From Tucson she flew the repaired Electra to New Orleans, arriving at 6:00 P.M. Saturday evening at Shushan Airport; checking in at the airport hotel, she and G. P. spent a quiet evening out with Amy’s old friend Toni Lake. All of these tidbits I picked up in the papers, following my friend’s flight long-distance, and even having to work at it somewhat, as the press didn’t seem to care all that much, this time around.
She was strictly an inside-pages phenomenon now, even when at Miami, the next morning, she brought her silver bird in with a shocking thud. She climbed from her cockpit after this “almost” crash landing to be quoted as saying, “I sure smacked it down hard that time!”
The Electra was misbehaving again: faulty shock absorbers, leaking fluid all the way from New Orleans, had caused the hard landing. The oil lines were also leaking, and McKneely led mechanics in an all-out assault on the problems.
On May 29 Amy told the press she would be taking off from Miami Airport, flying east to west on Pan Am’s route through the West Indies and then on down along South America’s east coast. Leaving G. P. and McKneely behind, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lifted off at 5:56 A.M. on June 1 with five hundred fans in attendance, held back by a line of policemen, her loyal admirers waving and cheering their heroine of the skies.
The papers were less easily impressed. In Chicago the headlines of the next day’s papers belonged to the police riot on the South Side of Chicago in which ten striking Republic Steel workers were killed; and the next day, every front page seemed devoted to Edward of England marrying Baltimore’s Wallis Simpson.
Over the next six days, to modest press attention, the Electra glided over the east coast of Central and South America, with stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caripito, Venezuela; and Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; and — after a ten-hour flight, crossing 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean — touched down at Fortaleza, Brazil, with Natal her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic.
According to the papers, on her overnight stops, she was up at three or four in the morning after no more than five hours of sleep. But the flights themselves, in the noisy plane with its cramped cabin, were the real endurance test: she mostly communicated with navigator Noonan by sending him notes fastened to a pulley line with a clothespin. Otherwise one of them had to climb over the bulky auxiliary fuel tanks between her cockpit and Noonan’s navigation table.
The flight over the Atlantic went well, despite some headwinds and rainstorms, with the Electra’s performance finally on the beam and Noonan providing ace navigation. But when they neared the African coast on June 7, Amy ignored Noonan’s counsel to turn south for Dakar and instead headed north, flying fifty miles along the African coast. When she sighted St.-Louis, almost two hundred miles north of Dakar, she sent back a note to Noonan asking him what had put them north. His response: “You.” She later admitted as much.
They landed at St.-Louis, their revised destination, where barracks-like accommodations, complete with bedbugs and primitive toilet facilities, awaited them. But their first week had been successfuclass="underline" four thousand miles in forty hours.
After a short hop to Dakar, Amy met two days of bad weather; impatient, she switched her destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa, finding a corridor between sandstorms to the north and a tornado to the south, and making the 1,140-mile flight in seven hours and change. The next morning she made the nearly one-thousand-mile trek from Gao over the Sahara Desert to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa. The heat was so punishing that the Electra could not be refueled until after sunset, as the gasoline might ignite upon touching the hot metal. Then it was on to El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and, on June 14, another twelve hundred miles to Assab on the shores of the Red Sea, stopping for lunch at Khartoum in the Sudan and taking tea at Massawa, Eritrea. She was, at the end of her second week and fifteen thousand miles from Miami, better than halfway to her objective.
The next day she crossed the Red Sea, then the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan. Here she stayed for two unpleasant days in the unremitting desert heat, taking two camel rides, and the time to stop at the post office to choose stamps and supervise the cancellation of the 7,500 first-day covers in her keeping. On June 17 she and Noonan headed for Calcutta, but even in the air, no relief from the blistering heat could be found: at fifty-five hundred feet, the temperature was a brutal ninety degrees. Finally the heat let up, and rainstorms took over, including air currents that sent the Electra up and down at a rate of one thousand feet in seconds.
When she took off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport on June 18, the Electra struggled off a water-soaked runway, barely clearing the trees, and monsoon rains accompanied them over the Bay of Bengal on the way to Rangoon, Burma. She didn’t make it to Rangoon, settling on Akyab, but on June 19, they reached their destination, where they took in the Golden Pagoda, taking off the next day for Singapore. Word awaited her that mechanics would be on hand to overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, which she made on the last day of her third week out. Her landing was an unsteady one, however, and she undoubtedly was suffering from what Paul Mantz later described as “extreme pilot fatigue.”
She had, after all, flown in 135 hours an amazing twenty thousand miles. She had slept in unfamiliar, sometimes primitive, even bizarre, surroundings; she had eaten little, slept less, and suffered from heat exhaustion, diarrhea, and nausea.
Three days of scheduled repairs for the Electra turned into six, and it wasn’t until June 27 — suddenly behind schedule, playing hell with G. P. Putnam’s plans to have her back by the Fourth of July for some grand press attention — that she and Noonan landed at Koepang on Timor Island, having given up on reaching Port Darwin, Australia, before nightfall. High on a cliff, Amy and Noonan and some villagers staked down the Electra on the grass-covered field, bordered by a stone wall designed to keep out wild pigs. She rose at 4:00 A.M., hoping to reach Lae, but was forced by headwinds to settle for Port Darwin, where she set down at 10:00 A.M. Some minor repairs were made, and — after a seven-hour-and-forty-three-minute and twelve-hundred-mile journey — the Electra reached Lae, Papua New Guinea, on June 29.
Weather and instrument problems delayed takeoff till Friday, July 2, when at 10:22 A.M., the Electra — carrying more than one thousand gallons of fuel, as well as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan — wheeled lumberingly down a crude dirt runway a mere one thousand feet long. A 2,556-mile flight lay ahead, with navigator Noonan responsible for pinpointing tiny Howland Island somewhere in the mid-Pacific.
At the end of the runway was a cliff, a dropoff into Huon Gulf, and — providing spectators with a literal cliff-hanger — the Electra’s wheels stayed on the dirt runway until the final fifty yards, her propellers churning up puffs of red dust. No wind to help liftoff on this hot, clear morning. Spectators said it was as if the plane had jumped into the ocean, committing suicide; and indeed it did seem to fall off the runway, dropping behind the edge of the cliff.
When it reappeared, the Electra seemed to ride the gulf, no more than five or six feet above the surface, props throwing spray. It took a long time, the spectators said, for that plane to finally rise from the ocean’s surface into the sky, but at last it did. And on this clear morning, the Electra stayed visible for a long, long time.