by Nancy Nahra
In Elliott’s vision, having Earhart at his university, no matter what she did, would boost his efforts to convince women students to enroll in technical courses. He was convinced that fields like engineering and other scientific areas, including agricultural science, would advance more quickly with an infusion of female talent.
Elliott’s idea immediately helped Purdue, where female enrollment went up 50 percent – especially when Earhart’s affiliation became known. She threw herself into the effort. In her view, no university would have been better: She knew that Purdue had its own airport.
Not seeing her position as honorary or merely a gimmick, Earhart moved in – literally. Enjoying the new adventure, the high-flying guest settled into life in a dormitory. She spent time with students, answered their questions, talked to them about career plans, and sat with them at meals.
But Elliott kept looking for even more ways to let Earhart help him advance Purdue and the study of science. He had majored in chemistry as an undergraduate. He compensated for the hardships of the Great Depression by getting New Deal funds for his university. A supple and imaginative thinker, Elliott helped start several corporations that would help the university. One of these was the Purdue Aeronautics Corporation. Now he heard of a new idea that combined flying and science. It matched his own thinking about collaboration between industry and education.
At a social occasion, Elliot heard Earhart talk about her interest in a formal scientific study to analyze how long-distance flying affected pilots. The practical-minded Elliot saw how useful such data could be to the airline industry. Calling upon donors, Elliot quickly raised the $80,000 needed for a flying laboratory. The fund he created, The Amelia Fund for Aeronautical Research, also provided Earhart the money for a new plane, a Lockheed Electra modified for long flights. That plane would transport the flying laboratory.
A plane equipped with numerous scientific instruments could gather data from a wide sample of climates and altitudes. Using that data, scientists at Purdue could promote their own work, publish their findings, and add to the prestige of the university.
Earhart saw the project as an opportunity to get a new plane. She had already said that her dear old Vega, Bessie, was getting old. She knew she needed a new plane, but the model she wanted was more than she could afford. The plane Earhart dreamed of needed capabilities beyond what the Vega could possibly deliver.
Now she was being offered such a plane.
A New Adventure
It was time for a new adventure. In recent years, Amelia Earhart had watched opportunities for record-breaking flying dwindle. She had flown the Atlantic, flown the Pacific, and seen commercial carriers start to offer flights over distances that had once made headlines. Now she was eager for a bigger adventure than anything that she - or anyone else - had tried.
Recognition coming from a university president heartened Earhart because it affirmed her efforts to help women interested in aviation. Now she came up with more ways to reach that goal. She wrote to the president of the Airline Pilots Association with a simple question: Why did that organization exclude women pilots?
In her public appearances and speeches, she repeated that theme consistently. She spoke eloquently about aviation as standing out from other forms of scientific progress. With skill and competence – as a speaker rather than as a pilot – she explained why aviation was a wonder: “Among all the marvels of modern invention, that with which I am most concerned is, of course, air transportation. Flying is perhaps the most dramatic of recent scientific attainments.”
In few words, she reminded people of how quickly this young field had grown: “In the brief span of thirty-odd years the world has seen an inventor’s dream, first materialized by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, become an everyday actuality.”
She also discussed how the future of air transportation mattered for women: “Perhaps I’m prejudiced but it seems that no other phase of modern progress contrives to maintain such a . . . measure of romance and beauty, coupled with utility, as does aviation.”
Then, she extolled the practical application of science. Her detailed technical knowledge would have allowed a lengthy elaboration at this point, but she cut it short in the interest of rhetorical appeal: “Within itself this industry embraces many of those scientific accomplishments which yesterday seemed fantastic in possibility. . . . Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women to the creations of science. Although women as yet have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them as to men.”
That wonderful year, 1935, before she started the academic year at the Purdue campus, Earhart had off-campus business to attend to. Setting several flying records added to her confidence. Now it was time to talk to Washington.
Earhart had always hated to wear a hat, but she knew there were times when she had to, and she did – grudgingly. Now, after she “strode into” a Senate hearing committee, she took off her brown felt hat and put it on the table. She had come to enlighten the men who sat before her.
She had recently resigned her job as aeronautical expert at the Department of Commerce. (To make it clear that she did the work as a public service, she agreed to work for a token salary of $1 a year.)
A Democratic senator - and Earhart was a lifelong Democrat - proposed to give the Interstate commerce Commission authority over aviation. Senators reasoned, and Earhart agreed, that it made sense to regulate aviation in coordination with other forms of transportation, but she cautioned the committee that they were on the wrong track by requiring airlines to give certificates of convenience and necessity for scheduled operations. She explained that they would be getting in their own way.
Several months later, political leaders everywhere knew the name Helen Richey. And they knew she was a close friend of Earhart. Now the most famous female flyer in the world was helping a younger pilot whose career had stalled.
Central Airlines had hired Richey but maintained that her gender gave her a handicap in her work; she resigned. Insisting that she had left Central Airlines “in a friendly spirit,” Richey could not get her career as pilot ignited again. She had been hired on a mail line as a co-pilot, but she could not get the pilots’ union to accept her, because the Department of Commerce would not authorize her to fly in bad weather.
Word of Richey’s experience, and Earhart’s support, galvanized feminists, who championed Richey. (Published reports carefully did not count Earhart a feminist.) But stories all focused on Earhart.
The old question came up again: Did women have the strength to fly transport flights? Earhart argued that women did have the necessary strength, and she knew why. A transport license, the most difficult to get, required a pilot to log 1,000 hours of flying. Some women had those licenses - seventy-two in the whole country - but none of those women had jobs on transport lines, which meant jobs flying air mail, very good jobs.
Now, backtracking, Department of Commerce air officials claimed, “It was just an informal suggestion made to the airline,” that had cost Richey her job, not a regulation. Earhart was making sure to make noise on behalf of women who wanted to fly, and be paid.
“Noted Scientists to Open Museum”
Because so much novelty still surrounded aviation, and because so few pilots were women, Earhart found herself classified as a woman pilot – and often that was all. It took time for her scientific interest in flying to be appreciated. Bold ideas were easily eclipsed by the physical courage and daring demonstrated by the risks she took. But after her association with Purdue University, her stature grew, allowing her interest in science to become part of her identity. Proof of that public awareness reached a high point in 1936, when she was invited to join scientists of world renown for the opening of a new museum in New York.
Promoting a new concept, the New York Museum of Science and Industry, promised scientific advances at a time when the public needed to believe in progress and have hope. Its location in New
York’s Rockefeller Center put the museum at the country’s financial center, a magnet for researchers looking for support. To convey the ambition of the museum, its opening stopped at nothing to demonstrate the level of excellence it meant to achieve. The newspaper accounts of the museum’s dedication read like a Who’s Who of science: Albert Einstein, Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, Sir William Bragg (a Nobel Prize winner whose son would also be a Nobel laureate), Robert A. Millikan, also a Nobel laureate, all participated. And so did Earhart.
From that illustrious roster, only Einstein was actually at the museum to speak. Other participants depended on technology to add their presence. Marconi from Rome, Bragg from the Royal Institute in London, Millikan from Pasadena, California, and Earhart from Santa Ana, California. New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was also present. Reinforcing the same alliance between science and industry that Purdue encouraged, the museum included exhibits of the laboratories of four large companies: General Electric, B.F. Goodrich, Eastman Kodak, and Bell Telephone. Science and education, two causes with which Earhart associated herself more and more, made it not only appropriate but necessary for her to be there.
Before long, Earhart did have a much bigger project – and a grander trophy – in her sights.
The first woman to solo across the Atlantic Ocean and fresh from a record-setting flight over part of the Pacific, Amelia Earhart now aimed to become the first woman to fly around the world. And she wanted to circle the earth where it is widest, staying as close as possible to the equator. “I have the feeling,” she wrote a friend, “there’s just one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this is it. It is my swan song as far as record flying is concerned, my frosting on the cake.”
Other pilots had circumnavigated the globe but by much shorter routes. For a flight of such long duration, Earhart would have to forsake Old Bessie for a newer plane custom-designed for long distances. The best available was Lockheed’s twin-engine Electra Model 10E. To make room for extra fuel tanks, passenger seats were removed.
To raise money, George Putnam came up with the idea of selling postal covers to stamp collectors. Envelopes commemorating the flight were signed by Earhart and addressed to buyers. Earhart would mail the envelopes from stops along the route. Putnam sold 10,000 of the covers for $5 each, and collectors still trade them.
Earhart intended to file dispatches during her trip, allowing newspaper readers to track her progress. But thanks to a deal that Putnam negotiated, her reports would have more commercial value than ordinary news stories. He brokered an arrangement with the New York Herald-Tribune to have Earhart write a syndicated column. And once she got back, no time would be wasted: He put together a lecture tour that would begin practically as soon as she landed. Another book contract with Harcourt was also in the works.
In need of an experienced navigator to fly with Earhart, trusted friends recommended Fred Noonan, a licensed ship’s captain who had helped develop routes for what would become Pan American Airways. Earhart and Noonan didn’t actually know each other, but they got along well and quickly learned that they could speak frankly.
Noonan confessed that he had had a drinking problem, but Earhart weighed that against his reputation as a skilled navigator. Noonan was legendary for getting accurate readings of a plane’s location by using exceedingly simple instruments: His skills won out.
The relationship between pilot and navigator, critical to the success of any mission, was complicated: Noonan had experience flying over some of the ground they would cover, but there were clouds on his record, all related to drinking. When she decided to give the navigator a second chance, was she offering what no one had offered her father? She knew that her trusted friend Gene Vidal advised against choosing Noonan, but she also knew that Noonan was now “all right” (not drinking). So much of her career had been built on taking risks, what could one more amount to?
Meaning to fly from east to west, Earhart set out with Noonan and two friends on March 17, 1937, flying from Oakland to Honolulu. The voyage ended there when her plane needed minor repairs and then ground-looped as she was trying to take off on the next leg. (Ground loop is a rapid rotation of an aircraft in the horizontal plane while on the ground.) Some witnesses said a tire blew out, others said the right landing gear collapsed. Still others blamed pilot error. Whatever the cause, the Electra suffered significant damage and had to be shipped back to California and repaired at the Lockheed plant. “After she cracked up the plane in Honolulu,” biographer Doris Rich said, “she felt fear for the first time, definitely. The immensity of the project suddenly hit her. She knew that if she lost the plane or failed in this, they were dead broke, both [Earhart and Putnam].”
For her next attempt in June, Earhart decided to go the other way, from west to east, the direction of prevailing winds along the route. This time, she and Noonan flew without fanfare from Oakland to Miami. There, Earhart announced that she was on her way around the world.
She planned to head south to the easternmost point of South America, then cross the Atlantic close to the equator. It would be Earhart’s first crossing of the equator itself, but Noonan was a veteran at flying the Caribbean and South American routes for what would become Pan Am. Their first flight took them to San Juan, Puerto Rico, an eight-hour trip. Earhart’s spirit of playfulness surfaced in the press reports she filed, complete with a geography lesson. A detailed map usually accompanied her reports now written in the third person to The New York Times:
Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, June 3 [1937] – Amelia made a 750-mile hop over South American jungles today to get to Dutch Guiana and then had to ride twenty-five miles on a trolley-car. . . . Her next hop is to Natal, on Brazil’s easternmost tip. . . . The distance is roughly 1,600 miles. . . . After that, she intends to make the over-ocean jump to Dakar, Senegal. Dakar is about 1,900 miles from Natal. . . . She plans to stay as near the equator as is feasible.
For the People at Home, a Saga
Africa scared Earhart. Before the flight, her friend Gene Vidal asked her: “What bothers you most?”
“Africa . . . terrifies me. If you were forced down in those jungles, they would never find you. And there’s a lot of it - and you look at the equator, there’s an awful lot of Africa - it’s very fat.”
Africa scared Noonan, too. They needed all of his skills as a navigator to cross the continent. No detailed map existed, and Noonan’s expertise told him that the available charts were not accurate. Falling back on celestial navigation, calculating his position from the sun, the stars, and accurate clocks, Noonan guided the plane over a huge expanse with few landmarks.
Earhart’s flight became an epic saga for people back home. Newspapers carried near-daily stories about her whereabouts, her doings, and her hardships. The sustained excitement resembled a sports tournament, with fans keeping maps in hand instead of scorecards. No detail seemed too trivial to record. Earhart’s reports noted, for instance, that she and Noonan were starting their days early to escape the afternoon heat. The dispatch on her stopover on June 11 at Fort Lamy, in French Equatorial Africa, reported that Earhart was keeping some details private, not disclosing when she planned to leave. But “after the flight to Khartoum,” the report said, “she plans to push on to India.”
In general, the press treated the flight as a serious scientific expedition, not a stunt. They referred to her plane as a “flying laboratory,” with its instruments outfitted by Purdue University.
The further Earhart got from the United States, the more difficult it became to make contact with her. Readers learned that sometimes she was genuinely out of reach.
When Earhart’s own dispatches weren’t available, the papers scrambled for second-hand reports, and not every story that turned up was true. One cable to The New York Times from London noted that, according to a “reliably informed” British correspondent at Aden (now Yemen), Earhart would be quarantined for nine days once she reached India because she had landed in a yellow-fever area in Africa. Apparently,
no one in India got the message. The next headline read: “Miss Earhart Lands on Fourth Continent: Reaches Karachi, India, on Her Flight Around World – Plans Hop to Australia Tomorrow.”
Earhart and Noonan had an unconfined and brief stay in Karachi, not yet split from India as part of Pakistan. As a pilot, she admired the city for its airdrome, the largest she had found anywhere. From Karachi, she flew to Calcutta on her way to Australia.
The stories suggested that Earhart’s plans often had to be changed. Readers could follow these changes without worrying that anything had gone wrong: “Miss Earhart made tentative plans to take off again on Thursday, depending on the weather,” read one dispatch. On the one hand, weather and supply shortages could slow her down, but, on the other, she was now in well-charted territory used by commercial airlines, including Noonan’s former employer: “Her itinerary calls for stops at Darwin, Australia, then across the Pacific Ocean along the island route of Pan American Airways,” the news read.
Behind her lay South America, the Atlantic, and Africa. Ahead she still had to cross the Indian Ocean, then Australia, and the Pacific before reaching the planned finish line at her takeoff point in Oakland, California.
Putnam’s Odd Misgivings
Leaving rainy India called for some quick adaptation to poor runway conditions. The plane had to lose some weight, and that meant flying with less fuel and limiting the range of the next leg. Instead of making it to Bangkok, Thailand, Earhart and Noonan got only as far as Rangoon, Burma. There, the American consul graciously lent them his car.
Next readers learned of a setback: Forced to backtrack a little in Indonesia, they had to return from Surabaya to Bandung, Java, for “instrument repairs.” The pair climbed back into the plane only after Earhart spoke to Putnam by telephone. Putnam was missing her and worrying more each day. He suggested she terminate the flight, even as far along as New Guinea, if she could not fix the new problems she was reporting. The problems had to do with radios, which neither Earhart nor Noonan knew anything about.
