PART THREE

_THE LAST FLIGHT_

1. _Crack-up in Hawaii_

Ironically, Amelia Earhart’s flight around the world was her last long flight. “I have a feeling,” she had said to Carl Allen of the New York _Herald Tribune_, “that there is just one more good flight left in my system, and I hope this is it. Anyway, when I have finished this job, I mean to give up major long-distance flights.”

Her plan was to girdle the earth at the equator on an east-to-west flight. The time of departure was set for March, 1937.

For Amelia, the flight was the greatest challenge of her life. No one had done what she planned to do. There had been other flights around the world, but none had been attempted at the equator. Wiley Post, AE’s good friend, had flown around the world twice in his Vega, the _Winnie May_, once in 1931 with Harold Gatty, then again by himself in 1933.

In 1935 Wiley Post tried again, this time with Will Rogers as his passenger. The plane, a half-breed of Lockheed Orion and Sirius with floats attached, was dangerously nose heavy. “You’ll be in trouble,” the engineers told him at Lockheed, where they refused to put on the floats, “if there’s just a slight power loss on take-off.” Post was stubborn and insistent. He found another company to attach the pontoons. At Point Barrow, Alaska, in August, the engine stuttered on take-off. The plane nosed in and crashed, and two of the most famous men of their time were killed.

Wiley Post’s flights had been made well north of the equator, at a distance only two thirds the length of the equator.

There had also been some remarkable distance flights by others. In 1933 the Lindberghs made a 29,000-mile air-route survey of Europe, Africa, and South America. Laura Ingalls in 1934 had flown solo from New York to South America and return, a distance of 16,897 miles. Also in 1934 the Pacific was flown in a first west-east flight, from Australia to California, by Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and Captain P. G. Taylor.

By girdling the globe, Amelia could achieve not only the record for distance, but also fly around the world. She would like to do it alone. It would be fun to be the first to fly the equator.

AE made her plans, the most elaborate and time consuming of her career. The details that had to be worked out, she found, were formidable. But she began simply, almost casually, to map out the 27,000 miles of the flight.

One day early in the winter of 1936 she walked across the living room in her home at Rye. She picked up the globe from the long table behind the sofa. She turned the globe to the Pacific, placed her thumb on Oakland, and spanned her hand to Honolulu; then from Honolulu her long, slender fingers reached easily to two little islands just above the equator. In another stretch of the hand she reached New Guinea. Seven thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean were easy to cross by a span of the hand, but those two little islands, Howland and Baker, were mere specks on the globe.

She looked closely at Howland, and wondered if she could find it flying alone after nearly 2,000 miles out from Hawaii. She swept her hand quickly over her hair and grinned. This was the most exact kind of flying. She would need the best of navigation equipment. She would need a navigator to make it.

When GP came home she told him of her need for a navigator; not for the whole flight, but just for the long over-water legs across the Pacific. George picked up the phone. He always knew whom to call.

GP first telephoned Bradford Washburn, a young Harvard professor who had done some distinguished ground navigation and exploration. Washburn agreed to come to New York for an interview.

AE was sprawled on the living-room floor with her maps when the young professor came into the house. She liked his cut: he was slim, wiry, handsome. She liked the set of his jaw and the look of his clear eyes. She got up from the floor, smiled, and reached out a hand in welcome.

Pilot and prospective navigator sat on the floor and discussed the problems involved. Amelia traced the itinerary she had marked on the map, mentioning, as she moved her finger, the distances between points.

Bradford Washburn examined the first two proposed legs of the flight. He was familiar with the Electra and felt it could easily make the distance from California to Hawaii. The long stretch over the vast Pacific to the tiny dot that was Howland Island: that was an immediate difficulty to overcome.

“How far did you say it was to Howland?” he asked.

“Roughly, about 2,000 miles,” Amelia said.

“Your 50-watt radio isn’t strong enough for that kind of flying. On such a long leg as that one you’ll be out of range of any ground stations.” Washburn looked intently at Amelia. “If you’re off just one degree on your heading, you’ll miss that little island completely.”

Amelia had no intention of being one degree off course. The best navigator available could hit the island right on the nose.

“What kind of radio signals will there be at Howland to home in on?” The professor pursued the point.

“None,” Amelia answered.

For Bradford Washburn the interview was over. The project was out of the question. He did not want to look for a needle in a haystack, especially if the haystack were the Pacific Ocean--and certainly not without a strong magnet to find the needle.

Bradford Washburn was convinced that Amelia had rather not have a navigator, that she had decided on one only as an irritable necessity. Her self-confidence, her belief in her own flying abilities, was for him towering and magnificent to behold; but he wanted no part of it.

“One must take chances,” AE had often said before, and she repeated the same words in the hope of hitting Howland Island.

That she was devil-may-care was perhaps attributable to what seem to have been premonitions, foreshadowings which she blatantly ignored. AE and GP had spent an afternoon examining gyroscopes at the Sperry plant in Brooklyn. On the way home Amelia had stopped the car at a red light on Flatbush Avenue. In the blue dusk of that winter’s day she noticed off to the side an old man step off the curb and start to shuffle across the street. “It’s hard to get old,” the old man muttered as he crossed, “so hard.” Amelia heard every word.

The light changed. Amelia slammed the clutch to the floor and shifted the car into gear. Her lips were closed tight, her eyes intent on the moving traffic. At the next corner she turned into a side street, drove around the block, and swung back up the street to where the old man had stepped off the curb. She looked up and down the opposite sidewalk. The old man had disappeared in the crowd.

That night, before going to bed, Amelia turned to George. Her eyes were level and serious. “It _is_ hard to be old,” she said. “So hard.” She walked to the mirror and sat at her dressing table. She looked hard at her own reflection. “I’m afraid I’ll hate it. Hate to grow old.”

GP said nothing; he waited for his wife to finish.

Amelia turned and faced her husband again. “I think probably, GP,” she spoke slowly and deliberately, “that I’ll not live to be old.”

On the twenty-second of July, 1936, Amelia went out to Burbank, California, to inspect the new Lockheed for the first time. The all-metal plane glistened as it was rolled out of the hangar into the sun. AE examined the plane closely: she walked the 55-foot span of the wings, climbed into the cockpit, worked the controls, and started the engines.

Lockheed, in keeping with its previous stellar designations for its aircraft, had christened the low-winged, twin-engined monoplane the Electra, after the “lost” star of the Pleiades.

Amelia, dressed in a mechanic’s white coveralls and inspecting her new plane, paid no attention to any designations, stellar, mythological, or psychological. She promptly dubbed the plane “the flying laboratory.” That was practical and to the point, for that was what the plane in fact was.

She loved the navigation equipment which had been installed in the passenger compartment. She climbed in to look it over. The fuselage had been cleared of passenger seats. Directly behind the cockpit two large tanks had been bolted in place; they could hold 1,000 gallons of fuel. That would give the plane an added range up to 4,000 miles. Behind the tanks was a complete navigation room.

She walked to the wide chart table set up against the bulkhead and under the far window. Through the round glass in the table she read the master aperiodic compass placed directly below. Mounted at each window was a pelorus, for taking bearings from any land mass. She set her eye to the tube of the one at the window over the table. The special flat plane of the window allowed for no distortions, especially for the readings from the bubble sextant. She noted next to the table a temperature gauge, an air-speed indicator, and three chronometers; and above the table and to the left side of the window an altimeter.

The arrangement for the use of the drift indicator was brilliantly simple. On the cabin door a special latch had been installed to keep the door open about four inches. Down through the opening in the door she swung the drift indicator. By looking through the instrument at smoke bombs during the day or flares at night, a navigator could determine the direction and velocity of the wind. Amelia was satisfied: her laboratory was adequate to the task from the navigation point of view.

The communications equipment, however, was at once delightfully modern and frustratingly primitive. Pilot and navigator had voice radio; but only the navigator had telegraphic key. Both could transmit and receive with ground stations, but not with each other. For intercommunications the navigator would have to use a cut-down bamboo fishing pole, with an office clip nailed to the end of it, to send messages written on cards up to the pilot; if he wanted to talk to the pilot, or if he wanted to dial the radio behind the pilot to a new frequency, he would have to crawl along the catwalk over the two big tanks between the cockpit and the passenger compartment.

The radio had a power of only 50 watts. Amelia was not satisfied, and she tried to borrow a better, more powerful, system. The radio was the weakest link in the laboratory chain.

For weeks she flew the Electra up and down the California coast, working out the “bugs.” In August she went to New York to enter the Bendix Trophy race. The coast-to-coast speed flight, she felt, would be an excellent “shakedown” for the plane.

Other women joined in for the race and gathered at Floyd Bennett Field. Louise Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Jacqueline Cochran, Laura Ingalls, Martie Bowman, Mrs. Benny Howard: all were stiff competitors. Helen Rickey had agreed to be AE’s copilot.

During the race trouble developed in the Electra’s fuel lines, and Amelia had to drop out much against her will. But two women did win the race: Louise Thaden with Blanche Noyes as her copilot.

Preparations moved along for the world flight. Clarence S. Williams of Los Angeles was engaged to get ready maps and charts. He laid out compass courses, the distances between points, the exact times at which to change headings: he prepared sectional after sectional for the many legs of the flight. His work was invaluable.

Paul Mantz was technical adviser, as he had been for the Hawaii-California flight. He supervised the mechanical readiness of the plane, and took it up on many test flights.

GP managed the far-flung problems, and they were many, of stopping places and alternates for the caching of fuel, oil, spare parts. Red tape of international length had to be cut and unsnarled. Innumerable credentials were needed: permissions to land from foreign governments, passports, visas, certificates of health and character, negative police records, medical papers. George made all the official advance arrangements. Before he was finished, he had spotted fuel and oil at thirty different locations along the route, and had collected several thick folders of papers for his wife.

Amelia made more and more notes on her charts as new information poured in. Airports, alternates, emergency landing fields, winds aloft, weather, terrain, altitudes: each had to be entered at the proper place. She took the maps and carefully marked the stop-off points, then drew lines to a double row for entering the exact amount of gas and oil that would be available along the way.

In preparing for previous flights she had revealed her plans only to closest friends, but this time Amelia did not shroud her activities in secrecy. The press received broad clues, and then were blamed, half-jokingly, as the cause of it all. Late in 1936 AE said to reporters in Los Angeles, “I’m nearly sold on the idea of flying around the world because I’d like to do it; but I’m a busy person this year. I have a lot of other things to do. Next year? Well, one never knows.”

On February 11, 1937, Amelia had flown to New York from California. Newsmen had surrounded her at the Hotel Barclay; they wanted a confirmation or denial of all the rumors they had heard about her plans for a world flight. With AE was the man who had agreed to be her navigator. He was Captain Harry Manning, her old friend from the _Friendship_ days, on whose ship, the _President Roosevelt_, she had returned home.

Amelia smoothed at the hips the dark-blue wool dress she had changed into. The press rarely saw her in “feminine” clothes. “Well,” she said, “I am going to try to fly around the globe.” She toyed with the bright scarf about her neck. “The flight will be as near to the equator as I can make it, east to west, about 27,000 miles.”

The press moved in. Reporters fired questions at her, photographers shot pictures at close range, newsreel men turned on their bright lights and rolled their cameras. Somewhat flustered by the sudden excitement she had caused, Amelia laughed. “You know,” she said to them, “I feel you men have pushed me into this. You are the ones who have kept saying that I was going to fly around the world, until finally you’ve compelled me to think seriously about doing it.”

Carl Allen, her friend from the New York _Herald Tribune_, would have none of it. “Oh, come now,” he protested, “nobody has pushed you into it. You know you’ve been wanting to do it all the time.”

Captain Manning, stolid and silent beside AE, smiled uneasily. Amelia quickly relinquished her ground. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I guess I didn’t get away with that, did I?”

“What are you going for?” one reporter abruptly asked.

AE thought for a moment. The question was one she had heard many times before. “Well,” she answered, “I’ve seen the North Atlantic. And I’ve seen the Pacific, too, of course; at least a part of it. But”--she hesitated--“well, just say I want to fly around the globe. And I think a round-the-world flight just now should be at the equator.”

She turned to the quiet man beside her. She looked at his thick, curly black locks. “Captain Manning is going with me part way,” she explained, “because I don’t believe the pilot on such a flight can navigate, too.”

Interview over, reporters broke for the nearest telephone. The world heard and waited.

Amelia dived again into the myriad details of preparation. She was still dissatisfied with the radio equipment. She realized that a 50-watt transmitter and receiver could reach only about five hundred miles under normal conditions. On the Hawaii-California flight the Vega radio had reached up to 2,000 miles, but only because of skipping--a radio phenomenon in which radio waves bounce up and down from the ionosphere and move forward for incredibly long distances.

But skipping was something that could not be depended upon. Some of the ground stations would be much farther than 500 miles apart. The distance between Hawaii and Howland was 1,940 miles; between Howland and New Guinea, 2,556 miles. The other navigation equipment was good, and worked well in test after test. How to strengthen the weakest link?

The problem continued to plague her while she gained more and more experience flying the Electra during most of the year 1936. Often she flew cross-country until she attained that assured feeling of confidence that came when the plane became an extension of her own body and limbs.

It was during the late morning of one of these flights, with Jacqueline Cochran acting as copilot, that Amelia landed at Wright Field in Ohio. The women pilots were met by Manila Talley, AE’s friend from Denison House days, whose husband was stationed at the field. The three of them climbed into Manila’s car and drove to the Officers’ Club at adjoining Patterson Field for lunch. Mrs. Talley noticed that AE seemed somewhat distraught.

When they sat down to lunch Amelia told her companions how she had hoped to borrow desperately needed radio equipment. She had been unable to get better radios from the manufacturers. They told her they had lost all they could afford on flights that didn’t make it. And, she was reminded flatly by them, regulations absolutely forbade lending government equipment.

Mrs. Talley and Miss Cochran tried to dissuade Amelia from making the flight with inferior equipment.

AE was adamant. “I have to meet my obligations,” she said. “We’ve sold letter covers to pay for the flight. I have to carry them.” She had earned $10,000 by selling and carrying letter covers for the Pacific flight. And for the world flight, Gimbel’s in New York had sold to collectors 10,000 covers, which had realized some $25,000 to meet expenses.

Amelia straightened her back against the chair and popped her crumpled napkin onto the table. “I will simply have to make do,” she said with a stamp of finality, “with what equipment I have.”

Other equally important matters occupied her days and nights. One at a time problems had to be faced, solutions had to be worked out. The preparations were the part of the iceberg that didn’t show.

Paul Mantz wrung out the Electra in shakedown flights and final tests. GP surveyed the extra-long runway at Oakland, waited for the final word about the emergency field being completed at Howland Island, and coordinated final arrangements with the Department of Commerce, Pan American Airways, and the Coast Guard.

For two weeks Amelia pored over weather maps, waiting for the one which would let her go: it didn’t have to be completely satisfactory, only acceptable.

There was plenty of help for the flight to Honolulu. Paul Mantz would be her copilot, and helping Captain Manning in the navigation room would be Fred Noonan. They were a right good crew.

Captain Harry Manning, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner for heroic daring in having rescued thirty-two men from the sinking steamship _Florida_, had taken leave of absence from his ship to be the navigator. Paul Mantz, expert pilot, movie stunt flier, aviation instructor, owner of a flying service, dependable technical adviser, was as familiar with the Lockheed as AE herself. Fred J. Noonan, a veteran of twenty-two years of ocean travel before he joined Pan American Airways, transport pilot, instructor in aerial navigation, had pioneered routes for PAA flights across the Pacific.

The plan was to drop Mantz off in Honolulu, where he could join his fiancée; to leave Noonan at Howland, where he could take the Coast Guard cutter back to Hawaii; and finally to drop Manning at Brisbane, Australia. From that point on Amelia hoped to continue solo for the rest of the way around the world.

On March 17, 1937, Amelia and her plane were ready. The Electra waited in the Navy hangar at Oakland. There was Gaelic festivity in the air: it was St. Patrick’s Day. In deference to Fred Noonan, AE pinned shamrocks on the men and herself. But the weather was not favorable; it drizzled, on and off, all day.

Amelia went to the window of the Navy office and looked out. Time and again she had waited at windows before, watching and waiting for the weather to clear. She drove her hands into her brown slacks, then adjusted the collar of her plaid wool shirt, then twisted the brown linen scarf about her neck. She turned up the collar of her brown leather flying jacket. Crow’s-feet gathered at the corners of her eyes as she squinted at the wet grayness outside.

Several showers passed over the field. Shortly after 3:00 P.M. she watched the low scud beginning to clear, and heartened as a thin strip of blue appeared in the higher overcast. The crew was alerted. It was time to go.

Paul Mantz started the engines, taxied the plane out of the Navy hangar, and stopped on the apron. Manning and Noonan ran out and climbed into the passenger compartment. To avoid reporters and well-wishers, Amelia sneaked into a Navy automobile and was driven out to the plane. GP drove out with her. Quickly she was hustled up onto the wing and into the cockpit. GP bent in and wished his wife a final farewell.

For five minutes AE and Mantz revved up the engines, checking the rpm’s and magnetoes of first one and then the other, then both of the powerful Wasps.

The Electra taxied to the east end of the field, to the 7,000-foot runway. On alternate sides of the take-off strip, cardboard placards had been staked out every 150 feet. Small puddles of water splotched the runway. Throttles were advanced and the props blasted back. The take-off roll was short: the five-ton Lockheed eased into the air after 2,000 feet. It was 4:37 P.M.

The flight to Honolulu proceeded without incident. At 5:40 A.M. the next morning, 2,410 miles, fifteen hours, and forty-seven minutes after Oakland, the Electra touched down at Wheeler Field.

Despite the long flight just completed, Amelia, teeming with energy and anxious to be on her way, wanted to take off for Howland without delay. But the weatherman dampened her zest.

Bad storms, she discovered, had started to move in from the southwest. Resigned, Amelia went to the home of a friend and slept. There was no point in worrying about the weather. “Weather permitting” had always qualified her every flight plan.

Paul Mantz, meanwhile, moved the plane to Luke Field, for the use of the longer runway there. Although the Electra would not use the full fuel capacity of 1,151 gallons to get to Howland, the weight of 900 gallons was still considerable. At Luke, a Pratt and Whitney mechanic made a thorough final inspection of the two Wasp engines. There was no time to spare: AE had sent word that she wanted to take off at dawn on the following day.

Amelia rose early that morning of March 19. Light began to break over the hills of Pearl Harbor as she drove out to the field. Expecting her, Paul Mantz had warmed up the engines; and Captain Manning and Fred Noonan had taken their places in the navigation room.

Amelia climbed into the cockpit. Before her lay the 3,000 feet of runway. The concrete shone in the morning light, and here and there gleamed patches of water. AE signaled; the mechanics pulled the chocks away from the wheels.

She lowered the flaps, held the wheel firmly, then slowly inched the throttle forward. The 1,100 Wasp-stung horses fought to go. The Electra started to roll. Halfway down the runway one wing dipped.

Amelia applied opposite aileron. The plane pulled to the right. AE yanked the left throttle all the way back. The nose swung from right to left, but the wing would not lift. She watched helplessly as the wing tip hit the runway and scraped the concrete in a shower of sparks. Then the right landing gear collapsed, the plane careened, then swung around uncontrollably in a swift ground loop. Amelia chopped the other throttle, cut the switches, and climbed out of the cockpit. On the ground she met Manning and Noonan jumping out from the passenger compartment door. They had not been scratched.

The $80,000 Electra lay like a broken bird upon the pavement. The right wheel had been sheared off; the right wing was battered and crumpled. Amelia was sick at heart as she looked at her damaged plane. “Something must have gone wrong,” she said in an attempt to say something.

“Of course, now you will give up the trip?” someone asked.

Amelia shook her head. “I think not,” she said. “If it’s possible, I’ll try again.” Her voice trailed off. “Repairs. Costs.”

Grave and silent she left the runway. Later she regained her composure and called GP in Oakland. He was relieved to hear that she was safe. “They crashed; the ship’s in flames,” a reporter had told him. The sparks had been mistaken for fire.

A few hours later a newsman came up to Amelia. He tried to be understanding. “Tough luck,” he said. “Anyway, you’re fortunate to be alive. By the way, I understand your husband will be greatly relieved, because now you can’t go on with the flight.”

AE showed him the telegram she had just received from GP. “So long as you and the boys are O.K.” it said, “the rest doesn’t matter. After all, it’s just one of those things. Whether you want to call it a day or keep going later is equally jake with me.”

The reporters now pressed her for a statement. “Nothing has happened,” she announced, “to change my attitude toward the original project. I feel better than ever about the ship, and I am more eager than ever to fly again.”

Amelia turned and walked to the window of the operations building. She looked up. High above the center of the field a black bird swung through the air in lazy widening circles.

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, mechanics would 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, and took 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. Noonan gave 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. Wisps of 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 a grand 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.

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 5:56 A.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. She heard, 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 1:10 P.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 suddenly realized 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 looked like 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 cut across 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 some twenty 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 bark _Compton_ which 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 currents stretched 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 after==

==Fr== Fred Noonan and I rolled out of bed at three

forty-five after an incredi

It shines on the engine cowls and into the cockpit

Have cover for radios

Get clock I can see at night

Check 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 stood ready 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 to Dakar from 3:36 P.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. She was 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.

4. _Africa to India_

Far from the customary skies was Africa and its smells. To Amelia’s sensitive nostrils the aromas of South America had been the lush and pleasant ones of fruit, fish, meat; in Dakar, as in St. Louis, the odor was the strong one of people.

The big bare feet of the natives she found extraordinary. She walked through the teeming streets, her eyes focused to the riot of color, her ears tuned to the comic opera of sound. Splashes of bright yellow, red, and green marked the native garments. The women wore Mother Hubbards and slung their babies on their backs or held them at their breasts. Amelia went over to one of the market stalls and bought a large bag of freshly roasted peanuts, her only West African export.

At Dakar, the Electra was scrubbed and washed, oiled and greased; the engines were given a forty-hour check, and a faulty fuel-flow meter was repaired.

The flight so far had been over the charted Pan American route to Natal and the Air France course to Dakar. Ahead, however, inland across Africa, lay regions rarely, if ever, flown over. Exactly what course they would fly, pilot and navigator were undecided. But they would have to leave soon, for tornadoes to the south and sandstorms to the north had been predicted. They would have to find a way somewhere in between.

The schedule for crossing Africa was a strenuous one. It meant flying the distance of 4,350 miles in at least four separate legs--a daily flight, in comparison, from New York to St. Louis. Where neither pilot nor aircraft was replaced, or replaceable, and this fact coupled with the thousands of miles that lay behind and ahead for the same pilot and plane, the flight became an ordeal of endurance and courage.

Amelia carefully studied the situation: the navigation aids were only two--contact and celestial. She could fly contact by following her map and identifying landmarks with the corresponding symbols on the sectional; but the African maps were pitifully inadequate, even when supplemented with pilot reports at each stop on the way. There were no radio beams to home in on, nor were there any lights at the landing fields they planned to stop at for refueling. For Fred, although he could, if it were clear, make position fixes from the sun and the stars, navigating over Africa was more difficult than finding his way over any ocean.

“Our flights over the desert,” Fred wrote to his bride of one month, “were more difficult than over water. That was because the maps of the country are very inaccurate and consequently extremely misleading. In fact, at points no dependence at all could be placed on them. Also recognizable landmarks are few and far between, one part of the desert being as much like another as two peas in a pod. However, we were lucky in always reaching our objectives. In all the distance I don’t think we wandered off the course for half an hour, although there were times when I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on the accuracy of our assumed position.”

Despite the difficulties Amelia blithely set out. They would push through somehow: there were, after all, countless places for an emergency landing if anything went wrong or if they lost their way.

On the morning of June 10 they took off just before six o’clock. The course was due east over the Senegal and Niger to the Sudan. Some 1,140 miles, seventeen hours, and fifty minutes later they sighted the upper reaches of the Niger River and landed at Gao. There the ubiquitous gasoline drums marked “Amelia Earhart” awaited them like squat silent sentinels. The months of planning in spotting the fuel were reaping their rewards. George, to Amelia’s soaring satisfaction, had done his job well. The rest was up to her.

The next leg was 1,000 miles long. The following morning, again before dawn, they left Gao for Fort-Lamy, flying over the Niger River for 170 miles then crossing endless stretches of barren desert land to Zinder. Then below lay spread out the broad valley of the Yobe River with its long brown tendrils and sprawling swamps. Now in the shifting pattern of land and water, for as far as her eyes could see, Amelia watched Lake Chad come into full view. She ran her eye over the shining surface but was unable to find any shore lines. Islands in the great lake had in outline the shapes of fantastic creatures out of storyland, with large fat paws and broad flattened heads.

As a little girl in Atchison, Amelia would climb into the old buggy in the barn with her sister Muriel and her cousins, the Challisses, and lead expeditions to imaginary lands. The map of Africa had been her favorite. Names such as Timbuktu, Senegal, Khartoum had stirred her dreams.

For Amelia in the cockpit of her own plane, the world of her childhood imagination was coming to life. Yet she missed seeing Timbuktu. If she had known about it beforehand, she could have visited the fabled town, for it lay but 400 miles up the Niger River from Gao. But the pressure of having to meet her schedule prevented the side trip. Someday, Amelia kept telling herself, she would return and make a leisurely trip, when she had time really to see and do.

Cranes, maribou storks, blue herons abounded about Lake Chad, as did many other birds she could not identify. She watched the shadow of the Electra, like a strange black flying fish, glide over the surface of the water. Once across the shore and over jungle, she looked for the elephants and crocodiles which had meant Africa to her ever since she had been a little girl in bloomers, but she could see none. Yet through the haze that now began to rise from the hot land like steam from a kettle she caught now and again the sight of a hippopotamus. The cockpit became hot and stuffy, and Amelia opened the windshield for a breath of outside air.

According to the pattern of early take-offs and landings for the African hops, it was just before noon when they approached Fort-Lamy for a stopover. The sun was high; its rays direct and glaring. As she came in on a long glide for the touchdown, Amelia held the throttles more forward than was usual: she needed a faster landing speed to compensate for the thin, hot air with its weak lifting power on the wings. Thick beads of sweat bubbled, broke, and ran down her face and neck. Her eyes smarted from the sting of the salt and she tried to blink the drops of sweat away. Her hands were wet and slippery on the wheel and throttles, and quickly she brought back one hand then the other to rub it dry against the leg of her trousers.

The Electra rolled swiftly over the ground. Gently Amelia touched the brakes until her plane came to a stop. Hoping for cooler air, she slid back the cockpit hatch. The inside of the plane was like an oven turned up to broil, but the hot outside air only added more heat to it. Quickly she taxied the plane and parked it. The bright metal wings sizzled in the sun; AE climbed out of the cockpit, skipped on tiptoe over the hot metal, and jumped to the ground. Fred swung open the door of the fuselage and climbed out. Pilot and navigator looked at each other: they were soaking wet, each separately chafing at the neck and waist from collar and belt. Amelia removed the kerchief from about her neck and wiped her face dry. She looked at the Electra: it sagged at one wing. The oleo strut of the left landing gear had just collapsed.

The landing gear was not repaired until 1:30 P.M. the next day. Because the heat was well over 100° AE and Fred decided to make that day’s hop a short one. They flew to El Fasher, only a few hours away. Fortunately, there was a strong tail wind, but Amelia felt as if she were riding a bucking bronco. The heat from the hot, dry sands below rose in strong convection currents that buffeted and pitched the Electra like a ship in a rolling sea. Fred felt as if he were back to his days of sailing ships. They were both happy to get to El Fasher, but not for long. When they crawled out of the plane, men with guns were waiting for them--disinfecting guns. As a health measure, pilot, navigator, and plane had to be thoroughly sprayed. Amelia and Fred submitted and squirmed.

One day at El Fasher was enough. Although the next day was Sunday, it was not a day for rest or prayer. The thirteenth of June, like any other day on the schedule, was marked for a flight, this one into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Khartoum.

The land flown over was for Amelia the bleakest and most desolate in all of Africa. There were no rivers, no native villages, not even one identifying contour line on the map. As far as Amelia could stretch her hand over the course line there was blank space beneath.

Unable to fly by contact, she locked in the auto pilot and studied the romantic-sounding names on the map. Qala-en Hahl, Umm Shinayshin, Abu Seid, Idd el Bashir, Fazi, Marabia Abu Fas: as she pronounced them, each in turn rolled from her lips and tongue in twisted vowels and consonants. What wonderful sticklers they would make for crossword puzzles!

As they approached Khartoum, Amelia was struck by the orderly way in which the city was laid out. She learned later that Kitchener had used the Union Jack for the blueprint. The city was situated on the banks of the Nile, 1,350 miles south of Cairo and several hundred miles west of the Red Sea. They remained in Khartoum for only two hours, time enough to refuel but not time enough for any sight-seeing.

From Khartoum they set out for Massaua, in Italy’s Eritrea. From above AE noticed an occasional grouping of colorfully striped tents; they marked stopping places along the endless camel trails across the desert. The blowing wind wrinkled and scalloped the waste of land.

Two hundred miles out the Electra bisected the Atbara River. Across the river sandy plains gently rose to foothills, the foothills to lush green mountains. As it approached the foothills, the plane hit bumpy, contrary air currents. The flow of air coursing down the slopes of the mountains tangled with the strong convection currents rising from the ground. Amelia fought to hold her plane steady, but it pitched and tossed. She added throttle and climbed to 10,000 feet, but the buffeting continued. To the left and about 3,000 feet below her wing she caught sight of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea; to the right, a range of peaks that towered to 14,000 feet. She weaved in and out and across to the other side. The eastern slopes came suddenly; sharp and abrupt, they angled quickly down into a broad, flat, sweeping valley. For the next 30 miles the land continued flat all the way to the Red Sea.

As she had found the Blue Nile and the White Nile to be neither blue nor white, but green, so now Amelia discovered the Red Sea not to be red, but blue. She was gradually seeing the world, or at least its rivers, in its true colors. She lowered flaps and landing gear and began her letdown.

Standing at the end of a bay formed by two coral islands and the mainland was Massaua. Late-afternoon shadows lengthened over the port. Mounds of salt about the town, like sand dunes she had seen at Cape Cod, glittered in the slanting rays of the sun. Two small clipper ships, some freighters, and countless other smaller craft rode the tide in the harbor.

After she had landed, Amelia soon discovered why Massaua was one of the world’s great exporters of salt. The blistering sun, causing temperatures often in excess of 120°, could evaporate hundreds of gallons of salt water in pans set out along the shore and leave thick layers of salt.

Amelia had forgotten to eat, as she had done so often before during these daily flights. She was starved for food; she felt “as hollow as a bamboo horse,” she said to one of the Italian officers who had greeted her when she arrived. The officer did not know how to translate the remark for his bewildered colleagues, but he understood her meaning, laughed, and nodded. Food had been prepared for them.

To prepare for the long flight across Arabia--it was a distance equal to the one she had flown over the South Atlantic--Amelia now flew the Electra 335 miles south and east down the coast of Eritrea to Assab, where the runways were longer and where a large number of gasoline drums had been stored for her.

The next morning, and well before daybreak from across the Red Sea in Arabia, they left Assab. It was June 15. Their destination, Karachi, India, lay 1,920 miles away. The flight would have to be non-stop, as the Arabian authorities had forbidden the Electra to land in their country; in fact, they had even refused the right to fly over their country. And, Amelia reflected, from what little she saw of it, their country was as forbidding as their refusals.

One hour and fifteen minutes after take-off they had passed over the southern entry to the Red Sea and had reached the English possession of Aden. From Aden, Amelia snaked a course along the southern Arabian coast. Flying at an altitude of 8,000 feet, she could see the blue of the Arabian Sea and the abomination of desolation which was the shore. Beyond the coastal mountains stretched the bare and endless sands of the desert. Of all places to make an emergency landing, Amelia thought, this was the worst. She reached into the cubbyhole to the right and behind her, and pulled out her Arabian credentials. “To Whom It May Concern” they began. Amelia hoped they would never have to concern anyone, because among other things the credentials begged for clemency for the fliers in the event they went down. AE wondered what would happen if she and Fred encountered the wrong nomadic tribe.

Amelia glanced at her instruments, then her eye stopped at the fuel gauges. The left engine seemed to be using too much gasoline. She reached for the mixture-control lever to lean out the fuel. The lever would not move; it was jammed. AE quickly analyzed the possibilities of a forced landing: neither the Arabian Sea nor desert was inviting, nor did she want to try to make it back to Assab; they would have to try to push through to Karachi. She eased back on both throttles.

Ahead was the Gulf of Oman, and across the gulf, Gwadar. At Gwadar she looked at the chronometer; it was five o’clock. Karachi was only two hours away. She hoped that by flying at a lower rpm she might make it.

The fuel supply lasted. When they reached Karachi, the chronometer for elapsed time since take-off had clicked off thirteen hours and ten minutes. It had been one of their longest flights. Weary, AE walked away from the plane.

“There’s a phone call for you,” someone said to her.

“Oh, yes,” Amelia answered flatly. Probably some newspaperman, she thought.

“It’s from New York. Mr. Putnam is on the wire.”

AE rushed inside to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

“How do you feel?” GP asked from 8,000 miles away.

“Fine. A little tired, perhaps.” The connection was good.

“How’s the ship?”

“Everything seems O.K. There’s been a little trouble with the fuel-flow meter and analyzer, but I think they’ll cure that here.”

“How’s Fred?”

“Fine....”

“Having a good time?” George asked.

“Oh, yes,” AE answered. “It’s been very worth while. We’ll do it again, together, some time.”

“O.K. with me. Anything else?”

“Well, I’ll cable tomorrow an estimate of when we should get to Howland. Good-by.... See you in Oakland.”

Amelia hung up the telephone and walked away slowly. GP was a most considerate and understanding husband, and when their friends had their little jokes about George’s role as the “forgotten husband,” he was always good-humored. After the Atlantic flight, she remembered, her Unknown Husband was decorated. Friends and well-wishers had gathered in her hotel suite in New York. The rooms were crowded with floral bouquets of congratulations.

A woman friend of AE’s went from bouquet to bouquet untying ribbons of various colors, and from them she fashioned a rosette. She walked over to George, who was sitting in one of the easy chairs.

“Stand up, husband!” the woman said. The husband obliged. She fastened the decoration to the lapel of GP’s coat. “For distinguished service in self-effacement beyond the line of marital duty, I hereby bestow upon you the ‘Order of the Forgotten Husband.’”

A flash of laughter cracked across the room. GP smiled uneasily, then laughed with the others.

“And,” added AE from the side line of spectators, “for having a sense of humor, too.”

Then, later, he organized other forgotten husbands of women fliers into the Forty-Nine Point Five Club. The women had formed an international organization of licensed women pilots and called themselves the Ninety-Nines. AE was the first president of the group. Not to be outdone, GP proposed a new trophy from the 49.5’s. It was an endurance prize to be awarded to the first wife who stayed home the longest. The trophy: a cut-glass baby bottle with crossed silver safety pins. The award was never made. There was no one who qualified.

Amelia kicked up the dust at Karachi as she remembered the telephone conversation with GP. Certainly she had never qualified for the trophy, but she would give it an honest try if she ever got home from this long trip. There was another continent to fly over, and another after that; not to mention the Pacific Ocean, which was more than equal to both of them put together.

For the present, however, the chance to ride a camel could not be foregone. Amelia and Fred rose to the occasion--literally. The way the camel swung up from the ground, nose-diving forward then lurching backward, Amelia, ensconced between the humps, felt as if she were going into a flat spin.

“Better wear your parachute,” Fred called over to her.

After the ride, or rather the swing aloft from extended rubber pads, AE went to the post office to have the “covers” canceled for her subscribing philatelists back home.

Out at the airport, the largest AE had ever seen, mechanics from Imperial Airways worked around the clock getting the Electra back into top-flight condition. Two instrument specialists on loan from the Royal Air Force repaired the troublesome fuel-flow indicator and the jammed mixture-control lever.

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 of the 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 4:00 P.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. They marked 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 set up 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.

“_Flying_ fishes,” 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 of Bengal 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 see Timbuktu, 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 5:25 P.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 3:00 A.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 Sea the 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.

6. _New Guinea to Howland Island_

The flight from Port Darwin to Lae, on June 30, was a flight of seven hours and forty-three minutes of the same day. The flight from Lae to Howland Island, however, was a flight into yesterday. For Howland lay one day earlier across the international date line. By the flight to the other side of the 180° of longitude there was one day to be gained; but to get to the great divide, there were two hours to be lost. And two lives.

In March, before she had cracked up in the earlier try for Howland from Hawaii, AE had written: “It is much better not to let fatigue of any kind creep into the early part of any expedition, for it cannot be eliminated later.”

Now she was weary and tired from a fatigue that could not be eliminated. Twenty-two thousand miles of flying in only forty days had taken its unremitting toll upon her and Fred.

Amelia wanted to be home by the Fourth of July and before her thirty-ninth birthday on the twenty-fourth. She considered the 7,000 miles that lay before her and wrote in her logbook: “Whether everything to be done can be done within this time limit remains to be seen.” And before she left Lae to begin the longest leg of the world flight--the 2,556 miles to Howland, she hastily scribbled: “I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”

AE hoped that the old difficulties with the navigation instruments that they had had at Surabaya would not return now to plague them on the long over-water flight. For on the leg to Howland the aids to navigation were limited.

The vast Pacific ruled out immediately the case for pilotage: except for islands few and far between there were no landmarks she could follow. The small size of Howland, for all practical purposes, discouraged the time and distance plotting of dead reckoning. There remained celestial navigation, with radio as an aid. For Amelia to be able to hit her target, the weather would have to be clear enough for Fred to be able to take his fixes from the stars at night and from the sun during the day. Once over the ocean and more than 500 miles out she would no longer be able to contact Lae by radio.

To get a radio bearing from Howland, she would have to fly all night and never waver from her course until early the next morning. Then she could home in on signals from the Coast Guard Cutter _Itasca_, which lay anchored off Howland. With the Electra’s loop antenna and the ability to receive from a strong sending station, she felt that her chances were good.

Nevertheless, Amelia wished now that she had not ordered the 250-foot trailing wire antenna to be removed from her plane before they left Miami. Gladly on the long over-water leg that faced her would she go through the trouble of reeling out and reeling in: if she had the long antenna she would be able to contact and to receive from the _Itasca_ from distances much farther out than the loop antenna permitted.

And, as if in fateful conspiracy, Amelia did not know that there was yet another aid to get to Howland. She did not know because no one had told her. A high-frequency direction finder had been obtained from the Navy and installed on the island of Howland; but neither Commander W. K. Thompson of the _Itasca_ nor Richard B. Black, the field representative of the Department of the Interior, had advised AE that the direction finder had been set up to help her.

This lack of foresight and coordination was but the beginning of a chain of incidents that linked finally to tragedy. Fred Noonan, in trying to set his chronometers, found that he could not calibrate them correctly because of radio difficulties on the Electra’s 50-watt set. With his chronometers reading slow or fast, he knew he would not be able to obtain accurate celestial fixes. An error of fifteen seconds on the precision instruments would mean a mistake of one mile in his position computations, and an error of one minute a mistake of four miles.

Such position errors, taken into account in giving AE headings to fly by, might add to the difficulties of the navigation. For a mistake of one degree in following the compass could take them one mile off course for every sixty miles flown, more than forty miles off course for the Howland leg.

Despite these serious problems, Amelia set out to find in the 7,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean the small speck of land that was Howland Island.

On July 1 the Electra stood poised several thousand feet from the edge of the cliff that marked the end of the runway. The plane was fully loaded with 1,150 gallons of gasoline, enough to fly under ideal conditions the full range of 4,000 miles. A contrary wind, however, which blew across rather than down the runway, coupled with an ominous black squall line, conspired to keep the Electra earth-bound for the day.

Amelia and Fred repacked the plane, discarding every scrap that was not absolutely needed. AE kept the bare essentials needed for travel; and Fred, a small tin case which he had picked up in Africa and which, Amelia was careful to note, “still rattles, so it cannot be packed very full.”

Restless and disappointed with the day’s delay, pilot and navigator did more sight-seeing on the island, but with half a heart. They could not wait to be off and homeward bound.

At ten o’clock the next morning--the second of July on Lae but the first on Howland--the Electra roared down the 3,000 feet of runway. In the cockpit Amelia watched the tachometer and the air-speed indicator: the rpm dial moved forward, and the air-speed needle crossed the red quadrant into the green, then across the green into the white. The plane broke cleanly into the air 150 feet short of the edge of the cliff that dropped to the sea. Amelia pulled up the gear and climbed to 8,000 feet, the cruising altitude.

She spread across her knees the sectional map prepared by Clarence S. Williams. As usual, all the information was there. She noted the course directions: a magnetic compass heading of 73°, later to change to 72°, then to 71°.

If the Wasp engines would continue to purr, and if the navigation could be correct, or not too far wrong, she would make it. She would be happy when it was over. After 22,000 miles, thirty stops, nineteen countries, five continents, and three crossings of the equator, and looking after 100 dials, gauges, and gadgets, and bucking wind, rain, thunderstorms, and monsoons, she had become tired from strain and weary from the work, not the pleasure, of flying.

The head winds were strong. A few hours out from New Britain and the Solomon Islands, directly on course, Amelia radioed her position to Lae. It was 5:20 P.M. Friday. They were, she said, at 4.33 South Latitude and 159.6 East Longitude, 795 miles out from New Guinea, and proceeding on course. Now, she hoped, if she could home in on the _Itasca_ in the morning, getting home by way of Hawaii would be an easy matter.

On the _Itasca_ preparations had been made and carried out with Swiss-watch precision. Commander Thompson had set up his watches--two men on the ship and one on the shore--and waited. The prearranged radio frequencies were checked, the higher short wave and the lower long wave. The limits of the Electra’s direction finder--the loop antenna--were listed as 200 to 1,500 and 2,400 to 4,800 kilocycles.

Giving her call signals, KHAQQ, Amelia would report in on radio at quarter past and quarter to each hour, as was her custom when possible during the entire world flight. Her frequencies for transmitting were 6,210 kilocycles by day and 3,105 kilocycles by night. For telegraphic code by key, Fred would use 500 kilocycles, the standard frequency used by ships at sea.

On the hour and the half-hour the _Itasca_ would broadcast weather reports and forecasts, and homing signals, on 3,105 kilocycles by voice and 7,500 kilocycles by key.

At 6:30 P.M., Howland time, the first of July, the San Francisco division of the Coast Guard notified the _Itasca_ that the Electra was airborne. To make doubly sure that the ship’s radios were operating correctly, the _Itasca_ tested signal strength with San Francisco, then tried to contact the Electra. It was too early to establish communication with the plane.

Listening at two receivers and a loud-speaker, in addition to officer and enlisted members of the crew, were correspondents from the Associated Press and the United Press, and the Interior Department’s Richard Black, whom GP had asked to be his representative and the coordinator for the flight. The _Itasca_ was standing by and ready.

12:04 A.M. The _Itasca_ transmitted by voice on 3,105 and by key on 7,500, trying to make contact; then keyed the homing signal, · --, the dit dah of the letter A.

12:15 A.M. KHAQQ was not heard.

12:30 A.M. The ship sent out the weather, repeating twice each part of the report: wind direction east, force 11 miles, partly cloudy, visibility 20 miles, calm swell, direction east.

Checking against possible radio receiver difficulty, the _Itasca_ asked Samoa if the cutter _Ontario_ had heard the Electra; the ship’s answer was that it had not.

12:45 A.M. KHAQQ was not heard.

1:00 A.M. The _Itasca_ sent the weather on 7,500 kilocycles by key and on 3,105 kilocycles by voice. The code was sent at a slowed-down ten words per minute.

1:15 A.M. The _Itasca_ had not heard AE’s signals. The ship felt that there was no cause for alarm, for the Electra was still about 1,000 miles out.

1:25 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Have not heard your signals yet; please observe schedules with key; go ahead, am listening on 3,105 now.”

This transmission was not answered by Amelia.

1:45 A.M. KHAQQ not heard.

1:55 A.M. The _Itasca_ sent the weather on 7,500 kilocycles by key and on 3,105 by voice.

2:15 A.M. KHAQQ not heard on 3,105 kilocycles.

2:45 A.M. Electra heard on 3,105, but the message was not completely understood because of the static. AE’s voice, identified by Carey of AP and Hanzlick of UP, was a low monotone. “Cloudy and overcast,” she had reported; they were her only intelligible words.

The _Itasca_, having heard Amelia, however indistinctly, now tried to establish communications with her. The attempt was unsuccessful. Again checking its own signals, the cutter now broadcast to stations in the vicinity; its messages were heard throughout the Pacific area.

3:00 A.M. The _Itasca_ reported the weather by key on 7,500 and by voice on 3,105; wind direction east 8 miles per hour; clear, calm; ceiling unlimited. Then by key the ship sent out the homing signal, the dit dah of the letter A.

3:15 A.M. The Electra was not heard.

3:30 A.M. _Itasca_ weather report: Wind direction east, force 8 miles per hour; clear visibility, 20 miles; calm swell, direction east; ceiling unlimited.

Then by voice on 3,105: “What is your position? When do you expect to reach Howland? _Itasca_ has heard your phone, go ahead on key. Acknowledge this broadcast next schedule.”

3:45 A.M. AE reported in by voice: “_Itasca_ from Earhart.... _Itasca_ from Earhart.... Overcast.... Will listen on hour and half-hour on 3,105.... Will listen on hour and half on 3,105.”

4:00 A.M. The _Itasca_ again gave the weather, then asked: “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? We are receiving your signals; please acknowledge this message on your next schedule.”

4:15 A.M. AE not heard on 3,105.

4:55 A.M. The _Itasca_ heard AE. But her message was garbled and unintelligible.

5:15 A.M. KHAQQ not heard on 3,105.

5:30 A.M. The ship sent the weather by key and voice; then by key on 7,500 kilocycles, a long line of dit dah’s.

5:45 A.M. AE not heard.

6:15 A.M. Amelia called in. She wanted a bearing on 3,105 kilocycles, on the hour. She would whistle into her microphone, she said, so that the Electra could get a bearing. She was about two hundred miles out, she figured.

6:20 A.M. Commander Thompson called the watch on Howland Island and told him to get a bearing with his direction finder on 3,105. AE’s whistle went out; the attempt was a failure.

6:45 A.M. Amelia’s voice broke in; it was clear and strong. “Please take a bearing on us,” she pleaded, “and report in half-hour. I will make noise in microphone. About one hundred miles out.”

Her voice was on the air too briefly to allow sufficient time for the Howland direction finder to take a bearing from it.

7:00 A.M. For the next fifteen minutes the _Itasca_ sent out the homing signal, both on 3,105 and 7,500 kilocycles.

7:18 A.M. The _Itasca_ broadcast to AE by voice: “Cannot take bearing on 3,105 very good [sic]. Please send on 500, or do you wish to take bearing on us? Go ahead, please.”

There was no answer from Amelia.

7:19 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Go ahead on 3,105.”

The message was not answered.

7:25 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Please go ahead on 3,105.”

There was no answer.

7:26 _A.M._ KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Go ahead on 3,105.”

Again there was no answer from Amelia. The ship again sent out the A homing signal.

7:30 _A.M._ KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Please acknowledge our signals on key. Please.”

Again the request was unanswered.

7:42 _A.M._ Amelia broke in loud and clear. Her voice was high and frantic. “We must be on you,” she said. “But cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude 1,000 feet.”

7:43 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Received your message, signal strength 5. Go ahead.”

Again the ship sent out the homing signal on 3,105 and then on 500 kilocycles.

7:49 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Your message O.K. Please acknowledge with phone on 3,105.”

7:58 A.M. Amelia called in again. She obviously had not heard the _Itasca_, for she failed to acknowledge the ship’s message. “KHAQQ calling _Itasca_,” she reported in; again her voice was loud and clear. “We are circling, but cannot hear you. Go ahead on 7,500 either now or on schedule time of half-hour.”

8:00 A.M. The _Itasca_ sent out a long series of A’s on 7,500 kilocycles.

In response to the ship’s message, Amelia broke in: “We are receiving your signals, but are unable to get a minimum [for a bearing]. Please take a bearing on us and answer with voice on 3,105.”

The _Itasca_ probably could have taken an accurate bearing on her if she had counted numbers rather than whistled. The whistling sound was too much like static to be distinguished from it.

At 10:00 A.M. July 2, when Amelia had taken off from Lae, it was 12:00 noon, July 1, on Howland, two hours later but one day earlier. At 8:00 A.M. the next day, Howland time, she had been in the air for twenty hours of elapsed time. If after adding throttle to compensate for head winds she had averaged a ground speed of 142 mph over the distance of 2,556 miles, she should have been over Howland at the end of eighteen hours. If she had averaged only 128 mph because of head winds, after twenty hours she should have been well over the target island.

8:33 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Will you please come in and answer on 3,105. We are transmitting constantly on 7,500 kilocycles. We do not hear you on 3,105. Please answer on 3,105. Go ahead.”

The message was not acknowledged.

One minute later the _Itasca_ continued: “Answer on 3,105 kilocycles with phone. How are signals coming in? Go ahead.”

8:45 A.M. Amelia broke in on 3,105 kilocycles. Her voice was loud and clear, but broken and frenzied. “We are in a line of position 157-337,” she said hastily. “Will repeat this message on 6,210 kilocycles. Wait, listening on 6,210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”

Anxiety drew taut across the radio room of the _Itasca_ as everyone strained to hear the repeated message on 6,210. Nothing was heard by anybody.

8:47 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “We heard you O.K. on 3,105 kilocycles. Please stay on 3,105. Do not hear you on 6,210. Maintain QSO on 3,105.”

The same message was sent by key on 7,500 kilocycles.

The _Itasca_ again heard nothing on 3,105 or 6,210.

8:49 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Go ahead on 3,105.”

8:54 A.M. KHAQQ from _Itasca_: “Your signals O.K. on 3,105. Go ahead with position on 3,105 or 500 kilocycles.”

The ship listened for AE’s answer on 3,105, 6,210, and 500 kilocycles.

The message was not acknowledged.

“We are running north and south,” at 8:45 A.M. had been Amelia Earhart’s last words.

Until ten o’clock on that morning of July 1 the Itasca continued to call. The operators transmitted on 3,105 and 7,500, and listened on 3,105, 6,210, and 500, and also on 500 of the direction finder.

Nothing more was heard from the Electra.

The decision of the _Itasca_’s crew was obvious and unanimous: Amelia Earhart was having radio receiver trouble.

Questions abounded. How account for her last report: “We are in a line of position 157-337”? What was the geographical point of reference for the line of position? Did she get a bearing from Howland? Where was she when she made the report?

The answers lay partially in several alternatives: the Electra’s loop antenna, or radio; the stars before dawn, or the early-morning sun.

The loop antenna, one of the plane’s direction finders, had a low-frequency limit of 200–1,500 kilocycles and a high-frequency limit of 2,400–4,800 kilocycles; therefore, it could not receive the _Itasca_’s homing signal from 7,500 kilocycles, but it could receive the one from 500 kilocycles. If the line of position 157-337 were determined from 500 kilocycles, then the all-important point of reference from which it was drawn had to be understood as Howland or the _Itasca_.

Obviously, AE knew her line of position, but she did not know where she was north or south on the line. This fact accounts for her “We are running north and south.” If she had known her exact position, she would not have conducted the search pattern for the island, nor would she have asked the _Itasca_ to take bearings on her.

Curiously, the only transmission she seems to have received on radio was the telegraphed A on 7,500 kilocycles, but she did not receive that signal long enough to get the aural-null, a minimum of sound for a bearing.

If neither the line of position nor the bearing could come from the loop antenna or the radio, there were still the aids of celestial navigation.

For navigator Fred Noonan, veteran of eighteen previous Pacific air crossings, it should have been relatively easy to determine position, if his navigation instruments were operating correctly and if the weather were clear enough to take fixes from the stars or the sun.

Before dawn on July 3 he could have taken a fix from the stars. But an error in his chronometer of a mere four seconds would lead to a mistake of one mile in the longitude of his determined position. If the sextant were in error, however, the mistakes could have canceled out by the taking of three observations. Yet it would seem that Noonan could not shoot the stars, for as early as 2:45 A.M. AE reported the weather as “cloudy and overcast,” and at 3:45 A.M. as still “overcast.” If that bad weather continued until dawn, Fred Noonan could not use celestial navigation regardless of instruments.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, if he saw the sun after dawn, he could have shot a sun line. But if 157-337 were a sun line, it was worthless without a geographical point of reference, because the line could be drawn anywhere on the globe. No point of reference was given by AE in her last report.

Thus the question persisted: Where was she?

7. _The Disappearance and the Search_

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan and their plane were lost somewhere over a possible area of 450,000 square miles in the South Pacific. The United States Navy was determined to find them.

In Washington Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William D. Leahy acted quickly and ordered ships and planes to take up the search for the missing fliers. In addition to the _Itasca_, an aircraft carrier and its full complement of planes, a battleship, four destroyers, a minesweeper, and a seaplane were pressed into service. Together these ships and planes would search for sixteen days an area of more than 250,000 square miles.

Commander Thompson of the _Itasca_ made some quick decisions after Amelia failed to arrive at Howland. If she had flown to the south, she should have seen Baker Island, just 38 miles south of Howland. The area to start looking for her, he concluded, was in the northwest quadrant indicated by the 337° of her last position report of 157-337.

Also, he was far from abandoning hope. Although Amelia was having radio trouble, there was every belief that Fred Noonan could make a fix and yet find Howland. Radio transmissions, therefore, continued around the clock at the same frequencies, of 3,105, 6,210, and 500 kilocycles.

If Amelia were leaning out her fuel at the rate of 50 gallons per hour, at the end of twenty-one hours, at 9:00 A.M. on the morning of July 2, she would have enough fuel left for two more hours of flying time, for she had had 1,150 gallons of gasoline aboard the aircraft. If, on the other hand, AE were using fuel at just under 45 gallons per hour, she could have flown for a total of twenty-six hours--until 12:00 noon, Lae time, but 2:00 P.M. Howland time. In other words, just as her tanks were going dry, her chronometer for elapsed time would have indicated approximately twelve o’clock. The Navy reasoned, presumably from AE’s point of view in the cockpit, that she could stay aloft trying to find some island somewhere until about noon.

If she were slightly north and west of Howland, and realized the fact, she would have tried for the Gilbert Islands; or, if she were even more north and west, she would have attempted the Marshall or Caroline Islands; if extremely north and west, the Mariana Islands. The last possibility was most unlikely.

“If they are down,” George Putnam wired from San Francisco, “they can stay afloat indefinitely. Their empty tanks will give them buoyancy. Besides, they have all the emergency equipment they’ll need--everything.”

That the Navy was unable to find the two fliers defies understanding if all the conclusions and predications were correct.

At 10:15 A.M. the _Itasca_ steamed north, and a Navy seaplane took off from Honolulu bound for Howland, to help in the search.

At twelve o’clock Amelia was reported as definitely not having reached Howland. Her time had just about run out. She was most probably down; somewhere close by, everyone hoped, either riding the wing of the floating Electra, or paddling away from it in the emergency rubber raft. Holding to the first assumption, the _Itasca_ listened for AE’s SOS on 3,105 and 500, because it was believed that the plane’s radio supply was by battery and that the antenna could be used from on top of the wing. The _Itasca_ pressed the search and kept calling the Electra continuously.

Because only portions of Amelia’s transmissions had been received during the night, and those garbled amid static, the Navy concluded that the Electra had been flying through or above thunderstorms.

After her last report to Lae, at 5:20 P.M. on July 2, something had happened to put her off course. After sunset at 5:55 P.M. and during the night until sunrise at 6:12 A.M. the next morning, she had somehow become lost.

The navigation procedures of Fred Noonan tend to confirm this last view. It was his practice, according to those who knew him, to follow course and to correct it by taking infrequent fixes during the night; then, just before dawn, he would correct course for destination by determining a line of position near the end of the estimated run. This procedure would allow a flight of about three hundred miles during the morning without a good fix.

If the compasses had tumbled during the night and if the chronometers were badly out of calibration, then there were navigation errors aplenty--especially where Amelia depended on a faulty radio to make her landfall at Howland.

The seaplane out of Honolulu had to turn back to base because of bad weather. During the initial part of its 1,800-mile flight to Howland, however, it constantly received transmissions from the _Itasca_. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with the ship’s radios.

The Lockheed engineers were contacted to find out whether the Electra’s radio could operate if the plane were floating. Their answer was the first heavy note of discouragement. The Electra’s radio definitely could not operate if it were on the water, they wired, because it needed the right engine for power. But, they added, the plane could float from the buoyancy provided by the empty tanks for a maximum period of nine hours. It was now hoped, for radio purposes, that the Electra had made an emergency landing on land.

The _Itasca_ searched an area of 9,500 square miles without success. In addition to constant transmission on 3,105 and 500, during the day it set up a smoke screen, and during the night it played its searchlight against the sky. These measures were in vain.

On July 7 the battleship _Colorado_ and the minesweeper _Swan_ joined forces with the cutter _Itasca_. The _Colorado_ with its planes went south and east through the Phoenix Islands, exploring the 157° reciprocal of 337° represented in AE’s last reported line of position. The _Swan_ and the _Itasca_ turned north and then west to the Gilbert Islands.

On July 9 the aircraft carrier _Lexington_, with 63 planes, accompanied by the four destroyers _Perkins_, _Cushing_, _Lamson_, and _Drayton_, sailed from Hawaii. They arrived in the Howland area on the thirteenth to lend their support to the search. For the next five days the _Lexington_’s planes logged 1,591 hours looking north and west for the missing fliers. The planes covered an area of 151,556 square miles without turning up a trace of the Electra or its pilot and navigator.

Each ship was required to send out the same broadcast:

“We are using every possible means to establish contact with you. If you hear this broadcast, please come in on 3,105 kilocycles. Use key if possible, otherwise, voice transmission. If you hear this broadcast, turn carrier [a steady key transmission] for one minute so we can tune you in, then turn carrier on and off four times, then listen for our acknowledgment.”

All attempts by the ships and planes were in vain. After exploring an area of 161,000 square miles, nothing was found of the Electra, the life raft, Amelia Earhart, or Fred Noonan.

Newspapers and radio stations across the country told the story of the disappearance and the search. Americans could not believe that Amelia Earhart was missing, and would not believe that she was dead. Everything about the story was too sudden, too tragic.

False signals and false reports now began to give spark to a despairing hope. On one of the ships two lookouts and an officer of the deck had seen a distinct green flare on the northern horizon. It was known that AE’s rubber raft had emergency flares. The _Itasca_ steamed north and east to investigate; at the same time it asked AE on the radio if she were sending up flares, and if she were, to send up another one. A few seconds later another green light appeared at a bearing of 75°. It was seen by twenty-five witnesses.

The _Itasca_ now checked with other ships in the area to find out if they had seen the flares. The replies were all in the negative; the signals, they cautioned, were probably heat lightning.

Howland Island then reported flares to the northeast. The men on the island immediately set flame to three drums of gasoline, hoping that the fire would serve as an unmistakable beacon. The Swan reported more lights but thought that they were meteors.

Because of the position, appearance, and timing of the lights, the _Itasca_ seriously thought that they were flares; but because of the other dissenting reports, it was now decided that the lights were merely a meteoric shower.

There were all kinds of radio reports. Amateur and professional radio operators from Honolulu; from up and down the west coast of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle; from across the Rocky Mountains in Cheyenne; and from as far inland as Cincinnati, now reported hearing SOS signals from Amelia Earhart.

If Amelia had landed on an island or reef, and were using her radio, it was possible that her signals had skip-waved back and forth and forward between ionosphere and ocean across thousands of miles. Yet, if there were SOS signals, they were not heard in the Pacific by the official radio operators on any of the assigned Navy and Coast Guard ships, or on any of the shore stations from the Gilbert Islands through the Hawaiian Islands to San Francisco Radio on the West Coast.

In exploring the Gilbert Islands, the _Itasca_ sent a party ashore to Tarawa, to confer with the senior British administrator of the islands. He had been informed of the Earhart search, and was surprised that neither the station at Tarawa nor the one at Beru had been notified about the flight before it began from Lae. Both stations, although they heard no Electra transmissions, could have helped, for Amelia’s course had lain just 20 miles south of Arorae, the most southern island of the Gilbert group.

The concentration of the search to the northwest had been based on a very careful analysis of the evidence. The weather conditions at the end of the flight were a clear blue sky to the south and east of Howland but heavy cloud banks about fifty miles north and west of Howland.

The _Itasca_ had laid a heavy smoke screen for two hours on the morning of July 2; it would have been visible to AE, flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet, for more than forty miles from the south and east, but only twenty miles from the north and west.

Evidently, judging from her reports, Amelia had been flying earlier during the night at a high altitude and above a thick overcast of clouds. Her signal strength, if direct and not the result of skip waves, indicated a maximum distance of 250 miles from Howland and not nearer to the island than 30 miles. Such was the conclusion of the _Itasca_.

All available land areas were searched and hundreds of thousands of miles of sea area. On July 19, 1937, the Navy released the _Itasca_ from any further search; the cutter’s mission was completed.

Back in California George Palmer Putnam had called on Jacqueline Cochran. He remembered Amelia’s having told him about her friend’s strange and marvelous powers at extrasensory perception. He was very excited when he came into Miss Cochran’s Los Angeles apartment. He begged her to help him locate Amelia.

Miss Cochran told GP where the plane had gone down: that it had ditched in the ocean, that Fred Noonan had fractured his skull against the bulkhead, that Amelia was alive, and that the plane was floating on the water. She named the _Itasca_ as a ship that was in the area although she had never heard the name before; and she named a Japanese fishing vessel in the same location. She told GP to get ships and planes into the area immediately to begin the search.

For two days Jacqueline Cochran followed the course of the drifting Electra. Ships and planes searched the area of her insight, but to no avail. Miss Cochran was racked with disappointment. If her ability were worth anything, she reasoned, it should have been able to locate and save her friend. Giving up, Jacqueline Cochran went to the cathedral in Los Angeles and lit candles for the repose of Amelia’s soul. She never tried her powers at ESP again.

Amelia had unquestionably disappeared. At best, her attitude toward her radio plans for the flight was casual; at worst, a combination of poor coordination, faulty radio receiver, and imperfect navigation instruments, had sent plane, pilot, and navigator to a watery grave.

The search over, rumors now began to abound and multiply about what had _really_ happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan.

Each would cause Noonan’s wife and Amelia’s husband and mother untold hours of anguish and false hope.

8. _The Fog of Rumors_

The first great rumor, which had gained widespread acceptance, was that Amelia and Fred were prisoners of the Japanese. They had flown over islands in the Japanese mandate which were being illegally fortified, the plane had been shot down by anti-aircraft guns, the pilot and navigator had been taken and held as spies.

This Japanese-prisoner story still persists after more than twenty years, largely because of a movie released in the early forties, while World War II was at its highest pitch and anti-Japanese feeling at white heat. The film, _Flight for Freedom_, starring Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, told the story of a famous American woman flier, “Tonie Carter,” who had been asked by the United States Navy to “get lost” in the South Pacific (actually, to remain in hiding at Howland Island), so that Navy planes could take photographs of illegal Japanese fortifications while “looking” for her.

In the movie, Tonie Carter’s navigator was an old beau, “Randy Britton,” to whom she had once been engaged. This gave rise to another rumor: Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in love, and decided to find a lonely Pacific island where they could live out their idyllic love “happily ever after.” Incensed by the broad allusions of the film, George Palmer Putnam filed suit. The movie company settled out of court.

The scenario writers for _Flight for Freedom_ were not alone, however, in their belief. Aboard the U.S.S. _Colorado_ while it was conducting its search for the missing fliers were Dr. M. L. Brittain of Georgia Tech, and other university presidents, who were guests of the battleship on a Pacific cruise.

There was the possibility, Dr. Brittain later suggested, that Amelia was a prisoner of the Japanese, even as late as 1944, and that one day soon she would be liberated by the advancing United States Marines.

“We got the definite feeling,” Dr. Brittain was quoted as saying, “that Miss Earhart had some sort of understanding with government officials that the last part of her voyage around the world would be over some Japanese islands, probably the Marshalls.”

Amelia’s mother, Amy Otis Earhart, has long maintained that her daughter was on a secret government mission and that she was captured by the Japanese. This is Mrs. Earhart’s belief although she has no official basis for it.

The Navy Department at the end of World War II was compelled to make a final official announcement about AE’s disappearance. Amelia Earhart had not been sent on a naval cloak-and-dagger operation. Her plane had not been shot out of the skies by Japanese gunfire. She had not been captured, held as a prisoner, or shot as a spy.

Nevertheless, despite official and unofficial beliefs and statements to the contrary, rumors still flourished.

There was the story of the Japanese fishing boat. After United States forces had invaded the Marshall Islands--north and west of Howland--Lieutenants Eugene T. Bogan and James Toole were quoted as saying that this story was told to them by a missionary-trained native named Elieu:

“Ajima, a jap trader, said three and a half years ago that an American woman pilot came down between Jaluit and Ailinglapalap Atolls [southeastern Marshall Islands] and was picked up by a Japanese fishing-boat crew. She was taken to Japan.”

In July of 1944, during the invasion of Saipan, in the Mariana Islands--far north and west of Howland Island--the Marines found in an abandoned Japanese barracks a photograph album filled with snapshots of Amelia Earhart in her flying clothes. It is known that AE carried a camera with her on the world flight but not that she was carrying a photograph album filled with pictures of herself.

Dr. Brittain, the same who had been on the searching _Colorado_, was queried in 1944 about the Saipan pictures. He felt that there was a definite connection between the album and the disappearance of the Earhart plane.

Of all the pieces of “evidence” in the stories about the disappearance, the most extraordinary was a piece of wood. It was a fragment of a fence post, with several nail holes in it and with one end badly charred. The piece of wood was found in July, 1942, by Robert D. Weishaupt while he was on beach duty with the Coast Artillery at Baranof Island, Alaska. Weishaupt noticed the burned piece of fence post as it washed in and out from the shore. It looked as if it had some writing on it. He waded in and picked it out of the water.

On one side was printed:

TO MY HUSBAND--I HAVE CRASHED 250 MLLS FROM HAWAII--N.W. OUR MOTOR WENT INTO FLAMES--SHARKS ABOUT ME.

A.E.

and on the other side, simply:

MRS. A.E.

Whoever wrote on the piece of wood and set it adrift on the water perpetrated a cruel hoax. It is extremely unlikely that AE could have crashed 250 miles northwest of Hawaii; the Electra did not have enough fuel to fly another 2,000 miles beyond Howland. And if Amelia had written such a desperate message, on wood suddenly provided in the middle of the Pacific, she would have addressed the message, not “TO MY HUSBAND,” but, rather, to GPP, her husband’s well-known initials; and she would have signed her initials on the reverse side, not “Mrs. A.E.” but AE, because she was not Mrs. Amelia Earhart.

For the rest of his life George Palmer Putnam was a man haunted and hunted by people who claimed that they had mystic powers and that they could put him in contact with his wife.

Eighteen months after her disappearance Amelia was declared legally dead, and GP married again. He went to live in the mountains away from the crowds, and during the war he joined the Air Force.

9. _The Light of Fact: A Mystery Solved?_

Two additional events, however, separate in time and both involving Amelia Earhart--but heretofore never interrelated--do fit together into a logical and revealing pattern. All the pieces of the puzzle are not available, but there are enough of them to form a discernible picture.

At the end of World War II Jacqueline Cochran, then head of the WASPS, the famous organization of women ferry pilots, was asked by General Hap Arnold to go to Tokyo and investigate the role that Japanese women had played in aviation during the war. While she was in Imperial Air Force Headquarters Miss Cochran noticed that there were numerous files on American aviation notables--and many files on Amelia Earhart.

These documents since that time have mysteriously disappeared. They are not in the official custody of the United States Government, or any of its departments, services, or agencies; nor do they seem to be in the possession of the Japanese Government. (All captured documents, those of historical importance having been copied on microfilm, have been returned to Tokyo. No AE files were discovered among the captured materials.) Nevertheless, these files seem to indicate that the Japanese had more than a normal interest in Amelia Earhart, because of another event that happened, curiously, again in the Marianas. This new evidence has never before been made public.

At the end of the war on the island of Saipan a Navy dentist worked with his assistant, a native girl named Josephine Blanco. It was 1946. Dr. Casimir R. Sheft, now practicing in New Jersey, was taking a break between appointments and talking with a fellow dentist. During the conversation Dr. Sheft casually mentioned the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and speculated about whether the famous flier could have ended her flight in the Marianas, and possibly near Saipan, for he had read somewhere that the Marines had found AE’s flight log during the invasion (actually, it had been the photograph album). Suddenly his dental assistant, Josephine, broke in: She had seen an American woman flier many years ago--nine or ten--on Saipan, when she was a little girl. The American woman wore khaki clothes and had her hair cut like a man....

Josephine Blanco, now Mrs. Maximo Akiyama, and living in California with her husband and their young son, was witness to an incident which is as incredible as it is enlightening.

In the summer of 1937 Josephine was riding her bicycle toward Tanapag Harbor. She was taking her Japanese brother-in-law, J. Y. Matsumoto, his lunch, and was hurrying along because it was nearly twelve o’clock.

That summer she had just finished Japanese grammar school, where she had gone for the last five years, ever since she was seven years old. In March she had celebrated her eleventh birthday, and now she could begin Catholic school. She was looking forward to studying with the Spanish missionary sisters. Father Tadzio had hoped that someday Josephine, too, like some of the other Chamorro native girls in the Marianas, would answer God’s call and become a native sister.

Josephine had a special pass to the Japanese military area near the harbor. Not even Japanese civilians were admitted to the area unless they carried the proper credentials. The young girl rode up to the gate, stopped her bicycle, and presented her pass. The guard allowed her into the restricted area.

On the way to meet her brother-in-law, Josephine heard an airplane flying overhead. She looked up and saw a silver two-engined plane. The plane seemed to be in trouble, for it came down low, headed out into the harbor, and belly-landed on the water.

It was not until she met her brother-in-law that Josephine discovered who it was that had crash-landed in the harbor.

“The American woman,” everyone was saying, greatly excited. “Come and see the American woman.” Josephine and her brother-in-law joined the knot of people who gathered to watch.

She saw the American woman standing next to a tall man wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt, and was surprised because the woman was not dressed as a woman usually dressed. Instead of a dress, the American woman wore a man’s shirt and trousers; and instead of long hair, she wore her hair cut short, like a man. The faces of the man and woman were white and drawn, as if they were sick.

The American woman who looked like a man and the tall man with her were led away by the Japanese soldiers. The fliers were taken to a clearing in the woods. Shots rang out. The soldiers returned alone.

Mrs. Akiyama has affirmed, after identifying a photograph of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan taken on the world flight, that the couple was unquestionably the same man and woman she and her brother-in-law had seen on Saipan: the clothes were different, but the woman’s haircut was unmistakable.

Josephine Blanco’s story, which is basically the same one she told Dr. Sheft in Saipan, is most probably true. It is extremely unlikely this native girl could have invented her story. If she had, then for what purpose? If for profit or gain, she had, for more than ten years after the American invasion, the opportunity to capitalize on her sensational news.

As an eleven-year-old girl, Josephine of course had no idea of the significance of what she had seen other than it was indeed an American woman she had seen. Dr. Sheft has never doubted her story, and for many years he has hoped that a thorough reexamination of the facts would be made. They were.

Amelia Earhart could have ended her flight around the world at Saipan. If she were indeed headed for Howland Island, however, she somehow made an error of about 100° in reading her compass.

It means that all during the night of July 2, beginning after sundown at 5:55 P.M., Fred Noonan was not able to get a fix from the stars to determine his position. And if, after fourteen hours out from Lae, he looked down and saw a chain of islands, he would have determined that he was on course and over the Gilbert Islands; but if AE had turned north while he was napping, and he had still awakened in time to see islands, they would have been, not the Gilberts as he might have thought, but the Caroline Islands--exactly the same distance away but in the wrong direction.

By somehow departing from her course, and making the tremendous error of steering north and west instead of east--as she had done once before on the world flight, when she had turned north to St. Louis instead of south to Dakar, overriding Fred’s directions, after the flight across the South Atlantic--AE would have found herself after twenty hours of flying time somewhere along the chain of islands that marks the Marianas.

Her last report, at 8:45 A.M., gave her line of position as 157-337. The Navy’s search satisfied judgments that the line was not a radio line, for the areas northwest and southeast from Howland were thoroughly investigated. One hundred fifty-seven-337, therefore, was undoubtedly a sun line.

Near Howland, at position 01° 00’ North Latitude and 177° 20’ West Longitude, on July 3, 1937, the bearing of the sun was 66° from the north point at 7:00 A.M., Howland time. The sun line, therefore, would have been 156-336.

Near Saipan, at position 13° 00’ North Latitude and 153° 00’ East Longitude, at 5:00 A.M., Saipan time, the sun was 64° from the north point. A sun line there would have been 154-334.

If Noonan had thought he was close to Howland when he shot his last sun line, his geographical point of reference--used for computing and plotting his observation--would obviously have been close to Howland. If he had actually been close to Saipan, however, the relative position of the sun would still have been almost the same: 64° from the north point near Saipan, as opposed to 66° from the north point near Howland. But his observation, when computed and plotted on his chart, would have shown him to be the same number of miles from his geographical point of reference.

An experienced navigator with trust in his abilities such as Noonan would have tended to believe that either his observations or his computations were somehow wrong. He would not have thought, at least immediately, that he was some 2,600 miles off course. If AE had been pressing him for a position to radio to the _Itasca_, he might have, in agonies of doubt, merely given her the line of position, which he could be sure of, but _not_ the geographical point of reference, because he could now no longer determine that point with certainty. This possibility would explain the irregularity of Amelia having transmitted the line of position without the necessary point of reference.

On the basis of these determinations, therefore, there is strong support for believing in Josephine Blanco’s story.

The Navy gave Amelia until about noon before she would go down. It was at noontime that Josephine saw the two-motored plane ditch in Tanapag Harbor.

The Navy’s final conclusion was that Amelia had ended her flight somewhere north and west. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were seen by two eyewitnesses north and west of Howland on Saipan. At that time of the year the American woman and her tall male companion could have been none other than AE and Fred Noonan.

In 1937 on Saipan, according to Maximo and Josephine Akiyama, the Japanese military did not hesitate to kill anyone, Japanese civilian or Chamorro native, whom they suspected of spying on their illegal fortifications.

Japanese officialdom maintaining an enigmatic silence (the Japanese Embassy in Washington knows nothing of the Earhart case, nor does Dr. John Young of Georgetown University, who examined captured Japanese documents for the American Government) concerning the disappearance of the two fliers, it may be idle to speculate upon the final fate of Fred Noonan and Amelia Earhart. The evidence, however, justifies at least one tenable conclusion.

When Josephine Blanco saw the twin-engined silver plane, Amelia and Fred had been flying for twenty-six consecutive hours and for 4,000 futile miles. The sight of the island that was Saipan must have cheered the fliers with renewed hope for safety and for life itself.

When they survived the crash landing in Tanapag Harbor only to be taken into custody as spies, their joy must have turned to inexplicable bitterness: they had been saved not for life, but for death before a Japanese firing squad.

For Amelia, who once had said to her husband, “I don’t want to go; but when I do, I’d like to go in my plane--quickly,” the last word of her wish must have struck her now with sudden and ironic force.

Yet, as she had so often before, Amelia Earhart must have met this challenge with stubborn self-control and resolute courage. For here at last was her unmistakable, but irrefutable, fate.

_RECORD FLIGHTS_

_AWARDS AND DECORATIONS_

_BIBLIOGRAPHY_

_A NOTE ABOUT SOURCES_

_ACKNOWLEDGMENTS_

_RECORD FLIGHTS_

1928, June 17: The first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger; with Wilmer Stultz pilot and Lou Gordon mechanic; in the pontoon-equipped Fokker trimotor airplane; from Trepassey, Newfoundland, to Burryport, Wales; time: 20 hours and 40 minutes.

1929, August 24: Third place in the first Women’s Air Derby Race; from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio.

1930, July 6: Women’s speed record; three-kilometer course; at 181.18 mph.

1931, April 8: World’s altitude record for autogiros; at 18,451 feet; in Pitcairn autogiro.

1932, May 20–21: First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic; from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to Londonderry, Ireland; time: 14 hours and 56 minutes.

1932, August 24–25: Women’s non-stop transcontinental speed record; from Los Angeles, California, to Newark, New Jersey; 2,447.8 miles; time: 19 hours and 5 minutes.

1933, July 7–8: Broke her own transcontinental speed record of the year before; in her Lockheed Vega; from Los Angeles, California, to Newark, New Jersey; time: 17 hours, 7 minutes, and 30 seconds.

1935, January 11–12: First to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California; in her Lockheed Vega; 2,408 miles; time: 18 hours and 16 minutes.

1935, April 19–20: First to fly solo from Los Angeles, California, to Mexico City, Mexico; in her Lockheed Vega; time: 13 hours and 23 minutes.

1935, May 8: Solo flight from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey; time: 14 hours and 19 minutes.

1937, March 17–18: Flight from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii; in Lockheed Electra.

1937, July 3: Record flight around the world at the equator; with navigator Fred J. Noonan; in Lockheed Electra; covered a distance of 22,000 miles, until strange disappearance over the Pacific somewhere between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island.

_AWARDS AND DECORATIONS_

City of Chicago: medal presented by Mayor Cermak, 1932.

City of New York: medal of valor presented by Mayor Walker, 1928.

City of New York: mayor’s committee medal; presented by Mayor Walker, 1932.

City of Toledo: medal presented 1928.

Atlantic City: key.

City of Philadelphia: medal presented by mayor, 1928.

City of Pittsburgh: key.

Mexico: Order of the Aztec Eagle; medal with blue center and crest; gold ribbon and lapel pin.

French Legion of Honor; with lapel pin.

Belgium Order of Leopold; with lapel pin.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts: medal presented, 1928.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts: medal presented, 1932.

Aero Club Royal de Belgique: medal presented, 1932.

Aero Club de France: medal presented, 1932.

Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association: medallion presented, 1933.

Le Lyceum Société des Femmes de France of New York: medallion presented, 1928.

Le Comité France-Amérique: medallion presented, 1932.

Distinguished Flying Cross: medal presented by the Congress of the United States, 1932.

Columbia Broadcasting System: medallion presented, 1932.

Mexico: Union de Mujeres-Americanas: medal presented, 1935.

American Society of Mechanical Engineers: medal presented, 1929.

American National Geographic Society Award: medal presented by President Hoover, 1932.

United States Flyers Association: member.

Poor Richard Club, Philadelphia: member.

Ciudad de Mexico: medal presented, 1935.

Sociedad Mexicana de Geografia y Estadistica: medal presented, 1935.

Society of Women Geographers: medal presented, 1932.

Chicago Aircraft Show, 1928.

International Civil Aeronautics Conference, 1928.

Brooklyn Rotary Club.

National Air Races: 1926.

International Shrine of the Birdmen: Mission Inn, California.

Badge with picture of Amelia Earhart, Lou Gordon, and Wilmer Stultz.

Two medals with picture of Amelia Earhart on the converse side and a seaplane on the reverse side.

Kansas Commonwealth Club.

Atlantic City: freedom of the city.

Boy Scouts of America; Medford, Massachusetts, Council: medal presented, 1928.

City of Toledo: key.

City of Buffalo: key.

Lafayette Flying Corps: medal.

Breakfast Club, Glendale, California: medal presented, 1928.

Lindbergh medal: presented in 1928.

Medal presented by Amelia Cardenas to Amelia Earhart: 1935.

City of Medford, Massachusetts: medal presented, 1928.

Harmon Trophy: presented in 1937; shared jointly with Jean Batten of Australia.

N.B. These awards and decorations, in addition to many other memorabilia, can be seen on display at the National Air Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The display was made possible by: Purdue University, the Amelia Earhart Post of the American Legion at Los Angeles, California, Amy Otis Earhart, Amelia’s mother, and AE’s friends.

_BIBLIOGRAPHY_

Only major works are listed and they have been subdivided into books and periodicals. The unsigned articles from magazines are listed alphabetically according to title.

A. BOOKS

ALLEN, FREDERICK LEWIS. _Only Yesterday._ New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931.

BALCHEN, BERNT. _Come North with Me._ New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958.

BYRD, RICHARD. _Skyward._ New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928.

COCHRAN, JACQUELINE. _The Stars at Noon._ Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954.

DE LEEUW, ADELE LOUISE. _Story of Amelia Earhart._ New York: Grosset, 1955.

EARHART, AMELIA. _20 Hrs., 40 Min. Our Flight in the_ Friendship. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928.

----. _The Fun of It._ New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.

----. _Last Flight._ Arranged by George Palmer Putnam. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937.

FORD, COREY. _Coconut Oil._ New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1931.

GARST, DORIS SHANNON. _Amelia Earhart: Heroine of the Skies._ New York: Julian Messner, 1947.

HOWE, JAMES MOORE. _Amelia Earhart: Kansas Girl._ New York: Bobbs, Merrill, 1950.

LINDBERGH, CHARLES A. _The Spirit of St. Louis._ New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

NICHOLS, RUTH. _Wings for Life._ Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1958.

PUTNAM, GEORGE PALMER. _Soaring Wings: A Biography of Amelia Earhart._ New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939.

----. _Wide Margins: A Publisher’s Autobiography._ New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942.

RAILEY, HILTON H. _Touch’d with Madness._ New York: Carrick and Evans, Inc., 1938.

B. PERIODICALS

BOYKIN, E. M. “Amelia Earhart at Home,” _Better Homes and Gardens_, 15:46–47, February, 1937.

DRAKE, F. and K. DRAKE. “First Lady of the Air,” _Reader’s Digest_, 58:55–59, May, 1951.

EARHART, AMELIA. “Try Flying Yourself,” _Cosmopolitan_, 85:32–35, November, 1928.

----. “Vagabonding by Air,” _Cosmopolitan_, 85:28–31, December, 1928.

----. “How Fanny Hurst Could Learn to Fly,” _Cosmopolitan_, 86:56–57, January, 1929.

----. “Is It Safe for You to Fly?” _Cosmopolitan_, 86:90–92, February, 1929.

----. “Shall You Let Your Daughter Fly?” _Cosmopolitan_, 86:88–91, March, 1929.

----. “Clouds,” _Cosmopolitan_, 86:86–87, April, 1929.

----. “Man Who Tells the Fliers: ‘Go!’” _Cosmopolitan_, 86:78–79, May, 1929.

----. “Why Are Women Afraid to Fly?” _Cosmopolitan_, 87:70–72, July, 1929.

----. “Fly America First,” _Cosmopolitan_, 87:80–82, October, 1929.

----. “On the Floor of the Sea,” _Cosmopolitan_, 87:45–46, November, 1929.

----. “Aviation Moves Forward,” _Country Life_, 59:39, January, 1931.

----. “Flying the Atlantic,” _American Magazine_, 114:15–17, August, 1932.

EARHART, AMELIA. “My Flight from Hawaii,” _National Geographic Magazine_, 67:593–609, May, 1935.

ELLIOTT, LAWRENCE. “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” _Reader’s Digest_, 36:110–116, July, 1957.

MAYBIE, JANET. “Miss Earhart Sleeps as Her Shipmates Gossip,” _Bookman_, 68:256, October, 1928.

----. “Amelia Earhart’s New Flight: Expedition into the Realm of Academics,” _Christian Science Monitor Magazine_, April 29, 1936.

MCINTYRE, O. O. “I Want You to Meet a Real American Girl,” _Cosmopolitan_, 85:21, November, 1928.

MCMULLEN, F. D. “First Women’s Air Derby,” _Woman’s Journal_, 14:10–11, October, 1929.

PERKINS, MARION. “Who Is Amelia Earhart?” _Survey_, 60:393, July 1, 1928.

PITMAN, JACK. “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” _Coronet_, 39:122–125, February, 1956.

PUTNAM, GEORGE PALMER. “Forgotten Husband,” _Pictorial Review_, 34:12–13, December, 1932.

----. “Flyer’s Husband,” _Forum_, 93:330–332, June, 1935.

----. “Lady with Wings: The Life Story of My Wife Amelia Earhart,” _Liberty_, Vol. 16, Nos. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; March 11, 18, 25; April 1, 8, 15, 22, 1939.

C. UNSIGNED ARTICLES

“Air-Hearted,” _Commonweal_, 16:116, June, 1932.

“Amelia Earhart: How Long a Mystery?” _The American Weekly_, September 10, 1941.

“Amelia Earhart’s Record Flight from Hawaii to California,” _Literary Digest_, 119:8, January 19, 1935.

“Appreciation,” _Commonweal_, 26:336, July 30, 1937.

“Collector’s Stamps to Pay for Round-world Trip,” _Newsweek_, 9:33, February 20, 1937.

“Earhart Wrecks Ship After Setting an Ocean Record,” _Newsweek_, 9:27, March 27, 1937.

“First Woman to Fly 2,408 Miles Over the Pacific,” _Newsweek_, 5:20, January 19, 1935.

“Good-will Emissary Again Achieves the Unusual,” _Newsweek_, 5:34, May 18, 1935.

“Lady After Our Own Heart,” _Nation_, 135:202, September 7, 1932.

“Lost Earhart,” _Time_, 30:50–51, July 12, 1937.

“Mourning Becomes Electra,” _Time_, 29:36, March 29, 1937.

“Mrs. Putnam’s Four Wreaths of Laurel,” _Literary Digest_, 113:5, June 4, 1932.

“One in a Million,” _Time_, 30:45–46, July 19, 1937.

“Philatelists Fly into Rage Over Flyer’s Stamp Corner,” _Newsweek_, 5:15, May 11, 1935.

“Search Abandoned,” _Time_, 30:36, July 26, 1937.

“Society’s Special Medal Awarded to Amelia Earhart,” _National Geographic Magazine_, 62:358–367, September, 1932.

“Sticky Business,” _Nation_, 140:118, January 30, 1935.

“Stultz, Gordon, and Miss Earhart Cross the Atlantic in Pontooned Fokker Aircraft,” _Aviation_, 24:1847, June 25, 1928.

“Thoroughbred,” _Scholastic_, 26:23, February 2, 1935.

“Warships and Planes Sweep Pacific for Lost Flyers,” _Newsweek_, 10:25, July 17, 1937.

“Woman Hops the Atlantic,” _Literary Digest_, 97:8–9, June 30, 1928.

_A NOTE ABOUT SOURCES_

In addition to the books and articles listed above there are also countless newspaper accounts about the exploits of Amelia Earhart, which are too numerous to be cited separately. Among the primary sources are the files of the Boston _Herald_, the Boston _Traveller_, the New York _Times_, and the New York _Herald Tribune_, both in the original editions on file at The Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in New York and on microfilm. They began in 1928 with AE’s _Friendship_ Flight, then to 1932 and 1935, and finally through the tragic year of 1937.

The basic story of AE’s life can be found in her books and articles and in George Putnam’s writings. GP had a keener eye for detail than AE: where Amelia needs to be rewritten, George elicits admiration for his skill; but this is true only for “ground operations.” In the air--for the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations of flying--Amelia is the master, although she is sometimes vague and often inconsistent. I am indebted to GP for the ground story and to AE for the air story.

For most of the facts of the last flight--and many readers would wonder how I came upon them, I found them in AE’s logs, which she sent home with her other gear before the take-off from Lae, New Guinea. Some of the logs are now at Purdue University; these and others GP used for AE’s book _Last Flight_, which he arranged for publication. The communications between AE and the _Itasca_ came from the cutter’s radio log, which Commander W. K. Thompson included in his official report, dated July 19, 1937. Some of the details of the Navy’s search were obtained from the deposition of the _Lexington_’s commanding officer, Captain Leigh Noyes, dated October 4, 1938, and from the affidavit of Richard D. Black, dated November 22, 1938. These three documents are in the possession of Clyde E. Holley, AE’s former attorney, in Los Angeles, California.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For most of the basic scenes and incidents in the story of Amelia Earhart I am indebted to G. P. Putnam’s Sons and to Harcourt, Brace and Company, whose books by Amelia Earhart and George Palmer Putnam provided me with the beginning framework for my biography. From AE’s _20 Hrs., 40 Min._, _The Fun of It_, and _Last Flight_ (arranged by G. P. Putnam), from GP’s _Soaring Wings_ and _Wide Margins_, I have carefully chosen events, transcribed letters, and quoted conversations. In the conversations and letters I have taken liberties and occasionally changed the word order and inserted synonyms, for it is my belief that GP often made AE sound the way her public expected her to sound. Expressions like “you betja,” “tummy,” and “grand” were not in keeping with my interpretation of Amelia’s character and I did not use them. GP, I believe, invented too freely.

I owe profound gratitude to the following persons, who wrote me letters, showed me photographs, and/or told me anecdotes:

Mary Ahearn, Josephine B. Akiyama, Lois Allen, Bernt Balchen, R. S. Barnaby, Elizabeth B. Brown, Howard Cady, Sidney Carroll, John F. B. Carruthers, Lucy Challiss, Jessie R. Chamberlin, Jacqueline Cochran, Thomas Coulson, Marjorie B. Davis, Anne M. Earhart, Paul Garber, Viola Gentry, Betty Gillies, John Glennon, Lawrence Gould, Clyde E. Holley, Clarence L. Johnson, Teddy Kenyon, Marvin MacFarland, Jan Mason, Ruth Nichols, Blanche Noyes, Charles A. Pearce, Edward S. Pearce, Margaret H. Putnam, Hilton H. Railey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lauretta M. Schimmoler, Ester Schlundt, Casimir R. Sheft, Manila Talley, Mark S. Waggener, Bradford Washburn, Helen Hutson Weber, Edna Gardner Whyte, and Gilbert L. Campbell.

For providing me with their Earhart materials and helping me in my research I offer my deepest thanks to:

The Library, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado; the Staff and the Bibliographical Center, Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado; the National Air Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, New York, New York; the Libraries, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana; the Honnold Library, Claremont, California; Robert Saudek Associates; and the Ford Foundation. And my special acknowledgment to the finest librarians I have ever known: Lieutenant Colonel George V. Fagan, Shirley Karol-chik, and Donald J. Barrett, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado. For a clean manuscript thanks to my typists, Beverly Bowman and Marie Rossignol.

For his invaluable assistance in working out the many navigation problems of the last flight my sincere thanks to Captain Thomas E. Pearsall, USAF Academy; and for their help in solving other difficult flying problems, my appreciation to Major John R. Galt and Captain Lawrence G. Campbell, also of USAFA.

Finally, for guidance and advice in writing and rewriting the manuscript, from the first stages through the final drafts, I want to thank John E. Williams, Harold M. Priest, Stuart B. James, Harvey Gross, and Major Joseph B. Roberts. And for having had faith in me from the beginning, four years ago, I want to express my profoundest gratitude to Colonel Peter R. Moody, head, Department of English, United States Air Force Academy. My deepest acknowledgment is on the dedication page.

$3.95

_DAUGHTER OF THE SKY_

The Story of Amelia Earhart

by PAUL L. BRIAND, JR.

The full story of Amelia Earhart’s life--including an explanation of the mystery of her disappearance and death--is told for the first time in this biography. It is a story of her girlhood in Kansas, her college years, her jobs as nurse and social worker, and her first adventures in flying as well as of her later years of achievement and triumph.

It was almost by chance that Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Overnight she found herself the most famous girl in the world. That was her decisive hour. She felt she had to prove worthy of her fame, to show the world that she was a great flier by right, not just by luck. What happened is explained by Colonel Railey in his Introduction:

“Genuinely as a tribute to her sex rather than for her own glorification, she accepted the honors that accrued; for the participation of women in aviation, which at all times she strove to encourage and pace, was the obsession which lured her to her death.”

Amelia Earhart went on to spectacular victories, setting up a flying record that is still a marvel of achievement and that puts her in the top rank of America’s hall of fame. A likable and modest woman, Amelia Earhart was a skilled and dedicated air pioneer, a true daughter of the sky, and her life story remains unique.

_Jacket design by Larry Lurin_

DUELL, SLOAN AND PEARCE NEW YORK

CAPTAIN PAUL L. BRIAND, JR., was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1920. He received his primary and secondary education at parochial, private, and public schools in greater Boston, and his higher education at Boston University, the University of New Hampshire (B.A., _cum laude_, 1948), Columbia University (M.A., 1952), and the University of Denver (Ph.D., 1959).

He began his military career as a naval aviation cadet, transferred to the Army Air Forces where he earned the Air Medal as a combat crew member in Europe during World War II, and was commissioned from college as a Distinguished Military Graduate, Air Force ROTC, into the regular Air Force.

Initially a public-relations officer, Captain Briand became an English instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, from 1952–55. Since 1955 he has been an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, where, “like two eyes joined in sight,” he combines his loves for aviation and literature. He is the co-editor of _The Sound of Wings_, an anthology of flying literature, published in 1957.

Captain Briand is married to the former Margaret Frances Palladino of New York; they have four children: Paul L. III, Mary Katherine, Anne Marie, and Margaret Mary.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

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