East to the Dawn (82 page)

Lae was by no means a hardship stopover. More than a thousand Europeans lived there, and it was the headquarters of Guinea Airways. It had a three-thousand-foot-long airstrip, a new hotel, and excellent communication with the rest of the world. After seeing to the airplane and getting radio and weather reports, Fred and Amelia went their separate ways. Amelia went out to dinner with Eric Chater, the manager of Guinea
Airways; Fred went out drinking with some locals, including James A. Collopy, district superintendent of civil aviation. Fred “had some drinks and sat talking airplanes” and didn't turn in until well after midnight, according to Collopy.

The next day Amelia got on the telephone and called her story into the
Herald Tribune.
She was aiming to get off the next day at noon, she reported, if everything could be done by then: “Everyone has been as helpful and cooperative as possible—food, hot baths, mechanical service, radio and weather reports, advice from veteran pilots here.”

But the plane was having radio difficulties again, according to Amelia, just a day after being fixed by the Australians. “Captain Fred Noonan, my navigator, has been unable, because of radio difficulties, to set his chronometers.”

Later in the day, she sent a telegram to George, which has been the subject of much speculation. She sounded worried.

RADIO MISUNDERSTANDING AND PERSONNEL UNFITNESS PROBABLY WILL HOLD ONE DAY HAVE ASKED BLACK FOR FORECAST FOR TOMORROW YOU CHECK METEOROLOGIST ON JOB AS FN MUST HAVE STAR SIGHTS ARRANGE CREDIT IF TRIBUNE WISHES MORE STORY.

“Radio misunderstanding” probably refers to the fact that Amelia had thought that
Itasca
could take radio bearings on her on 3105 kilocycles until they informed her that they could not “due to lack of suitable calibrated equipment on that frequency.” The coast guard on June 18, just prior to the
Itasca's
sailing, said they informed her of that.

The words “personnel unfitness” remain a mystery. Gene Vidal told Gore that he as well as George had been at the
Herald Tribune
office, that “personnel trouble” was code for Fred's drinking, and that both he and George advised her to abandon the flight. But she told them she thought “personnel” were improving. Since Amelia's views on alcohol had gone from laissez-faire to negative—there was no liquor served in her new house—she was being strangely mysterious if the problem was a clear-cut case of too much alcohol. Paul Collins, a close friend of Gene's, corroborates this conversation. Gene told Paul, “Amelia stated that she was still having personnel trouble and had had to delay her takeoff for Howland Island for two days though the weather pattern was good.” George never divulged to anyone what he thought, and, it must be noted, he never mentioned that he had spoken to Amelia in Lae.

One can only speculate. Possibly Fred went on a bender. Possibly the word in the telegram is misspelled and Amelia meant “personal” unfitness.
The only thing that can be said with certainty is that
something
was wrong, or Amelia wouldn't have sent the telegram. The real question is, did it affect the flight? And the answer, of course, is that we don't know. The enforced delay certainly annoyed Amelia though, for she wrote, “Denmark's a prison and Lae ... appears to two fliers just as confining.”

With an extra day on their hands, Amelia and Fred used the time to re-pack the plane and discard various things that were no longer of use. Amelia noted that she and Fred were making the repacking a joint effort, and that when that task was finished, they went off sight-seeing—together—and that Fred was the driver: “We commandeered a truck and with Fred at the wheel ... we set out along a dirt road. We forded a sparkling little river.... We turned into a beautiful coconut grove.” It doesn't sound as if she is dragging around a disagreeable companion with a hangover, as some biographers have speculated, or that she was ill, under the weather, or feeble, as others have put forth, but it cannot be ruled out.

There was no partying the next evening, according to James Collopy. Both went to bed early. There are several pictures of them taken in Lae. In most Amelia has a camera in her hand. Contrary to later reports, she looks fit and healthy. So does Fred.

Fred Noonan was a fine navigator. Pan Am had thought so highly of his abilities that they made him chief navigator and gave him the job of training individual navigators for the Clipper runs. William Grooch, a fellow officer at Pan Am wrote about the beginning of Pan Am's transpacific service:

Fred was regarded with something close to awe: “The crew maintained that he could ‘shoot the sun' standing on his head.”

The big problem in navigation was still longitude. What was true about longitude in the fifteenth century still held true in the twentieth: it
was more difficult to figure than latitude. On that first Clipper flight that Musick skippered and Noonan navigated, one night Noonan got seven fixes from the stars and received forty-one radio bearings; he was dead on course but was making a bit faster speed than he had figured. That meant his longitude calculations were off.

Fred was very good, but on the Electra he was missing navigation aids that he had become used to on the Clipper flights, namely the radio bearings beamed to the Clippers by Pan Am operations, and the ability to communicate with ships at sea. It was because he couldn't send and receive messages in Morse code, necessary to communicate with ships, any better than Amelia, that they had jettisoned the trailing antenna; he was also aware that Howland Island was not reachable by Pan Am radio because it was too far from their route. Perhaps he didn't even realize himself just how crucial the constant stream of information was to his navigational prowess. Amelia certainly knew how hard it was to find an island. After she, Fred, Harry Manning, and Paul landed in Hawaii, she had written, “Making the landfall that morning was even pleasanter than my first of California's shore line two years ago. After all, it would require ingenuity to miss a continent, which I was aiming for then. Hawaii, however, is something else again and we all knew how easily it could be passed by.” Compared with Howland, Hawaii was a continent.

Richard Black, whom George was in contact with, was point man for Amelia for the South Pacific, in charge of gathering the weather information as well as coordinating the ships that would help guide her in. He saw to it that the Fleet Weather Central forecast for July 1 for Amelia's route, based on information gathered from all British and American stations and ships in the South Pacific reached her:

Black, in hindsight, would later say that he thought she shouldn't have taken off in the face of such a forecast. But five years before, while waiting at Harbor Grace, Amelia had been faced with a doubtful weather report
that kept the captain of the greatest plane in the world, the Do-X, on the ground; she had taken off and triumphed. It didn't particularly bother her that she would have the wind on her nose; she would have been expecting it. Southeast trade winds blowing at twenty-five miles an hour were the norm in June, according to Clarence S. Williams, who mapped portions of the flight.

Nor did the report seem dangerous compared with the storms that she and Fred had already flown through, the monsoons that had forced her back twice to Akyab. The thought undoubtedly was that if a serious storm developed before the point of no return, the Electra could do what it had done in the past: retrace its route back to Lae. The most important factor was Fred's ability to set their course by the sun and stars—and nothing in Fleet Central's forecast cast doubt that he would be able to do so.

The standard navigation operating procedure that Fred set up for the Clipper flights was as follows: the navigator received a weather report every thirty minutes; every sixty minutes he “shot the sun”; and every 120 minutes the plane dropped down near the surface of the water so that he could make a drift site from which he could compute the exact wind direction and intensity. Fred would have been following this procedure on the flight to Howland, at least in the beginning—shooting the sun and the stars, dropping down to the sea to take drift sights. He would have depended also on dead reckoning. He would have been flying a great circle course, as was Pan Am practice. If he was following the procedures he had instituted at Pan Am, he would be plotting longitude and latitude every half hour, as well as altitude, speed, and direction of the wind.

There would later be theories that there was confusion as to time, because the flight crossed the international date line. But standard operating procedure at Pan Am was to send time messages based on Greenwich time, precisely to obviate this error. Indeed, every Pan Am Pacific flight crossed the date line, and knowing about it was one of the tricks of the trade.

The navy and coast guard thought they were prepared to render every aid. The
Itasca
was waiting at Howland Island, with Richard Black aboard, backed up by a staff of nine military personnel. Black had juggled the schedule of
Itasca's
regular three-month tour to replenish supplies at Howland, Baker, and Jarvis so that it arrived in plenty of time to get Howland set up for Amelia. Now, under the supervision of Army Air Corps Lieutenant Daniel Cooper, the runways were marked off with red flags by the young Hawaiian settlers. The short 2,400-foot runway running east-west, the one Amelia was expected to use because of the prevailing easterly winds, got
special attention, but the other two, the 4,100-foot northeast-southwest runway, smooth and hard, which would be used in a crosswind, and the 4,100 foot north-south runway, the longest of all, which would be used if the wind shifted, were also carefully checked out and marked. Since there was a huge bird population—10,000 frigates, 8,000 boobies, and 14,000 terns on the tiny island—numerous birds had been forcibly removed from the runways. The small house with a living-radio room, kitchen, and bedroom had been tidied up for her, and the bed made. Beach and offshore patrols had begun, and a radio-telephone connection was set up between the island and
Itasca.
The USS
Ontario
assumed a position halfway between Lae and Howland Island to help guide her in. The USS
Swan
took up a position midway between Howland and Honolulu, to guide her home on the final leg. They began waiting.