11.Flying in California
California was a wonderful place for flying. In the summer of that year—it was 1920 and she was an exuberant twenty-two—Amelia had dragged her reluctant father from his Sunday newspapers and persuaded him to take her to an air meet at Daugherty Field, out on the far stretches of Long Beach. By the time they arrived, Mr. Earhart was hot and uncomfortable. He ran a long finger under his wilted collar, and mopped the sweat and dust from his face. He could not understand his daughter Millie’s enthusiasm for airplanes. After you had seen one, he affirmed, you had seen them all.
Amelia was fascinated at the sight of the old Jennys and Canucks. They were the same kind of planes she had seen at Armor Heights in Toronto. A man in uniform with an “official” badge pinned to his coat passed in front of her. She took her father by the arm. “Dad,” she asked, “please ask that man how long it takes to learn how to fly.”
Mr. Earhart went to talk to the official; then he returned tohis daughter. “He says it’s different with different people.” Then he added, “The average time is between five and ten hours.”
Amelia reflected on the report. “Please ask him how much lessons cost.”
Unwillingly Mr. Earhart went to the official again. When he came back he said, “The answer to that question is one thousand dollars.”
All the way home Amelia thought about the $1,000. It was more money than she had ever had, and she wondered where she could get such a large sum. Her father did not seem to share her interest, and she did not know how her mother would react to the idea of her taking flying lessons. She would begin her campaign by first asking her father if she could take just one ride in a plane.
She finally coaxed him into taking her out to Rogers Airport. They ate a hurried breakfast then took the streetcar to the outskirts of town, to an open space at Fairfax and Wilshire boulevards which was the airfield.
A young pilot of about Amelia’s age, noting prospective customers, came forward and introduced himself. He was Frank Hawks and he would one day establish numerous records as a famous racing pilot. Amelia told him she wanted to go up for a ride.
Frank Hawks glanced at the tall, slight build of the girl in the high-laced shoes. He was unimpressed. If she wanted to go, he told her, she would have to suffer another passenger in the same seat with her, and he nodded to his companion standing by the plane. Hawks didn’t trust frightened females in his airplane. Amelia saw that argument was pointless and agreed to the conditions.
The pilots helped her into the front cockpit. Hawks climbed into the rear seat, and his friend squeezed in beside Amelia. A mechanic swung the propeller and the plane came suddenly to life. AE watched the whirling blur before her and covered her ears to shut out the deafening blast. The plane started to rollover the uneven ground to the far end of the field, then it turned and stopped.
The wings and fuselage shook as the motor clattered wide open. Amelia screwed up her face to the noise. The plane began to move down the take-off run, dipping and bumping as it picked up speed. Then, suddenly, it broke cleanly into the air. As suddenly Amelia was thrilled: she felt as if she were floating on a cushion of air.
She looked down from 300 feet. Trees and ground were speeding by; everything was getting smaller as the plane climbed into the sky. The automobiles on Wilshire Boulevard looked like black bugs, the houses like toys.
The plane leveled off. “Two thousand feet,” Hawks shouted from the back seat. Amelia looked over the side of the cockpit. The oil derricks on the edge of the city were directly below; farther out, the Hollywood hills and the ocean.
Hawks nosed the plane into a steep glide, then tipped up the wing into a turn. The wind whistled over the wings and through the struts and cross wires.
Amelia braced her arm against the instrument panel. She smiled as she rose slightly from the seat. The stick in front of her angled forward; she wanted to hold it. When she reached out a hand, the man beside her shook his head and pushed the hand aside.
She turned quickly left and right in the seat, then tapped her feet on the floor. How wonderful to climb and turn and dive through the air! She felt buoyant, light, free—something she had never known before. A warm wave of exhilaration surged through her.
The plane had landed and the flight was over too soon. AE was on the ground but her thoughts were still in the sky. She knew now that she would have to fly again, whatever the cost. As soon as she had left the ground on that take-off she had known it. She now understood what had lured the young Canadian pilots into the air.
That evening she had to tell her family about her plans. “I think I’d like to learn to fly,” she said finally, when the supper dishes were being cleared from the table.
“You aren’t really serious, are you?” her father said. “I thought you were just wishing. I can’t afford to let you have instruction.”
Amelia was by no means defeated. She would find other ways of getting the money. She would get a job and pay for her lessons by herself. She was now old enough to decide what she wanted to do with her life. Her father’s decision forced the issue and broke the financial ties she had grown to depend upon.
Amelia found a job with the Los Angeles telephone company. It paid little, but sorting mail and running errands provided enough to get started with her lessons. She worked five days a week, leaving her with weekends to spend at the flying field. Neta Snook, an early woman flier and a graduate of the Curtiss Flying School, was her first instructor.
Early one Saturday morning AE rolled out of bed. She was wearing a leather flying jacket over her pajamas. For the last several nights she had been sleeping in it to give it a worn look. She didn’t want the curious to know that she was a novice at flying. She ate her breakfast quickly; she wanted to be out of the house before seven o’clock.
The ride out to the airport took more than an hour to the end of the carline, then she had to walk another three miles along the dusty highway to the field. Amelia wore her riding breeches, her high leather boots, and her leather jacket; tucked under her arm was her leather helmet and goggles. Although she had not soloed yet, she felt like a flier. And to complete the woman-flier portrait, she had been secretly snipping away at her hair.
Instructor Neta Snook and student Amelia Earhart must have looked strange to the casual onlooker. What were these two women doing, dressing like men and climbing into an airplane?
Neither woman cared. Why couldn’t a woman enjoy the pleasures and run the risks of flight? Snooky did not troubleherself about how she looked: she was comfortable in a pair of mechanic’s dirty coveralls. Tall and slender, Amelia, with her hair pushed under her helmet, looked like a handsome boy. She was not concerned about her appearance; she was being practical: the field was dusty and the plane was difficult to climb into. The jodhpurs and jacket, like the gym suits she wore as a little girl, made good sense.
Amelia was glad that Neta Snook was her first instructor. With a woman to teach her she felt less self-conscious about taking lessons; any of the men fliers, who overwhelmed her with their abilities, would have scared her away, at least in the first difficult stages of learning how to fly. Her self-confidence was still shaky and insecure.
AE learned slowly but well. At first Neta showed her how to read the instruments, how to start and rev up the engine, how to check the magnetoes, follow through on stick, rudders, and throttle as she took the Canuck off, climbed, made gentle turns to the left and right, and came in for a landing.
After a few weeks Amelia had learned how to fly a quadrangular course. This had been difficult at first in the light plane. She had to fly around a fenced-off field by keeping the right wing, at a steady altitude of 1,000 feet, exactly in line with the fence. She would angle in to the line, move swiftly downwind, turn steeply into the wind and crab along the cross-wind leg, then level out and move slowly upwind. The fourth leg was the hardest, for it meant a shallow turn with the wind to stay on course. The maneuver around the field demanded coordination of up and down and left and right. But Amelia could see the point of the exercise: if she could successfully work stick, rudder, and throttle in getting around the field, she would have learned the basic requirements for a landing pattern.
Then Neta taught her stalls and spins. These had to be mastered soon if she hoped someday to solo. Again Amelia followed through on the controls. AE sat in the rear cockpit and studied Neta’s every move with stick, throttle, and rudder.Neta reduced throttle, pulled up the nose until the wing stalled; the plane plunged down, then she jammed the stick forward and added throttle to pull out of the dive. This was a simple stall, and Amelia soon commanded the necessary skill to recover the plane.
A spin was more involved; again Neta proved that the Curtiss Flying School had taught her well. As before she pulled the plane back into a stall, but now she kicked the right rudder hard, snapping the wing over. The plane spun to the right, and Amelia, getting dizzier from each tightening whirl, tried to concentrate on Neta’s recovery. Neta applied opposite rudder to the direction of the spin, straightening the wings; then she thrust the stick forward, adding power, and slowly came back on the stick to bring the nose back onto the horizon. Amelia thought the maneuver too complicated to master, but after several attempts with Snooky patiently guiding her through each step, she finally learned. Her reactions became quick, sure, and accurate.
Having learned how to take off and land, and how to recover from stalls and spins, Amelia began to radiate with the new sense of power which these basic skills and accomplishments had given her. She was eager to get on with her lessons, but there was never enough money to pay for them. Much of her instruction from Neta had been on credit, and her job with the telephone company scarcely paid enough to meet all costs. It became immediately clear to her that she needed a better-paying job. She found one a few days later in a most unlikely occupation for a girl—driving a truck for a sand and gravel company.
By this time Amy Earhart realized that her daughter was serious about flying, and she decided to help. On the condition that Amelia would spend more time at home, Mrs. Earhart let her have some of the money she had been saving over the years. Amelia readily agreed to the terms.
To her sorrow, however, when she returned to the field a few weeks later to tell Neta Snook the good news, AE learned that Neta, herself desperate for funds, had sold her plane. Disappointedbut not discouraged, Amelia turned to a man to help her through enough lessons so that she could solo. Fortunately, her choice of a new instructor was a good one. He was John Montijo, a former Army instructor with hundreds of hours of experience in the air. And what was more, he was patient and unexcitable before the most trying stupidities of his students. He was demanding, but very knowing and skillful in his ability to teach others.
Amelia learned quickly from him. And she insisted that he teach her acrobatics before he allowed her to go up alone. She wanted to have complete mastery of the Kinner Airster biplane. She knew that if she could stunt the plane, she would then have the necessary confidence to recover the plane from whatever attitude it might assume.
Under Montijo’s guidance, her reactions to the most unusual conditions of flight became as trigger fast as they were in the more normal spins and stalls. She practiced for hours doing slips and split-S’s, loops and rolls, lazy-eights and Immelmanns.
Amelia had gained such a sure degree of skill from her new instructor that when her time to solo finally came she had lost all nervousness and fear. She reversed the usual procedure for the first flight alone. Most fledglings she had watched took off with a joyful sweep and circled the field; then—suddenly ground shy—they kept circling until the tanks ran dry and they had to summon the courage to land. The necessary judgment for a good landing is one of the first tests of a good pilot, and AE hoped that hers would be as smooth as John’s always were.
On the day of her solo Amelia walked out to her plane with the graceful ease of newly won self-assurance. Her patent-leather jacket gleamed in the sun; her high leather flying boots, carefully laced over the tight-fitting breeches, kicked up the dust as she walked; her white shirt, jauntily opened at the neck, revealed the inevitable feminine touch. She stepped onto the lower wing of the plane and swung into the front cockpit. She buckled her helmet and set her goggles over her eyes. A mechanic spun the wooden propeller and the biplane headed out to the runway forthe take-off. As the plane rolled down the barren strip, gaining speed for the take-off, Amelia felt the right wing sag just before the plane should have lifted into the air. Instinctively, AE chopped the throttle, pulled back the spark-control lever, and settled the plane onto the ground. Getting out to see what had gone wrong, Amelia noticed that one of the shock absorbers had collapsed.
After the damage had been repaired, Amelia, taking courage anew, tried again. She inched the throttle forward, and when the plane had more than enough flying speed, she eased back on the stick, waiting an anxious moment for the plane to break from the ground. The shock absorber held, and the Airster sprang from the end of the runway. Gently, almost caressingly, Amelia coordinated throttle and stick, aileron and rudder, in her climbing turns out of take-off. Suddenly, as she leveled the wings and straightened the nose, she realized an overwhelming fact: she was alone, gloriously alone. She was in complete command of the surging power from the engine and it was just at her fingertips to obey her will and no other.
Her nerve ends had multiplied, for now the power of the engine was her power and had become part of her own body, and the wings and fuselage andempennagewere extensions of her own limbs. She climbed and dived and turned, pranking the air in the thrill and exhilaration of new-found love. The awareness of soaring flight now struck her consciousness as if for the first time. She was now the master of her life, her destiny, and perhaps her death. The realization brought a bitter joy and a livid loneliness, but beyond them lay a new kind of freedom and a blessed peace.
Buoyant and elated, she swung the plane into the landing pattern. Feeling too confident, she neglected to lose enough flying speed in her final approach to the runway, and when she tried to touch the plane down, it kept bouncing off the ground and back into the air. Finally, realizing that she had not cut the power, she pulled the throttle all the way back and held thestick hard against her middle. The engine sputtered, the wing stalled, and the plane thumped to the ground.
When she had taxied the plane to the parking area, some of the other pilots came running over to her. “Congratulations!” they shouted. “How did it feel?” they asked. “Were you scared?”
Amelia felt guilty and somewhat silly, but she certainly had not been frightened. She was ashamed of her rotten landing, but took some comfort in what John Montijo had once told her. All landings are good ones, he said, if you can walk away from them. Amelia was proud that she had finally soloed; by flying only on weekends, she had taken months to do what others had done in just a few weeks of constant instruction. She turned to one of the men standing near her plane and asked him to take her picture out in front of the Kinner. She posed like a wistful maiden who is going to announce her engagement in the society section of the Sunday newspapers. She smiled softly and held her arms out from her body, her hands angled, her fingers pointed. The camera clicked.