3.The Kinner Canary
In 1922, when she was twenty-four years old and the owner of her first plane, a yellow Kinner Canary, she had tried for her first record. She decided that the ceiling of the Kinner should be tested, and asked an official from the California Aero Club to seal the plane’s barograph—a revolving cylinder for recording altitude. The little three-cylinder Lawrence engine took the plane to 14,000 feet, and a new altitude record before the 60-horse-power quit. The fault, AE learned when she landed, had not been with the motor but with the spark control lever. It had become disconnected during the test run.
Undismayed, Amelia tried again for a higher altitude a few days later. She hoped this time that everything would work smoothly. The Canary climbed quickly and easily to 10,000 feet, but ran into a layer of thick clouds. At 11,000 feet she hit a driving wall of sleet, and at 12,000 feet she looked into a blinding blanket of fog.
AE now did a very stupid thing, she later confessed, one that should have cost her her life. It was a miracle that she survived the experience. Rattled because she could not tell her position without instruments and because she had no outside landmarks for check points, she did the first thing that came into her mind: she pulled the stick back and kicked the plane into a spin. She spun, down and around, winding the Kinner through the overcast until she broke out of it at 3,000 feet. Seeing the ground at last, Amelia straightened out of the spin and pulled the plane out of its headlong dive.
After she landed, she nonchalantly climbed out of her plane and started to walk away. She snapped off her helmet and shook her close-cropped head. From the edge of the tarmac one of theold-time pilots rushed over to her. He cussed her out roundly.
“Suppose there had been fog all the way to the ground?” he shouted at her, flailing his arms. “You would have screwed yourself into the ground.”
“I guess I would have,” Amelia said, refusing to be alarmed. She held her head high, turned, and walked cockily away from any further discussion about the incident. She had set a new record of 14,000 feet a few days before, and that was good enough for her.
Luck had been with her before in other accidents, the kind she liked to call the “blowout” variety in flying. Once in her early instruction with Neta Snook, her first instructor, the motor of the Canuck cut out shortly after take-off. Neta nosed the plane down for an emergency landing and glided into a nearby cabbage patch. For Amelia the crisis had produced a slow passage of time, time enough for her to reach over and calmly cut the switch before the plane hit the ground. The propeller and landing gear were smashed, but the women fliers walked away from the crash unharmed.
Another time, on a solo flight, she had to make an unexpected landing in a field drenched with rain. The wheels had stuck in the mud, and the plane up ended and nosed over. Unhurt, Amelia hung upside down from the safety belt.
In yet another emergency landing she had hit dried weeds more than six feet high. The plane flipped over so suddenly and with such force that Amelia broke away from the safety belt and went flying out of the cockpit. Again she had walked away from her aircraft without a scratch.