was at Hyde Park for the long July Fourth weekend after the marriage of Franklin, Jr., and Ethel DuPont on June 30. They all waited but there was no more news.
Aboard the Itasca Commander Thompson was worried. He did not even know when she left Lae until San Francisco radioed him two reports, the first of which gave the wrong time. She had not acknowledged any of the weather reports the Itasca sent on the hour and half hour starting at midnight. At 2:45 A.M. chief radioman Leo G. Bellarts heard her, along with the two wire-service reporters, Carey and Hanzlick, who recognized her voice.
At 3: 45 they heard her again. This time so did Black and Lt. Cooper, standing with Hanzlick and Carey in the doorway of the radio shack, which was off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Her voice was muffled, the delivery abrupt but they heard “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycle on hour and half hour.”
On schedule at 4 A.M., the Itasca called her on 3105 asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge this message on your next schedule.”
She did not.
At 4: 53 A.M., while the Itasca was sending her the weather in code and voice on 3015, Amelia broke in, off her schedule, with a garbled message at a volume of S-1, the lowest grade of five, too faint to discern anything except, “partly cloudy,” before she was drowned out by static.
Thirty minutes later, Lt. Cooper and radioman Frank Cipriani went ashore to Howland to man the high-frequency radio borrowed from the Navy and powered by gun batteries from the ship.
At 6: 14 A.M. Amelia came in again on schedule, fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, according to Noonan’s ETA. The volume had increased to S-3. “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour,” Amelia said. “Will whistle in microphone.” Her whistle was difficult to distinguish from the whining sounds of Pacific radio reception at dawn. Cipriani could not get a “fix” on her.
At 6: 45, fifteen minutes past Noonan’s ETA, Amelia came in at S-4. “Please take bearing on us and report in a half hour. I will make noise in microphone. About one hundred miles out.” Her voice was clear but the message too brief to take a bearing on her.
Answering her request for a bearing in a half hour the Itasca broke its own schedule and broadcast to her by voice on 3105 at 7: 18, “Cannot take bearing on 3105 very good. Please send on 500 or do you wish to take bearing on us?”
There was no answer.
At 7: 42 she came in at S-5, her delivery much as Paul Mantz once described it, “a quick drawl like from a rain barrel.”
“We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A second radioman’s log, claiming she said “Only one-half hour gas left,” was verified by other witnesses.
The Itasca’s operators immediately began transmitting on both 3105 and 500 assuring her that they heard her and asking her to acknowledge. A minute later she came in again, “Earhart calling Itasca. We are circling but cannot hear you. Go ahead on 7500 either now or on the schedule time on half hour.” Her voice registered a loud S-5.
At eight o’clock Amelia acknowledged the Itasca for the first time, again at S-5 volume. “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We received your signals but unable to get a minimum [a bearing]. Please take bearing on us and answer on 3105 with voice.”
The Itasca’s answer was that it could not take a bearing on 3105 because its DF worked only up to 500 kilocycles. The operator on Howland heard her on the Navy high frequency DF at 3105 but again, her transmission was too brief to get a bearing. From 8: 07 to 8: 41 the ship’s operators transmitted and listened on all wavelengths including 7500 because it was the only one on which she had acknowledged having heard the Itasca, just before eight o’clock.
Apprehensive about the flight from the beginning, Commander Thompson now knew he faced a real emergency. Not once in her messages had Amelia given him her position, her course, her speed, or her ETA. She was past the ETA Noonan had sent from Lae, and the half-hour of gas she mentioned at 7:42 would have been exhausted. On Howland, Cipriani could not get a bearing on her because her messages were too brief and by this time he had exhausted the gun batteries on which he operated the high frequency DF.
At 8:44 Amelia’s voice—shrill and breathless, her words tumbling over one another—came in at S-5 on 3105 kilocycles. “We are on the line of position 156-137. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”
The Itasca responded immediately, continuing to transmit by voice and key and to listen on every frequency she might use. There was no answer. Twenty
-three days before her fortieth birthday Amelia Earhart’s last flight was finished. The death that she called part of her “high risk” profession must have come as she wished. “When I go,” she said, “I would like to go in my plane. Quickly.”
Over the nine years spanning her first and last transoceanic flights, Amelia Earhart became one of the most famous women in the world. The private Amelia disliked that fame intensely. But the public Amelia played on it relentlessly as a platform on which to fight for her ideals of equality for women, international peace, and a world where flying would be a commonplace, acceptable and accessible to all. She lived—and died—in dogged pursuit of her vision, and by so doing brought it ever closer to reality.
* For countries whose names have changed since 1937, current country names are designated in brackets.
† Anne Lindbergh thought the CW transmission and reception so important that by 1931 she had a license and could send and receive an acceptable seventeen words per minute.
‡ That same day Amelia’s name appeared in a story she would have liked. Equal Rights magazine’s lead editorial called her an “ardent feminist” who had set off to make aviation history circling the globe and who deserved credit for her well-articulated views on women’s rights.
EPILOGUE
Amelia Earhart was the object of the most extensive mass rescue attempt ever made for a single lost plane. Four thousand men manning ten ships and sixty-five airplanes combed two hundred fifty thousand square miles of the Pacific—an area as large as Texas—in a sixteen-day search. The Itasca and Swan were joined by the battleship Colorado, the aircraft carrier Lexington, three destroyers, a British freighter, and two Japanese naval vessels. They found no trace of the Electra and on July 19 naval authorities declared the search for Amelia Earhart was over. They were wrong. It had only begun. Nothing she might have said or done, no scheme George Palmer Putnam might have designed, could so enhance Earhart’s renown as the mystery of her disappearance. She had been famous. By vanishing she became legendary.
Amelia Earhart Page 32
