East to the Dawn (79 page)

Because the plane had just come out of the Lockheed plant in Burbank, Amelia was able to get away with calling what was her first leg a “shakedown” flight and keep all publicity to a minimum, much more in keeping with all her earlier flights. With her were George, Fred Noonan, and Bo McKneeley, flight mechanic; the plan was to fly eastward cross-country and if all went well, if they could shake out all the bugs, to take off from Miami for the first transoceanic leg. And bugs there were: after landing in Tucson, when Amelia restarted the engines to taxi to the fuel pumps, the left motor, still hot, backfired and, in the afternoon heat, burst into flames. The fire went out almost immediately; the damage was “trivial, mostly some pungently cooked rubber fittings.” Amelia shrugged it off as due to the Arizona summer weather. The engine was cleaned and the plane hosed down, and the next day they started out into the teeth of a sandstorm.

They put down that night in New Orleans, their landing unannounced. The first anyone knew of her presence was when she radioed ten miles out at Plaquemines that she was approaching. Then she “streaked out of the setting sun, circled Shusan Airport three times, set down on the runway at 5:55 PM.... her hair tousled as usual.” “I've never been on the ground at New Orleans,” she told the reporters waiting for her at Shusan disarmingly. “I've flown over your airport here numerous times, and it looked so nice from the air that I decided to land and see how it looked from the ground.”

It was partly cloudy and in the seventies when they took off the next morning at 9:10, bound for Florida. They landed just after midday at Miami municipal airport. The landing was a hard one because the shock absorber fluid had leaked out of the landing gear—another bug to correct. The next week or so would be spent preparing, checking, and fixing the Electra, working out minor adjustments in components and radio, and waiting for parts. They had brackets fitted to the side of the fuselage just behind the door to hold a “sky hook,” into which the metal rods supplied by the Department of Agriculture were fitted that trapped air and microorganisms for study. (Fred coughed in one and would have thrown it away, but Amelia insisted it be put with the others, because “I thought it would give the laboratory workers something to ponder when they came upon its contents among the more innocent bacteria of the equatorial upper airs.”) Maintenance work was done by Pan American mechanics. Amelia, George, and Fred moved into a two-bedroom suite at the Columbus Hotel, the Putnams having a bedroom off one end of the living room, Noonan off the other.

Amelia spent most of her time at the Pan Am hangar with the plane, although she did accept one offer to go deep sea fishing. She also attended a reception honoring Captain H. T. Merrill and his copilot Jack Lambie, held across from the hotel in Bayfront Park, who had just completed, in a sister ship to Amelia's Electra, the first commercial transatlantic round trip from New York to London. Carl Allen, conscientious reporter, still on the job for the
Herald Tribune,
accompanied Amelia on a tour of the big hangar-workshops at Pan Am's Dinner Key facility, where the Sikorsky Clipper ships were hauled out and inspected after each flight. Both Carl and George observed that Pan Am personnel changed their opinion of Amelia for the better after observing her firsthand. Many at Pan Am had been feeling sorry for their former confrere, Fred Noonan, whom they all respected, reported Carl, but after they observed Amelia in action, “they were willing to concede that ‘poor old Fred' needed no sympathy, that he evidently had signed up with the pick of the lot of women aviators.” Carl went on: “she knew exactly what she wanted done, and had sense enought to let them alone while they did it. There was an almost audible clatter of chips falling off skeptical masculine shoulders”

When Allen first arrived in Miami and caught up with Amelia at the airport, one of the first things he did was to go over the equipment list to see if there had been any changes since Oakland. He noted one change that he wasn't sure he approved of—the elimination of the marine frequency radio that operated on the 500-kilocycle bandwidth. “Oh,” she said, “that was left off when Manning had to drop out of the flight. Both Fred Noonan and I know Morse code but we're amateurs and probably never would be able to send and receive more than 10 words a minute.... The marine frequency radio would have been just that much more dead weight to carry and we decided to leave it in California.” That made sense to Carl, for as a pilot he knew useless weight could mean the difference between life and death: between having enough fuel and not having enough to complete a journey against unexpectedly adverse winds.

A new, powerful antenna had been installed to maximize the 6210 to be used during the day and the 3105-kilocycle frequency to be used at night. But Pan Am radio technicians decided to replace the antenna with yet another one after she was unable to communicate with either the local broadcasting station or with the Bureau of Air Commerce airways station at the field in a test flight. She planned to broadcast every half hour, fifteen minutes before and after the hour, all the way around the world.

Fred Noonan had a friend in Miami by the name of Helen Day. An attractive young businesswoman, she knew him from the time he had lived in Coconut Grove, Florida, and flew for New York Rio and Buenos Aires Airlines, the line Pan American had bought. He had spent a considerable amount of time with Helen, then a college student, and with her circle of friends. Helen was now the accountant for a chain of stores. With time on his hands, even though he had recently remarried, Fred called her up and asked her to dine with him and to come early to meet Amelia.

She went up to the suite the last afternoon and met Amelia and George. She found George much as Edna Whyte described him: tense and preoccupied. He ventured a brusque and minimal “How do you do” and “Good-bye” to her as he wrestled with final arrangements. His immediate problem, according to Helen, was that Amelia had no cash, and the banks were closed—a problem that was solved when someone thought of asking
The Miami Herald
whether they would cash a check, which they did. Then Helen listened as the plans for where they would spend the next night changed. Clara Livingston, a pilot, one of the original Ninety-Nines and a friend of Fred and of Amelia, called up and offered to put them up at her sixteen-hundred-acre sugar plantation in Puerto Rico, promising, according to Fred, “not to have a party.... It would be a quiet restful evening.... You can believe her.... She doesn't have a reporter up her sleeve.” Amelia and George and Fred discussed it and decided it was a great idea.

Helen found Amelia very relaxed; if the the imminent departure weighed heavily upon her, it didn't show. Amelia wore a light chocolate brown housecoat that had two stripes, one ivory and one orange, that went from shoulder to hem—an outfit Helen thought very attractive. It speaks volumes about Amelia's mindset, as well as her relationship with Fred Noonan, that Amelia now queried Helen about her blind mother, about whom Fred had told her a great deal, who was unusual for her alertness and interest in life. Then Amelia's social work training came to the fore—she wanted to know what the Lighthouse for the Blind was doing for the blind people of Miami.

Helen and Fred went out for an early dinner at a restaurant up the boulevard a little way from the hotel. During dinner he told Helen that he had had a drinking problem, but that it was over, he had stopped, and that he viewed this trip as his opportunity to show everybody else that he'd turned his life around. He also told her that he was being paid “considerable” money. She came away feeling that he had indeed turned the corner, and didn't think there was a great risk in having him for navigator. Nor did Clara Livingston. Nor, evidently, did Amelia.

He did feel, however, that it was a dangerous adventure. He said, Helen recalled, “Amelia can take care of herself; if we were forced down anyplace I don't feel that she would lean on me unnecessarily—you know—she would carry her own weight. You know, I wouldn't fly across the Mississippi River with Laura Ingalls.”

Helen told him that there had “been some stuff in the papers about romance.” “Forget it,” he said. “There's no romance going on—just two people doing a job.”

Helen, being the local with a car, drove him back to the hotel and on the way offered to drive him out to the airport the next morning. Fred declined, thinking it too much of an inconvenience. She dropped him back at the hotel and drove on home, only to find out upon arrival there that he had been calling her. It transpired that Amelia wanted Helen to have breakfast with them and so Fred decided it was a wonderful idea to add Helen and her car to the entourage. So at three A.M., pushing her way through the knots of reporters jammed in the lobby Helen gave her name and was allowed up the elevator to their suite, where she found Amelia, George, George's son David and wife Nilla, Eustace Adams, an author and old friend of the Putnams' who lived in Florida, and Fred Noonan, all busily gathering equipment. Helen helped them carry down their things—various items that included pith helmets, thermos jugs, and a machete in case they were forced down in the jungle. Someone carried Amelia's small suitcase, which contained five shirts, two pairs of slacks, a change of shoes, a light working coverall, a weightless raincoat, linen, and toilet articles. Fred carried only his octant.

They went down and pushed their way through the lobby, then drove to a Greek restaurant and had breakfast. Helen listened, fascinated, as Amelia asked for hot tomato juice to be put in two of the two-quart thermos jugs, and asked Fred, “Are you going to drink that stuff?” To which he replied, “No, she is.”

They arrived at the airport just after four A.M. It was still dark when they got to the small hangar; a light was burning. The mechanic Bo McKneely was there, having spent the night with the plane. Since except for Bo there was no one about to help get the plane out of the hangar, everyone got out of their cars and pushed. By the time they were finished, police had arrived to cordon off the area, and a crowd estimated at five hundred were sitting in their cars with their headlights beamed at the hangar. Helen had said good-bye and was some distance away when Fred called her back and gave her letters and three dollars in money orders for her to send on to the postmasters of Hollywood and Oakland for his July rentals for two post office boxes in those cities, “in case he was late.” By four thirty
the small amount of luggage carried by Amelia and Fred had been loaded into the plane, together with the thermos bottles of hot tomato juice and, for Fred, coffee. Amelia, exercising the utmost care, warmed up the ship's two engines. Then she shut them down, another glitch: a thermocouple, which registered cylinder-head temperatures from the left motor, refused to work. Bo McKneely set about repairing it. The rising sun was brushing back the silver gray of dawn, Amelia noted.

Just before takeoff, George as usual couldn't resist another good-bye. He climbed up, leaned into the cockpit for a last kiss, and shook Fred's hand. It could be seen that Amelia “exuded confidence and smiles.” George did not.

At 6:04 Amelia closed and fastened the hatch; thirty seconds later, the Electra was airborne. Standing on the roof of the administration building with David, George paced nervously back and forth until the silver plane rose and wheeled and disappeared to the southeast.

21

The Flight

• • • • They were off on June 1, the pilot who was afraid of nothing, who just wanted to make the first globe-girdling flight touching the Southern as well as the Northern Hemisphere and knew it had to be done before she was forty, and the navigator out to show the world that his life was back on track.

They started out in easy stages. The flight to San Juan took a little over eight hours. Their mutual friend Clara Livingston met them at the airport and drove them out to her sugar plantation to spend the night at Mi Casa, her dramatic colonial hacienda with its twin staircases curving down to the beach.