2.New Route, New Preparations
“Hamlet would have been a bad aviator,” Amelia once said. “He worried too much. The time to worry,” she added, “is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit.”
Contrary to her injunction, AE, like the melancholy Dane, worried, but only for two months before she reattempted the world flight. In May the Electra would be repaired and ready again.
After the accident at Luke Field, messages offering encouragement poured in from everywhere. Loyal friends helped her to pick up the pieces and start again.
The brush with death she had taken as a fatalist. “Someday,” she told GP, “I will get bumped off. There’s so much to do, so much fun here; I don’t want to go. But when I do go, I’d like to go in my plane. Quickly.”
The old plans, most of them, would now have to be scrapped. Routes and weather conditions would have to be restudied. Where rains had been in March, there were now none; where winds had once proven favorable, they would now prove adverse; where monsoons had been predicted, there would now be dust storms.
For a world flight beginning in late May, the advantage seemed to lay in flying west to east. To beat the bad weather predicted for the first legs of the route, she would have to be through the Caribbean and Africa by the middle of June. If she left from Miami, the flight to Florida could serve as a final shakedown for the Electra. Amelia decided on a west-east route.
The reversal of flight plans brought on countless difficulties and greatly added expense. Fuel, oil, spare parts, mechanicswould now have to be relocated. Typical was the change involved in one engine overhaul. A mechanic had been dispatched from London to Karachi; he would now have to be reassigned elsewhere.
Having taken the warning of Bradford Washburn about radio facilities on the ground, AE had made arrangements with the Coast Guard to have one of its cutters stationed at Howland Island, so that the Electra could home in on the ship’s radio signals. All this had to be worked out again, and GP contacted Richard Black of the Department of the Interior to rearrange the necessary coordination.
Credentials had to be re-examined and reacquired. New approval for plane and pilot was secured from the Bureau of Aeronautics. Charts were replotted for the new routes, and hours had to be spent at Lockheed consulting with the engineers and the mechanics.
In blessed relief from the pressure of the many details, AE would slip out to Indio, in the California desert, to visit her flying friend, Jacqueline Cochran. Miss Cochran and her husband Floyd Odlum had greatly helped in the financing of the world flight. At the desert retreat Amelia could rest and bathe in the sun, swim in the pool, or ride horseback.
On one such visit AE and Miss Cochran discussed, as they had before on other occasions, the experiments going on at Duke University in extrasensory perception. Amelia was extremely interested in the subject, as Miss Cochran had indicated her own ability at ESP.
Curiously, the two women pilots had heard that night on the radio about a passenger plane that had been lost somewhere in the mountains between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. Amelia asked Jacqueline if she could locate the plane. Her friend gave the location of the plane and other specific details of roads and mountain peaks in the area where the plane had gone down. AE called Paul Mantz, who verified the details on an aerial map. Excited, Amelia sped back through the night to Los Angeles, andtook off early the next morning. She searched the area for three days and verified the names and locations in Miss Cochran’s descriptions; but she could not find any trace of the plane. That spring, however, when the snows had melted, the wreckage of the plane was found just two miles from where Jacqueline Cochran had said it was.
At other times subsequently Miss Cochran demonstrated again her extraordinary extrasensory powers. At AE’s request, she located another missing airliner, crashed and pointing downward from a mountain peak. The plane was found at the exact location.
Before one of her flights with GP in the Electra, Amelia asked her friend to record the details of the flight. Miss Cochran gave exact dates, times, and locations near Blackwell, Oklahoma, where AE had landed to remain overnight.
As a result of these experiences, the two friends decided that in the event AE should go down and get lost on the world flight, Jacqueline would tell the rescuers where to look for Amelia and her plane. That she failed when Amelia went down in the Pacific is one of the deepest sorrows of Jacqueline Cochran’s life. Yet many of Miss Cochran’s perceptions about the disappearance were correct.
Upon returning from Indio to plunge again into her preparations, Amelia immediately concerned herself with finding a new navigator. Captain Harry Manning’s leave of absence had expired and he had to return to the command of his ship. AE turned to Fred Noonan, Manning’s co-navigator for the Honolulu-Howland leg of the aborted east-west flight. Noonan agreed to sign on.
There had been some anxiety from some quarters as to whether Fred Noonan was capable of the expert, high-speed celestial navigation needed on the long over-water legs of the world flight. Jacqueline Cochran, in particular, was most anxious, and convinced Amelia that she should take Noonan far out over the Pacific, fly him around in circles until he was disoriented, then make him take her back to Los Angeles. AE obliged. Noonangave her the course back. The Electra hit the California coast halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Apparently, Amelia was undisturbed by the navigation error, even in view of the irrefutable and just-demonstrated fact that a mistake of one degree on the compass could, on a long flight, take her miles off her course. That she still engaged Noonan, knowing as she did that tiny Howland Island was just two miles long and only three-quarters of a mile wide, a mere fifteen feet above sea level, and more than 2,550 miles from Lae, New Guinea, is testimony to an unshakable confidence in her own ability.
On May 19, two months to the day after the crack-up on Luke Field, the Electra, repaired and gleaming, was rolled out of the Lockheed hangar. Two days later it was flown up to Oakland where the letter covers were quietly and secretly placed on board again, then flown back to Burbank.
Amelia had made no public announcement about the reversed direction of the flight. To all appearances, therefore, when she, Fred Noonan, her mechanic “Bo” McKneely, and her husband George Putnam took off the next day for Miami, the trip was just another routine flight.
Actually, it was the final shakedown flight. If it proceeded without mechanical difficulties, Amelia decided, she and Fred would continue around the world from Miami; if not, she could bring the plane back to Burbank for further adjustments.
Late that afternoon they landed in Tucson, Arizona. The summer heat of the desert rose from the concrete ramp in wave after stifling wave. Discharging her passengers, AE taxied to the refueling pit. After having her tanks topped, she restarted the Wasps. The left engine stuttered, caught, then backfired, and finally exploded into a burst of flames. Amelia cut the switches and hit the left fire-extinguisher button. The men on the ground sprayed the burning engine with foam. The fire suffocated and died.
AE climbed out of the Electra to examine the damage. Wispsof smoke rose from the Wasp. The acrid smell of burned rubber filled her nostrils. The engine and prop were black with dirt and grime, the cowling caked gray-white with bubbled foam. The heat from motor and ramp cloyed the air.
Early the next morning, when Amelia and her three men returned to the ramp, the engine had been repaired and the plane thoroughly washed. Out of the west, winds charged with sand began to swirl and sweep over the field. Amelia wanted to be on her way. “Let’s see if we can get up and over it,” she said.
They took off and climbed to 8,000 feet. All the way to El Paso, on the western edge of Texas, the sandstorm below, like a golden turbulent sea, billowed and eddied. On they pushed across Texas. That night they were in New Orleans. The next day, after crossing the Gulf of Mexico to Tampa, they turned southeast to Miami. At Miami the final decision had to be made.
Now began a week of final preparations. The Electra, Amelia decided, would not have to be returned to Burbank; the Pan American mechanics in Miami, she happily discovered, had all the skill needed to make a last tune-up on the plane.
While the men worked on the Electra, Amelia was ostensibly calm, patient, unhurried. She would sit on a service stand to watch an adjustment being made on one of the engines, sprawl on the tarmac to help with a bothersome strut, or join the mechanics for lunch at the “greasy spoon” restaurant across the street. The men, noticing her ready smile and easy ways, admired her as a pilot who knew her plane and as a woman who knew what she was about.
Fred Noonan renewed his old acquaintances among the Pan American personnel. “Poor old Fred,” they had said about him initially, “flying around the world with a woman pilot.” But growing to know Amelia as she calmly went about her tasks, they finally conceded to Fred that he had the pick of women fliers for his pilot.
Their acceptance of AE on an equal footing with the men of aviation reflected Fred Noonan’s personal views. “Amelia is agrand person for such a trip,” he wrote to his wife. “She is the only woman flier I would care to make such an expedition with. Because in addition to being a fine companion and pilot, she can take hardships as well as a man—and work like one.”
For Amelia there was criticism from the press that she was just another “stunt flier,” despite her statements to the contrary that she was conducting an experiment on the human level. The press was partially right.
“When I have finished this job,” she said in confidence to Carl Allen, “I mean to give up long-distance ‘stunt’ flying.” Then a smile creased her face. “I’m getting old,” she added. “I want to make way for the younger generation before I’m feeble, too.”
There were serious conversations with GP at the hotel where they were staying. He was anxious about her safety on such a long trip. Life held out so much else for her, he asked her if she could not give up the idea.
“Please don’t be concerned,” she said. Her voice was low and soft. She parted the bangs of her dry mop of hair. “It just seems that I must try this flight.” She walked to the window and watched the waves in the distance breaking on the shore. She turned slowly. “I’ve weighed it all carefully. With it behind me, life will be fuller and richer. I can be content. Afterward, it will be fun to grow old.”
George Putnam knew from the look in his wife’s eyes that her mind was made up irrevocably. Such was the woman he had married. She had to prove to herself, and to the world, that women could do as men could do.
Amelia made the final inspection of her aircraft. She was concerned about all the weight the plane had to carry and looked for ways to lighten the load. After she checked again each item of equipment, she finally decided to remove the 250-foot trailing wire antenna from the plane. It was too bulky and it was too much trouble to reel out and reel in while she was trying to fly the plane. One had to take chances.