Amelia (9 page)

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.

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
:

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.

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.

Earhart stopped in Lae, New Guinea, before going on to tiny Howland Island in the middle of the Pacific. She risked running into the monsoon season, and the 2,256-mile flight from Lae would be the longest hop of the whole trip. Even more difficult, Howland Island was just a tiny speck in the vast Pacific, a half-mile wide and a mile-and-a-half long. It lay some 1,532 miles southwest of Honolulu. Noonan would need every ounce of his skill to find it. And to make the task still harder - though no one knew it at the time - the island’s position on the charts was about five nautical miles from its actual location.

Elaborate arrangements were in place to help Noonan. The Coast Guard cutter
Itasca
was to meet Earhart’s plane with supplies when she arrived at Howland Island, and the press reported colorful details about the “surveying and marking [of] three runways and attempts to scare away thousands of birds” to prepare for the landing.

The
Itasca’
s radio would help Earhart and Noonan pinpoint their location and find the island. Two other American ships were also nearby, and, as Earhart’s plane neared, they were to burn every light they had, marking the way to the island just as French ships had marked the way from South America to Africa. The
Itasca
also fired up its oil-powered boilers to generate smoke as a visual signal. But if Earhart saw any of this, she gave no sign.

When Earhart and Noonan had arrived at Lae, they had 22,000 miles behind them, more than two-thirds of the itinerary. They expected the next leg to be tricky, if not downright dangerous, because it was so long and the island so hard to see. But they were also worn out after all that flying and, understandably, in a hurry to beat the weather – or so people later surmised. In their haste or exhaustion before taking off from Lae on July 1, they failed to communicate all the details of the radio frequencies they would be using and making sure their radio could handle them. That was a fatal mistake.

At first, there was hope that Earhart and Noonan might be found. Ruth Elder, who survived a crash in the Azores after a fuel line broke during an attempted flight to Paris, gave hope to newspaper readers: “I feel in my heart that Amelia will be rescued. I know exactly how she feels, floating around some place in the Pacific, the sun beating down on her as she prays that a ship is somewhere nearby. It was only an hour before we were rescued, but it seemed like ages.”

Some reacted to the news with shock, at a loss for the words to express disbelief.
Life
conveyed the disbelief and awe felt by many: “The cold fact was that her flight, despite the scientific equipment also aboard her flying laboratory, was undertaken as a stunt – the kind of dangerous stunt of which the Federal Government now strongly disapproves. But this was of small importance to Earhart.”

Walter Lippmann
, a political commentator, spoke for many in his poetic reaction to Earhart’s loss: “The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia’s adventure. Such persons . . . prove that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton, no mere cog in the collective machine but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.”

Theories abounded in the aftermath. It was suggested that the direction-finding loop antenna on the Electra was new technology and Earhart may not have understood it, or maybe the antenna, which was mounted underneath the fuselage, got damaged in takeoff. Or perhaps communications with the
Itasca
were planned using different time systems set half an hour apart - Earhart on Greenwich Civil Time and
Itasca
using a naval-zone system. Others theorized that the radio simply malfunctioned because of the technical problems Earhart had described to Putnam. We will never know. What was clear afterwards was that Earhart’s plane was sending signals with no problem, and they were getting through. But her radio wasn’t hearing the answers.