3.Miami to Africa
Shortly after five o’clock in the morning of June 1, 1937, AE and Fred climbed into the Lockheed Electra to begin their flight around the world at the equator. Amelia started the engines. The dials of the engine instruments—rpm’s, oil pressure, fuel pressure—swung into place; then she noticed that the needle for the left cylinder-head pressure failed to respond. AE shut down the motors. The left Wasp would have to be checked.
Bo McKneely scurried up a ladder, removed the cowling, and quickly spotted the trouble. It was a broken lead to the thermocouple—a thermometer coupled to one of the cylinders. AE and Noonan rejoined GP and his son David on the ramp, while McKneely resoldered the lead. The sun edged over the gray line on the horizon.
As Bo McKneely replaced the engine cowling, AE and Fred remounted the wing on either side and again climbed into the cockpit. GP, climbing up after Amelia, leaned in to bid his wife good-by. It was their last farewell.
Amelia slid the hatch shut, started the engines, and signaled for the chocks to be pulled from the wheels. She taxied to the southeast corner of the field and turned into the take-off runway. At 5:56A.M.the Electra broke from the ground, bound for California by the longest way possible. The last flight was on.
The Lockheed climbed slowly to cruising altitude, then swung southeast to the course for Puerto Rico, the first stop. Amelia, settling back in her seat, looked out under the left wing. The blue waters of the Gulf Stream shaded into the green off the coast; against the light ocean floor, fish flitted darkly.
Shortly after six o’clock she tuned in on Miami’s WQAM to find out what weather conditions were ahead on course. Sheheard, in addition, a breath-taking account of her own take-off. Such a dramatic rendering, Amelia reflected, would awaken any man. She turned to Fred in the right seat. They laughed aloud.
The sea was misty against the rising sun, and clouds swiftly scudded by under the wings. Then she saw the great reef that was the Bahama Banks loom into view, followed by the bright green tapestry of Andros Island. Fred had crawled over the catwalk back to the navigation room.
Amelia locked in the Sperry automatic pilot, then from a brief case took out her logbook—a secretary’s dictation pad. She jotted down fleeting impressions: “... little rocks and reefs just poke their heads above the water. So few lighthouses in this mess ... trees in black silhouette against the burnished sun path.... The shadows of clouds (white clouds in the blue sky) are like giant flowers, dark on the green sea ... curtains of rain clouds aloft....”
Layers of cumulus clouds built up and sandwiched the Electra between them. Amelia nosed down to 1,000 feet and caught the sun again off to the left. Fred Noonan had estimated the time of arrival at San Juan as 1:10P.M.
Shortly after twelve o’clock Fred sent up a card clipped to the end of the fishing pole. Amelia read: she was too far south of course. She swung the plane into a corrected heading. Through the haze she could not distinguish between sea and sky. She looked at the indicated air speed: the needle pointed at 150 mph. She was nursing the engines for the long trip.
Through the mist the island of Puerto Rico came into view. Amelia followed the coast line to San Juan. As the Electra closed in on the city, she spotted the airport and began her letdown for a landing. She lowered flaps and gear and eased into a long glide into the wind. Anchored off the near end of the runway was a four-masted schooner. Amelia skipped over the masts and rounded out in a three-point touchdown.
After she had taxied to the parking ramp, she suddenlyrealized that she had forgotten to eat any of the sandwiches placed on board the plane. Breakfast had been pre-dawn and 1,000 miles ago. She was hungry; and from the abrupt release of tensions, tired.
Friends waiting at the airport came to the rescue: Mrs. Thomas Rodenbaugh with food and Clara Livingston with rest. At the Livingston plantation, twenty miles from town, Amelia turned in at eight o’clock. The sound of the surf outside the window, “charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / of perilous seas,” surged over her and drowned her in a deep sleep.
For the 3,000-mile stretch, south and east down the coast of South America to Natal, there were only four satisfactory airports; between them, the grim alternatives of ocean or jungle. The first stop was to be Paramaribo, 1,000 miles away.
At four the next morning Amelia bounded out of bed, determined to make a dawn take-off. But occasion conspired against her. Repair work on the take-off runway would necessitate a shorter run to get airborne; to get airborne, she would have to reduce the fuel load; to reduce the fuel load, she would have to forego Paramaribo. She would have to push through to another, closer stop.
“Push through,” she wrote. “We’re always pushing through, hurrying on our long way, trying to get to some other place instead of enjoying the place we’d already got to.”
As she had skipped from place to place as a little girl, and from job to job and interest to interest as a young woman, so now she skimmed over the world to touch and go. “Sometime,” she said, realizing that her schedule prevented long visits, “I hope to stay somewhere as long as I like.”
By the time the Electra was ready for take-off the sun was in full view above the horizon. The leg would have to be a short one; strong head winds had been predicted. Once in the air Amelia watched the green mountains of Puerto Rico change to white clouds and blue sea. From 8,000 feet the little clouds lookedlike white scrambled eggs. Far into the distance, and dead ahead on course, the hazy outline of the land mass of Venezuela came slowly into focus.
South America, the second of five continents to be flown over, was a complex of densely timbered mountains, valleys of open plains, and thickly tangled jungle. Amelia, looking at her first jungle, shuddered at the thought of the Electra having to make a forced landing—“the getting away would be worse than the getting down.”
Fortunately, Fred had flown the region many times before. He would get them through. Such were the advantages of flying the Pan American route with a former Pan American navigator.
A dirty red-brown river snaked through a mountain pass. Amelia followed it inland to a town of red roofs and black oil tanks. It was Caripito. The airport offered a long, paved runway. AE eased the Electra down.
They lunched at the hangar and stayed overnight at the home of Henry E. Linam, general manager of Standard Oil for Venezuela.
The next morning—it was June 3—mountainous rain clouds hemmed in the town. Determined to get on, Amelia plowed through them, then skirted around them back to the coast. She climbed through showers to 8,000 feet and broke into the sunlight. The gray, dank world lay below.
AE pulled out her log and scribbled her sensations of the moment: “The sun illumines mystic caves,” she scribbled on the pad, “or shows giant cloud creatures mocking with lumpy paws the tiny man-made bird among them.”
Over sea, jungle, and shore line Amelia played tag with the clouds. From well out to sea she recognized off the right wing a muddy river spilling into a wide dirty fan; together they formed the Nickerie River and delta that separated British from Dutch Guiana. She turned inland toward the coast; and rather than follow the coast in true Pan American fashion, she now cutacross Jungles. A strong head wind was reducing her ground speed: she advanced the throttle to make a true air speed of 148 mph.
Another river cut across the course line. It was a curling thread of silver with green beads of islands. Amelia spread the sectional map across her knees. It should be the Surinam River, she concluded as she ran her finger along the blue line on the map. Paramaribo must be 12 miles in from its mouth; and the airport, another 25 miles farther. Alongside the river on the map a cross-hatched line indicated a railroad. Instructions from Fred were to follow it; like Casey Jones, Amelia did.
On either side of the railroad track were jungle and now and again rice fields and mud huts. From the clothes swinging from the lines behind the huts AE tried to determine the direction of the wind, but she was too busy following the course of the river to get an accurate reading. Expecting to find a small hacked-out clearing for a landing field, she was delighted to find one of the best airport facilities she had ever seen. Paramaribo had gone aviation-modern! A wind sock marked the wind direction; strips of white cloth indicated the best landing strip; smoke from a bonfire, set ablaze when her plane came into view, showed the wind velocity. How thorough are the Dutch, Amelia thought, as she began her letdown.
Amelia and Fred were hot and tired when they climbed out of the Electra. Coffee, orange juice, and sandwiches were quickly provided. Refreshed, they went to the Palace Hotel, one of Fred’s old Pan American stopping-off places.
At the hotel pilot and navigator discussed possible delays from rain and mud at the field. Amelia was eager to get on; Fred, calm and stoical.
“It’s all a matter of comparison,” he said to her. “We’re impatient about a day’s delay. That’s because that lost day’s flying might see us across a continent or an ocean. But a swell way to learn patience,” he assured her, recalling one incident in sometwenty years of sailing the seven seas, “is to try a tour of sailing-ship voyaging. Back in 1910”—he stretched his long, slender body across a chair and footstool—“I was on the barkComptonwhich was then the largest square-rigged ship under the English flag.”
Fred’s eyes crinkled at the corners into crow’s-feet as he smiled about what he was going to say. “We were weather-bound for 152 days on a voyage from the state of Washington, on the Pacific coast, to Ireland. After nearly half a year on one vessel on one trip you become pretty philosophical about the calendar.”
Amelia’s concerns about delay were somewhat alleviated by Fred’s story, and, as she discovered the next morning when the day broke clear, unfounded. Ceiling and visibility were unlimited, except for a diaphanous mist that clung to the Surinam River. Happily they took off, bound for Fortaleza in Brazil, to fly over 960 miles of jungle and 370 miles of ocean.
They had left Paramaribo too early to receive any weather reports; as a result, what the weather would be like on course was strictly a matter of wait and see. Amelia hoped she would not have to turn back: of all possibilities, this would be the most exasperating.
The first of four projected crossings of the equator lay ahead. Unbeknown to Amelia, Fred had planned appropriate ceremonies for the occasion. He had set aside a thermos bottle full of cold water, and at the right time he was going to crawl across the catwalk and pour the water over her unsuspecting head. But Fred became so occupied with his navigation that the Electra had winged across the zero line of latitude before he could play his role of baptismal King Neptune. When Amelia learned his plan she laughed in victory, but shuddered to think of the next three crossings.
The broad banks of a long river wound through the jungle. It reminded Amelia of the Mississippi, which she had flown over many times. This South American cousin could only be the Amazon. Under the right wing yellow and brown currentsstretched out and in to the lower delta. Like so many toothpicks, thousands of uprooted and broken tree trunks flowed, gathered, and spread over the moving stream. The shadow of the Electra skimmed over the surface.
Bragança, São Luís, Camocim: Amelia checked off on the map each city as she passed over it. According to Fred’s dead reckoning—determining position by speed in a given direction for a definite elapsed time—she should soon be in sight of Fortaleza. He had given her ten hours to make it.
She watched the preset chronometer on the instrument panel, and waited for the steady jerks of the dial to click to the designated hour. She then looked out to see if she could recognize any telltale signs below. Just west of what she determined to be Cape Mucuripe she saw a light brown strip of sand that formed an arc between the mountains and the seacoast. She checked the map. It had to be her destination. Fortaleza was the only city on such a topographical boomerang. Fred had hit it on the nose!
The airport was excellent; and when Pan American put all their facilities at her disposal, Amelia decided to ready the plane there for the South Atlantic hop to Africa, rather than at Natal, her actual point of departure.
The Electra underwent a complete inspection: oil change, greasing, instrument check, engine overhaul, scrubdown and washing. Amelia and Fred, after a week of traveling, felt for themselves a similar need for cleaning and overhaul. AE’s one-suitcase wardrobe contained few duplicates. There was much laundry to be done.
They stayed at the Excelsior Hotel. Amelia’s room looked out over red-tiled roofs to the sea. She sat in the cool breeze from the open window, pulled the chair up closer to the desk, and addressed a letter to GP. She chuckled as she wrote:
“The hotel people naïvely put F.N. and me in the same room. They were surprised when we both countermanded the arrangements!...For a female to be traveling as I do evidently is a matter of puzzlement to her sheltered sisters hereabout, not to mention the males. I’m stared at in the streets. I feel they think, ‘Oh, well, she’s American and they’re all crazy.’”
The city of Fortaleza for Amelia was a remarkable study in contrasts. As she explored and shopped, she stopped to notice the carts and donkeys that clogged the streets along with busses, streetcars, and automobiles; the women carrying loads on their heads, as they walked past up-to-date shops; old decrepit buildings standing next to the most modern examples of architecture; and down along the shore primitive catamaran fishing vessels setting sail, while airplanes roared overhead.
The next day, while the mechanics continued to work on the plane, Amelia and Fred set things in order. They repacked gear, sent used maps, gifts, and souvenirs back home, and washed the cloth covers for the engines and propellers.
That night AE lay on her bed and tried to relax from the day’s work, the weeks of flying, the hours of anxiety, the months of tense preparation that had gone into the flight. Her leg jumped as muscle tensions eased. On the tile roofs outside rain began to fall and splatter. It became a tropical downpour, sudden, heavy, and unremitting—like the ones she had known in Honolulu. She feared the Fortaleza airport might turn into a sea of mud. Luckily, the hop to Natal was short, and the fuel load would be light. The Electra should be able to get off. Amelia turned her head into her pillow and fell off to sleep. There was no need to worry. Even in blackest times sleep was a gift she cherished.
At four fifty the next morning they were off for Natal; fortunately the field had drained beautifully, and the runway was more than adequate for take-off. Natal was only two hours away, and they hoped to get an early start across the South Atlantic. Off the left wing and far out to sea rain squalls chased black clouds. Amelia set the automatic pilot and pulled out her log.
She wrote, then crossed out what she had written, then started to write again. This did not seem to be a day for composition:
Par One
Last night was not long enough for two tired fliers.Despite going to bed immediately afterFrFred Noonan and I rolled out of bed at threeforty-five after an incrediIt shines on the engine cowls and into the cockpitHave cover for radiosGet clock I can see at nightCheck props
Amelia put down her pencil and looked out to watch the progress of the black squall line out at sea. It was moving closer. She would have to race it in.
Down along the edge of the coast and on a tip of land the Natal airport was unmistakable. The long intersecting runways were a sure landmark. Amelia nosed the plane down and dived for the field. The rain squall was right behind her.
The Electra was just rolling to a stop and turning into the taxiway when it hit. Long whips of rain lashed the wings and cracked along the fuselage. AE stopped; she could not see out ahead from the cockpit far enough to taxi any farther: the rain relentlessly hit, spread, and streamed down the windshield.
From the hangar along the parking ramp mechanics noticed the difficulty. They rushed out to the Lockheed and pushed the plane up to the ramp and into the hangar. Once inside, Amelia felt guiltily dry as she watched the rain gather in small puddles about the feet of the mechanics. They were soaked to the skin.
To cross the South Atlantic from Natal, AE deferred to the experience of the French. She checked with the crew of the next plane scheduled to leave on the flight across. They told her they preferred to leave very early in the morning, because the worst weather could be expected during the first 800 miles. Amelia decided to leave very early in the morning—soon after midnight. If weather prevented then, they would leave the next afternoon and fly all night to make an African landfall in the morning.
At three fifteen on the morning of June 7 the Electra stoodready for the take-off. Amelia fretted: the only runway marked by lights in the black night could not be used because of a strong cross wind. For an upwind take-off the run would have to be made across a grass field. Flashlights in hand, Amelia and Fred walked in the grass, looking for obstructions and for any landmarks that could serve as guides.
The Electra came through splendidly; as it had so often before, it sprang easily into the air.
In the blackness of the night, inside the cockpit the instrument panel glowed. A glimpse at the bright dials pointing at the correct numbers cheered Amelia. She flew by the instruments she believed in, had learned to believe in from experience. On such a night it was the only way. And it was up to Fred in the navigation room to pass up the right headings to fly by. This was her third crossing of the Atlantic, she reflected happily; Africa, her third continent to be spanned, and her second leap over the equator. She hoped Fred was again too busy to think about dousing her with water.
For the first half of the 1,900 miles across the ocean the Electra bucked head winds averaging 20 miles in velocity. AE set the throttles ahead just far enough to average a ground speed of 150 mph. The dial of the indicated air speed inched forward to 170. She wanted to nurse the engines, whatever the wind and weather, for the long, hard pull around the world.
Ahead she noticed jagged mountains of clouds building up with towering peaks, and below them dark downward-streaking geysers of rain. There was no way around them. She would have to plow through.
The rain was hard and heavy. Mixed with oil from the propellers, it spattered and smeared brown and black against the windshield. Amelia could feel the weight of the rain on the wings against the pressure of the wheel in her hands. The Electra buffeted and surged in alternating downdrafts and updrafts. Then, as suddenly as the thunderstorm had hit, she was through it.
At six forty-five she crossed the equator and reported her position to Natal radio. At six fifty the left engine, then the right, started to miss, then to catch again. Too much oil, Amelia guessed. She looked out to the left and saw a plane streaking across the sky. It was an Air France plane. She would have liked to talk with it, but she knew it had only telegraphic key, and she in the cockpit only voice telephone. The Electra’s key for transmitting code was back in the navigation room with Fred; and even if she shouted back at him, he could not hear her over the noise of the engines. With all its modern devices, the “flying laboratory” lacked an intercom between pilot and navigator.
Locking in the auto pilot, she placed the stenographer’s pad on her knee. She scrawled hastily: “Gas fumes in plane from fueling made me sick again this morning after starting. Stomach getting weak, I guess.” Then she added later: “Have tried getting something on radio. No go. Rain, static. Have never seen such rain. Props a blur in it.” Fred had crawled up from in back to sit in the right seat. “Fred dozes,” she observed. “I never seem to get sleepy flying. Often tired but seldom sleepy.”
Fred stirred, woke up, and looked about. He got up from the seat and crawled back to the navigation room to see if he could get a fix. The haze was too thick. He studied his other instruments, then made an estimate. He jotted on a card:
3:36 change to 36°Estimate 79 miles toDakar from 3:36P.M.
then sent it up ahead to Amelia. She read it, shook her head, then added at the bottom in pencil:
What put us north?
Amelia disregarded the advice of her navigator. Although Fred’s directions indicated a turn to the right, she turned left: it seemed better to her.
Forty-five minutes later she found herself over St. Louis. Shewas north instead of south, and 163 miles off course to Dakar! She decided to let down and make a landing. It was too late to turn around and go back.
To hit a continent, such a refusal to follow directions was of no grave consequence; to hit an island, however, it could prove fatal.
The flight across the South Atlantic, Amelia was careful to note, took thirteen hours and twelve minutes. That was one hour and sixteen minutes less than it had taken for the solo hop across the North Atlantic.