5.India to Australia
Two days later, on June 17, the Electra was pronounced ready; and on that same day they left Karachi for Calcutta, 1,390 miles directly across India to its eastern border.
Shortly after take-off low clouds formed and sped by beneath the wings but were soon outrun. The waves of sand of the Sind Desert now whipped into little whirlpools; then, driven by a strong wind from the south, they became a sandstorm of unabated fury. Amelia climbed higher in escape.
Ahead there was no storm, and she could see ridges that grew from the ground rising to foothills and then to mountains. They were like “sharks poking their backs through a yellow sea.”
Over Central India aids to contact flying became a surfeit of plenty: well-mapped railroads, rivers, and mountains were easily identified. By such landmarks her way was made easy.
But it was not so in the air. Large black eagles dived out ofthe sky toward the Electra. They soared and swung and spun about the plane, giving Amelia many moments of fretful anxiety. If they flew into the propellers, they would be chopped into bird-and-feather burger which could choke off the Wasp engines. That she missed them was a miracle of purblind fate and wide-eyed flying.
Below, the mountains had descended into plains. Mosaics in neat squares of brown, green, and gold were laid out as if on a vast floor, the squares joined by silver-and-gold inlay that reflected the sky and the sun.
In the distance the Ganges River sparkled, and beside it the city of Allahabad stood out against the white brightness of the encircling countryside. Beyond the city mountains green with luxuriant growth rose sharply into towering magnificence. Rainstorms engulfed the peaks. Amelia plowed through.
Air currents from off the mountains lifted the Electra an added 1,000 feet into the air. AE jammed the control column forward, trying to hold down the nose of the plane. Sheets of rain smashed down on wings and fuselage and lashed back from the props against the cockpit windows.
Once over the tops, the mountains quickly became plains that would continue for the next hundred miles all the way to Calcutta. Low clouds now scudded by and the weather cleared, revealing a quilted patchwork of gray, green, and tan rice fields.
More towns and an increasing number of railroads indicated that a big city was at hand. AE watched factories and mills and many villages grow thicker as she approached the heart of the city.
Harbor, docks, many intersecting streets, and countless white buildings bright in the sun: these were Calcutta. As she reached Dum Dum airport, another squall line moved in and broke across the Electra just as Amelia began her letdown for a landing. Rolling down the runway the plane sent up sheets of spray. Then as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped, and the sun shone as before. It was 4:00P.M.
Four hours later Amelia was sound asleep. The long, hard flight had exhausted her; her eyes, tired and sore from the constant strain of watching ground, wings, and instruments, had closed as if from an involuntary reflex action.
Because of the Honolulu crack-up and the consequent change in plans that turned the flight to a west-to-east crossing at the equator, the monsoon season, which they had hoped earlier to escape, was now upon them. For India, it meant that the winds, beginning in June, would sweep in from the Indian Ocean in the southwest, carrying with them rains heavy, violent, and destructive. For the Electra, it meant cross winds and downpours, for its course lay directly in the path of the monsoon. For Amelia, it meant one of the supreme tests of her skill, courage, and endurance.
During that night of June 17 the monsoons began. When Amelia and Fred reached the airport in the morning, the ground was wet and soggy. A take-off would be risky at best; but the forecast was for more rain, which would make a take-off impossible. Amelia decided to chance the risky.
She revved up the engines. Slowly, as she added throttle, the Electra began to roll and gain speed. Tail up and at full power, the plane sloshed through the mud and strained to become airborne. The end of the runway loomed ahead; in a desperate move, AE pulled back sharply on the control column. The Electra broke from the mud, then began to settle, but finally held. Amelia pulled up the gear; the wheels, still spinning and slinging mud, rose into the wells. As the plane rose in a steep climb, the underside of the wings and fuselage just cleared the treetops at the edge of the field. The Lockheed had done it again.
Difficult and dangerous as it was, the take-off was but the beginning. The worst was yet to come. The sky was a dull metallic gray, and in it leaden clouds heavy with rain crowded about the plane. AE felt that they were grim harbingers.
Through occasional holes in the clouds Amelia saw scattered chunks of land that looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Theymarked the mouths of the Ganges. From the hot land, steam rose as if from a giant cauldron. In a constantly moving pageant, rice fields dotted with workers, grass houses, and green trees sped by.
The weather clearing ahead, Amelia recognized the two unmistakable landmarks of Akyab: two golden pagodas and many volcanic islands. Beyond the city was the airfield with two runways and one hangar. She wanted to refuel and push on to Rangoon that same day, but the monsoon proved a superior foe.
At Akyab, while the Electra was being refueled, AE checked the weather reports for the way ahead. They were dire and discouraging. Amelia decided she would have to try to get through somehow.
No sooner had she leveled off from her climb out of take-off, and turned into her course heading, than a head wind, full of rain, hit the Electra squarely on the nose. It was the heaviest rain Amelia had ever seen. Sheet after sheet, thick and concentrated like shovelfuls of gravel, flung back from the props and slapped against the windshield. The Electra heaved and churned through wave after wave, through wall after wall of water. Amelia could not see out from the cockpit and had to fall back completely upon her instruments.
For two hours she pitted herself and her plane against the storm, trying to break through the monsoon. Finally exhausted, her legs and arms heavy as lead from fighting stick and rudders, she relented, and retreated from the encounter. Reluctantly, she turned out to sea, nosed down to the tops of the waves, and headed back to Akyab.
For her navigator Amelia had nothing but praise. “By uncanny powers,” she wrote later, “Fred Noonan managed to navigate us back to the airport, without being able to see anything but the waves beneath the plane.”
When they returned to Akyab, the weatherman at the airport told them that the weather would probably not improve for three months. Amelia wondered if she and Fred would not have to setup light housekeeping and wait things out. She talked things over with him. They decided that they would try again.
The next day, the nineteenth, they set out, hoping this time to reach Bangkok in Siam. Amelia, quickly realizing that yesterday’s tactics of trying to fly under the monsoon would not work again, now climbed to 8,000 feet, hoping to top the mountains and somehow plow through. She was determined to make it.
She set her eyes on her instruments and flew her plane blind. Through the tossing and pitching of the plane and the pounding of the rain she brought the Electra through. She worked her legs constantly, trying to hold the rudders. Hands gripped to the wheel, her arms pressed forward then pulled back on the control column; the plane now rolled left, now right. Her legs and arms began to ache and then to stiffen as she fought to keep the nose up, the wings straight and level.
The instruments were her only guide, her only hope. She flew the little yellow plane on the artificial horizon before her, and held the pointer on the compass heading by flying the needle and ball of the turn and bank indicator. Never far from her right hand were the engine throttles, set evenly forward and registering 150 mph in the white quadrant of the air-speed indicator. Out of the corner of her eye she kept constant check on the altimeter and the rate of climb. Again for two hours she worked and sweated and fought.
She broke out into the clear, the victor. Below her were plains, brilliant in the morning sun. She pressed back in her seat and heaved a heavy sigh. It was a blessed relief to see the earth again. Through the plains meandered the Irrawaddy River.
Clouds appeared again; and Amelia, carefully choosing the openings of light among them, skillfully skirted her plane this way and that between them for the next 50 miles.
Far in the distance, about twenty miles in from the sea and near a wide river, she saw a great golden pagoda pointing brightly above the dark shadows of a city. It was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda,AE quickly determined from her map, and that meant Rangoon. She grinned happily: she was dead on course.
They landed to refuel and with the intention of leaving immediately for Bangkok. But the Electra had not rolled to a stop when a heavy downpour engulfed the airport, making a take-off out of the question.
Amelia and Fred made the best of the delay by sight-seeing. The first tour was a short motor trip on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay. The fliers, in a sudden release from their tensions, could not restrain themselves from singing snatches of Kipling’s “The Road to Mandalay,” although they shuddered to think of the number of tourists who must have done exactly the same thing on the same road.
After finishing the line—“Where the flying fishes play”—Amelia turned to Fred.
“That’s it,” she said to him.
“What is?” Fred asked.
“Flyingfishes,” she answered. “See?” Amelia explained: “That’s what aviators are—ought to be—if they’re silly enough to squash around aloft at this season.”
Fred agreed. He had never known at sea storms like those of the last two days.
They then went to see the golden Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the same that had guided them into the city from the air. Fred refused to go inside, but Amelia kicked off her shoes, climbed the long flight of steps to the top entrance, and entered to see the many Buddhas and to watch the white-robed men at their priestly tasks.
On the morning of June 20 they were off for Bangkok. They crossed the upper half of the Gulf of Martaban to Moulmein, then flew across the north-south range of mountains that marked the dividing line between Burma and Siam. From the height of 8,000 feet Amelia looked out beyond the right wing and back to Rangoon: like the prow of a ship, the city divided the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea, creating the wide Bay ofBengal on the right side and the smaller Gulf of Martaban on the left.
Since take-off, clouds had begun to form. What had been gentle sheep-backed formations far into the west now grew and changed into forbidding anvil-shaped thunderheads; in the east, flanking the range of mountains, clouds broke and scattered, baring to Amelia’s view green foothills that gradually sloped and diminished into broad, thickly snarled jungle. As she looked at the heavy undergrowth, Amelia hoped she would never have to pancake the Electra anywhere below.
They cut across the Mae Klong River. In the distance were plains backed up by mountains. Slowly a ragged outline on the horizon became the sharp needle points of Buddhist temples and the peaked roofs of tiled buildings. It was the city of Bangkok. Through the city AE could see from above how the Mae Nam River continued its tortuous course from the mountains in the north to the Gulf of Siam in the south.
Hoping to make Singapore before nightfall, they landed at Bangkok only to refuel and be on their way again.
Back in the air, Amelia stretched the sectional map across her knees and studied the way ahead. Singapore lay on an island to which pointed the long 900-mile finger of the Malay Peninsula. To reach it, she would have to cut across the Gulf of Siam, then proceed on a course east of the Malay coast, and finally head directly south.
She looked out from the cockpit. The day was clear and the visibility unlimited. She found it hard to believe that she was flying over the fabled world she had so often set out for, riding the old buggy in the Atchison barn, or lying on the floor in the parlor looking at one of Grandfather Otis’s big geography books. She loved the sound of the names, Siam and Cambodia, and she picked out others at random from the map—Bang Saphan, Lem Tane, Koh Phratnog. Yet there were two of them below: Siam to the right, Cambodia to the left.
Nevertheless, Amelia shook her head, as she had failed to seeTimbuktu, so had she missed seeing the famous Taj Mahal in Negra, which had not been far off the Karachi-Allahabad leg. It, too, would have to wait for another time. Now, there was too little time and too much to see.
She now followed a valley across the mountains, then swung down the western coast from Alor Star in Malay. The clouds over the peaks were beginning to grow: cumulus into cumulo-nimbus, cumulo-nimbus into great thunderheads.
A deep green jungle unfolded below, with an occasional scar that marked the cut of a road across the undulating hills and flatlands.
After six hours of flying Amelia sighted Singapore. Letting down from altitude, she passed over countless ships in the great sprawling harbor, then continued over the vast city to the airport. At 5:25P.M.the Electra touched down.
Amelia and Fred had dinner with the American consul general and his wife. After dinner the fliers begged to be excused, and turned in. At 3:00A.M.they were up and on their way back to the airport, eager to get on to their next stop, Java, which lay on the other side of a third crossing of the equator. It was the morning of June 22.
The Electra soared into the air. Over the sea along the coast of Sumatra, then across the southeast point of the island, Amelia guided her plane into the world down under of the Southern Hemisphere.
In quick succession she noted the jungle and swamp of a long chain of islands; then sudden and abrupt, the volcanic mountains of Java, imperious and proud, which rose out of the mist to dominate the surrounding sea below them. Like suckling pigs, tiny islands lay along the mother shore for their nourishment.
Amelia landed at Bandung and taxied the plane to the hangar. According to plan, the Electra was scheduled for a complete going over. The plane in the hands of the mechanics, Amelia and Fred decided to get a closer look down into one of the volcanoes they had flown over.
In a borrowed car they drove up the mountain to the rim of the crater at 6,500 feet. For the first time on the long trip they felt a chill and put on their flying jackets. The sulphur fumes from the volcano were strong and sickening; they reminded Amelia of the strong gas fumes in refueling that sometimes made her ill. Nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from looking down into the crater. It was pointless to drive to the top and not see what she had come to see. She bent over the rim and looked down: a pool of bright green water glittered softly hundreds of feet below.
At 3:45 the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June, Amelia and Fred climbed into the Electra. They hoped to fly this day non-stop to Australia. AE started the engines. She watched the instruments closely as the needles moved up in response; then, as in Miami when they first started out for the world flight, one of the important engine instruments failed. Something had gone wrong; but without the instrument operating correctly there was no point in proceeding.
It was not until two o’clock that afternoon that they heard they could now move out. Because of the late start, they decided to fly only as far as Surabaya, 350 miles away. On the way, what had been failure of engine instrument for Amelia now became failure of navigation instruments for Fred Noonan. He could not get his most important long-range instruments to function properly. Reaching Surabaya, they turned around and flew back to Bandung. To go on without aids for the difficult navigation that lay ahead, especially over water, would make the rest of the world flight extremely dangerous.
Before they left Surabaya to retrace their steps, AE was called to the telephone. It was GP, calling from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his United plane was refueling before continuing on to California. George had heard from Amelia that there had been some difficulty with the plane.
“Is everything about the ship O.K. now?” he asked.
Amelia, refusing to worry her husband concerning something he could do nothing about, held back the truth.
“Yes,” she said abruptly; then softly added: “Good night, hon.”
“Good night,” GP answered. “I’ll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”
When the Electra landed in Bandung, Dutch technicians were hastily called to work on the faulty navigation instruments. While they worked, Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing in the close-by city of Batavia.
Pilot and navigator had made an agreement not to do any shopping; they did not want to add any weight to the plane. Six pounds, they reminded each other, equaled one gallon of fuel. But Amelia broke the pact to buy a knife. She purchased it—a handmade sheath knife at a metalworker’s shop—for her friend John Oliver La Gorce of the National Geographic Society; she wanted him to add it to his extensive knife collection. She jammed the knife under her belt. She wanted to carry it all the way to Washington, D.C., and make an official presentation of it to her friend.
It took two days to repair the Electra. On Sunday morning, June 27, Amelia and Fred left Bandung, hoping again to reach Australia. But what had been the conspiracy of instruments now became the conspiracy of time. For every fifteen degrees of longitude crossed, they would lose one hour; and the day would grow shorter the longer and farther they flew east.
For this reason they had to land, after only five hours of flying, at Koepang, on the island of Timor. The flight from Java to Timor had been for Amelia an experience in extremes, as the lush tropics became arid wastes—and rich abundance, monastic sparsity.
Except for a fuel shed at Koepang there were no other storage facilities. Amelia and Fred pulled out the cloth covers from the back of the fuselage and covered the props and engines. Then with the help of some of the natives they turned the Electra into the wind and staked it down to the ground.
The next morning, again before dawn, they climbed wearily into the plane. The Electra rolled down the grass runway and jumped into the air from the steep cliffs of the island. Over the Timor Seathe head winds were strong, and it was not until three and a half hours later that Amelia sighted the bright emerald sea on the northern coast of Australia. They landed at Port Darwin.
Again, as it had happened before in arriving at a new country, Amelia and Fred had to be fumigated. For the last time they stoically submitted to the spray guns.
At Port Darwin they unloaded their parachutes and sent them home. Over the Pacific a parachute would be of no use whatever. Gracefully declining all invitations, Amelia and Fred parted for their separate rooms to turn in early for much-needed rest. The next stop was Lae, New Guinea, only a few hours away from Australia, but an eternity away from home.