H Amelia Earhart

Lindbergh was not to be the only aviation celebrity of the late 1920s. Building on the women pioneers before her,5 Amelia Earhart was to emerge shortly after the Lindbergh flight as the foremost female aviator up to that time and, arguably, even to the present day. (See Figure 13-4.) She certainly captured the public imagination in much the same way that Lindbergh had, and thereby contributed to the enthusiasm that helped to create the airlines.

When Earhart soloed in 1922 at a small field in south Los Angeles, California, there were fewer than 100 female pilots in the United States. Her flight instructor, Neta Snook, was one of those women. The right to vote had been achieved by women only three years before, in 1919. Earhart purchased a yellow Kinner “Airster” prototype for $2,000 and began making a visible impression in the area, being featured in the Los Angeles Examiner declaring that she intended to fly across the continent. She immediately set a new women’s altitude record (of 14,000 feet) and was advertised as one of only two female pilots in an air meet at the Glendale airport. She was awarded a flying certification in May 1923 from the Federation

FIGURE 13-4 Amelia Earhart.

Aeronautique Internationale, although flying licenses were not required, nor even issued, by the U. S. government. The certification was necessary in order to have official recognition for any record-breaking or record-setting achievements.

In 1924, Earhart moved with her mother to Boston, Massachusetts, arriving there by a “motorcar” which she drove all the way from California by way of Banff, Canada. This was a daring adventure at the time, as the U. S. Army had only performed the first sustained cross-country convoy in 1919. In Boston, her flying activities once again prompted curiosity from local interests, including The Boston Globe, in which she was featured in an interview in June 1927, shortly after the Lindbergh flight. She was billed as “one of the best women pilots in the United States” and began to be mentioned increasingly in the local press. Earhart bore a remarkable resemblance to Charles Lindbergh, and some say that was the main reason for the event that set her career skyward. She was to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean.

«You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky. w

Amelia Earhart

We have already seen what excitement Lindbergh’s spectacular solo transatlantic flight had caused in 1927. By 1928, women in both Europe and America were making plans to be the first woman to make the crossing, but with a difference—they planned to have the fly­ing actually performed by male pilots. (See Box 13-1.)

Amelia Earhart had no such plans. The flight that was to make her initially famous was entirely planned and paid for by others. She had nothing to do with the selection of pilots, the selection of aircraft, or with flight planning. She was, in effect, chosen as a passenger. At the time, she was making a living as a social worker with immigrants in Boston.

The adventure began in early 1928 when another female patron, the wife of a wealthy Londoner, Frederick E. Guest (she was formerly Amy Phipps of Pittsburgh), purchased a Fokker Trimotor from Commander Richard E. Byrd with plans to hire a pilot to fly her to England. Mrs. Guest was soon dissuaded from this venture by her family, but she stuck with the plan for the trip to be made by “an American girl with the right image,”6 and a committee was formed to find her replacement.

On the committee was George Palmer Putnam, a New York publisher and writer. He had, in fact, published Lindbergh’s We, the firsthand account of the first solo transatlantic crossing, and was in the process of publishing Richard E. Byrd’s chronicle of his flying and exploring adventures in the book, Skyward. He heard of Amelia Earhart, then residing in Boston, and invited her to New York for an interview. It went well, and the agreement was sealed in April 1928.

Earhart would be a passenger on the Friendship, a Fokker F-7 Trimotor fitted with floats that had been already scheduled for a transatlantic attempt in June. The crew consisted of a mechanic, Bill Gordon, and the pilot, Lou Stultz, the latter of whom was proficient in multiengine aircraft, float plane flying, and instrument flying. Amelia Earhart had none of these qualifications nor, for that matter, did many male aviators. Nevertheless, she was billed as the “Commander” of the flight, which left Newfoundland on June 17, 1928 and arrived in New South Wales, England the next day after a flight of 20 hours and 49 minutes.

Gordon and Stultz were soon forgotten, but the public embraced Amelia much as they had Lindbergh. This was a matter of some embarrassment to Earhart, who felt that she had done nothing to deserve such adulation and that the credit should go to the crew, and she had the courage to say so. But the public clamor continued. She received congratulations from many government quarters, including President Coolidge, and under the tutelage of George Putnam, she embarked on a lecture circuit during 1928 and 1929 that gave her worldwide recognition. She thereby became acquainted with aviation luminaries of the time like Admiral Byrd and Colonel Lindbergh. Because of the physical resemblance to Lindbergh and the Atlantic transit similarity, she soon garnered the moniker “Lady Lindy.”

After her return from Europe in 1928, Earhart began to earn the celebrity that had been handed to her by fate. She crossed the continent solo from New York to Los Angeles in September 1928. She was swamped with offers to endorse products in advertising media. She began writing articles for national magazines, including Cosmopolitan and McCall’s, and she was hired by Transcontinental Air Transport (the Lindbergh Line) as Assistant to the General Traffic Manager. She acquired a Lockheed Vega and began entering air races around the country and set several speed records.

In 1929, she was largely responsible for inaugurating the Women’s Air Derby, a grueling nine-day race from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland, Ohio, dubbed by Will Rogers as “the Powder Puff Derby,” a name that has remained with the event. The race was limited to women who had been licensed and who had logged at least 100 hours of solo time. It was estimated at the time that only 30 women could qualify for the event. Twenty fliers started the race, 15 finished, and there was one fatality. Earhart finished third.

Earhart improved her flying proficiency, particularly in instrument qualification. With her publicist (and now husband) George Putnam, she planned and advertised her intention of becoming the first woman to solo the Atlantic. On May 19, 1932, AE (as she had begun to sign her name) left Harbor Grace, Newfoundland for Paris. Mechanical difficulties en route, including a leaking reserve fuel line, an inoperative altimeter, and a broken weld on an engine manifold, caused her to alter course for Ireland. Fifteen hours and eighteen minutes after leaving Harbor Grace, AE landed the Vega in a sloping field outside of Londonderry. Her acclaim rose higher and higher, and she had earned it.

Amelia Earhart was destined for even bigger accomplishments, and for tragedy, as the decade of the 1930s unfolded. We will jump ahead in our chronology of the development of aviation to briefly consider the rest of her story. So far, Earhart had only tried to duplicate what men had done. She had set no significant records for the first time in aviation on a genderless basis. But on January 11, 1935, she left Wheeler Field in Hawaii and successfully soloed her new Vega across 2,400 miles of Pacific Ocean to Oakland, California. No person, man or woman, had ever done that before. The Vega performed flawlessly and required only eighteen hours and fifteen minutes en route. She followed this up with other aviation firsts, a nonstop flight from Burbank, California to Mexico City on April 20, 1935, and from there she flew nonstop across the Gulf of

Mexico and on to Newark, N. J., in 14 hours and 19 minutes on May 8 that year.

In June 1935, AE took on a new role as visiting aeronautics advisor at Purdue University, which had begun an ambitious plan to develop one of the nation’s first academic aviation curricula. As it turned out, this assignment would provide Earhart with the airplane with which she would make her final mark—her unsuccessful attempts to circumnavigate the globe. The Lockheed Electra 10E was purchased by Purdue to be used for research purposes in connection with AE’s duties, but soon after taking possession of the Electra in July 1936, she flew it in the 1936 Bendix air race from New York to Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, the airplane was fitted for long-distance flight and the latest radio navigation equipment.

Earhart made two attempts to fly around the world in the Electra, both on a flight-planned route close to the equator of over 29,000 miles.7 In both attempts she carried navigator Fred Noonan, who had flown the Pacific extensively with Pan American. The first attempt was planned from east to west, beginning in Oakland with the initial stop in Hawaii, and then on to tiny Howland Island. This effort was abandoned when Earhart ground looped the Electra on take off from Hawaii on March 19, 1937, with serious damage to the airplane. The plane was shipped back to the Lockheed plant in California where it was repaired.

For her next attempt, AE decided to reverse course and fly the route from Oakland to Miami, thence to South America, and on to Africa and points east. The Pacific itinerary was to be the last part of the flight, but it still included Howland Island, which is truly a relative speck of land in the vast Pacific Ocean. By late June 1937, the route had been successfully flown all the way to Lae, New Guinea, a distance of 22,000 miles. On July 2, Earhart and Noonan departed New Guinea for the long over-water flight to Howland Island. In spite of all precautions, including the Coast Guard vessel Itasca standing off Howland to broadcast homing signals and to plot her position, the Electra never made landfall at Howland. Although she was heard on several occasions attempting to make contact with Itasca, her location was never established, and no provable trace of her, Noonan, or the Electra has ever been found.8

While Amelia Earhart had little direct effect on the establishment of commercial aviation in the United States, her efforts to overcome and transcend the boundaries encountered by the aviation pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s engendered public admiration and a greater acceptance of the new industry of flight. She became a model for both male and female aviators and, like many of them, her time was too short.