East to the Dawn (34 page)

She had absolutely no idea what forces her flight would unleash. The summer before, when Charles Lindbergh arrived in Boston after his triumphal flight, was just when Amelia had been so caught up in the opening of Dennison airport. The crowds surging to greet him on “Lindy Day” had been so huge that several times the police had had to call for reinforcements, and even so, things got so out of hand on Boston Common that the parade ground resembled a battlefield, with more than a hundred people stretched on the grass. Amelia, absorbed with her projects, must have thought it a momentary phenomenon.

When she wrote Marian Stabler a chatty letter very shortly thereafter, she didn't even mention Charles Lindbergh or the excitement his visit had caused. Now, concentrated as she was on the upcoming challenge itself, undoubtedly assuming that the world had gone wild for Charles only because he was the first, the conquerer, the inventor, so to speak, she gave scant thought to
her
possible postflight fame. She therefore merely asked Marion Perkins for a two-week leave of absence and, worried that her absence might disrupt the vacation schedule, arranged for a staff worker about to leave to stay to cover for her in return for two hundred dollars. She fully expected to be back in Boston July 1 for the opening of the vacation activities. She continued flying, occasionally slipping out early in the mornings in her yellow Kissell roadster across Neponset Bridge to the Dennison airport, flying in borrowed or demo planes out over the nearby cranberry marshes, north and south over the coast, or inland over the Charles and the towns to the west.

Amelia told only four people of the impending adventure: head worker Marion Perkins, George Ludlam, Harold Dennison, and Sam Chapman, her fiancée.

9

Vortex

●●●● Commander Byrd was in charge of all arrangements for the flight; his decisions were the ones that governed the outfitting of the
Friendship.
His judgment was strongly influenced by the harrowing transatlantic flight he had taken the summer before in another Fokker, a virtual twin of the
Friendship
except that it had wheels instead of pontoons, in which he had taken off from Roosevelt field on Long Island and which he ended up ditching at sea off the coast of France.

Richard Byrd was a charismatic, glamorous figure—one of those people who loom large in the eyes of their contemporaries, but who in the light of history become reduced in size and can be seen as flawed. His misjudgments were monumental. Where he went, accidents happened. He recounts the first instance himself—the accident that almost sidelined his naval career. At Annapolis, as captain of the navy gym team, intent on winning the intercollegiate championship in 1911, Byrd devised a splendid gymnastic trick for himself, a “hair-raising” stunt on the flying rings—a kind of double flip that he tried successfully. Once. Then, instead of practicing, he never tried it again until the day before the meet, in a crowded gym. Not surprisingly, he fell, badly breaking his foot.

He barely graduated that June, and because he couldn't physically
function properly on a boat, (his ankle didn't work; he fell down a gangway), he was retired by the navy after five years, “retired on three quarters pay; ordered home for good.”

World War I saved him. He became a navy pilot, fought his way back on duty. He learned to fly, naturally, on seaplanes.

By 1926 he was a world figure by virtue of the fact that he and Floyd Bennett were the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole (a claim now disputed). To cap that adventure, in pursuit of winning the Orteig prize of $25,000, Byrd next set about assembling plane and crew to fly the Atlantic nonstop from America to France. His aircraft, a Fokker which he grandly named
America,
was ready before Lindbergh's
Spirit of St. Louis
but was involved in an accident caused largely by Byrd's thoughtlessness. Aboard at the time were the plane's designer, Anthony Fokker, Floyd Bennett, George Noville, and Byrd. It was Anthony Fokker, bitter at the needless accident that had ended the chance of his plane becoming the most famous in the world, who pointed the finger at Byrd. He had planned to test the plane alone, but Byrd turned up and not only insisted on going but insisted on Noville and Bennett going also. “I should have refused,” Fokker said later to Floyd Bennett, “because without any load in the rear, and with an empty main tank the ship became nose heavy.” The Fokker crashed. Byrd had his arm broken, Noville had his stomach muscles torn; Floyd Bennett, the most gravely injured, suffered a fractured thigh and a lung punctured by a propeller fragment; he was in the hospital for months and never did fully recover.

Undeterred, after the airplane was repaired, Byrd got on with his plans, but by that time on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh in the
Spirit of St.
Louis had landed in Paris and won the Orteig, and Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine in the
Columbia
had flown nonstop to Eisleben, Germany.

The
America
finally took off from Roosevelt field on June 29, laden down, in addition to what Byrd considered necessities, with 150 pounds of mail—and four in crew, Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville. They hit France, according to Byrd, right on target, then flew over Brest heading for Paris (their destination), but by then it was nighttime and foggy. Byrd later called the trip “a most terrible experience.” By his account, they saw bright lights just about the time they expected to see Paris and thought their flight was almost over, but flying a bit further, they realized that the lights were not Paris but a lighthouse beacon; they were lost. They flew on. The compasses had malfunctioned, and again according to Byrd, they tapped them, got them “okay,” and headed for Paris again. Then although “I knew we were heading toward Paris,” there were no lights. Just blackness. By then, afraid they would run out of gas, they cast
out unnecessary equipment in an effort to lighten the plane and headed back for the lighthouse, which they found. As they peered through the rainy night by the light of the beacon, they couldn't clearly distinguish the beach and therefore decided it would be safer to land their land plane in the water as close to the beach as possible. Bernt Balchen, at the controls, made a perfect, incredible landing in the sea, the water shearing off the landing gear “with hardly ajar to the plane.” Stunned but not hurt, they all hurriedly climbed out of the plane, inflated the rubber boat, and rowed to shore. They were lucky to escape unharmed. They had landed at Versur-Mer, later to become famous in World War II as Omaha Beach. After the flight, Byrd alone of the fliers always claimed the lights had been Paris.

Just that April 1928, Commander Byrd sent Balchen and Bennett, the pilots who would be going with him to the South Pole, to go rescue German pilots who were stranded on Greenly Island, off the northern tip of Newfoundland, after making the first successful east-to-west transatlantic flight. The rescue mission, sponsored jointly by
The New York World
and the North American Newspaper Alliance, drew public attention to Byrd's upcoming Antarctic adventure. But the Germans had been in no danger. Byrd, with utter disregard for his men, sanctioned Balchen and Bennett to go, even though both were ill with the flu—so ill that when they arrived in Detroit to pick up the plane (as it happened, just a week after Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon picked up the
Friendship),
Edsel Ford took one look at the fliers and clapped them both in the Henry Ford Hospital. Still far from well a few days later, they took off in the specially equipped Ford trimotor bound for Greenly Island. Floyd Bennett, never fully recovered from the first plane crash of the
America
the year before, caught double pneumonia, and in spite of a dramatic flight to bring him serum by Charles Lindbergh, on April 26 he died at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec.

A few years later in the Antarctic (with the trimotor renamed
Floyd Bennett
in honor of his dead friend), Byrd endangered the lives of his entire support staff when he insisted on manning an advance weather base alone through the dark Antarctic winter simply because he “really wanted to go for the experience's sake.” Rescuing him, his teammates almost died.

Instead of entertaining thoughts to the effect that the
America's
watery end the previous summer might have been the result of two conditions—that the plane was too heavily loaded and that the navigating had been faulty—Byrd drew the conclusion that flying across so much open water in a plane with wheels was foolhardy. The solution he came up with was to use pontoons instead of wheels.

There had been a mounting number of transatlantic air fatalities since
Lindbergh's successful crossing the summer before. Month after month, the world's top fliers took off to cross the North Atlantic in land planes and were never heard from again. The worst stretch came during the first wrenching week of the previous September—three planes, two taking off from the North American continent, one taking off from England, disappeared at sea; eight fliers died within seven days. The first was the Fokker
St. Raphael,
carrying the English pilot Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim and British air aces Colonel Fred Minchin and Captain Leslie Hamilton, which took off on August 31 from Upavon, England. The second, another Fokker called
Old Glory,
took off on September 6 from Old Orchard, Maine, carrying the aviation editor of the New York
Daily Mirror
and two top pilots, one American and one French. The third was a Stinson,
Sir John Carling,
which took off the next day, September 7, from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, with two British pilots.

A feeling began to grow that Lindbergh had been lucky rather than smart. Such an august official as the U.S. secretary of the navy, T. Douglas Robinson (who naturally had a built-in bias toward seaplanes) announced: “the departmental policy will in the future be that no naval personnel will be permitted to engage in transoceanic flights in land planes.” The Australian government for a time prohibited land planes from flying more than fifty miles over open water within its territory. John A. Wilson, director of civil aviation for the Canadian Air Board, declared: “I deprecate the use of land planes in transoceanic flights.” So Byrd touched a chord when he said, “I believe that the flight of the three engine plane that will fly with one engine dead and which is equipped with floats for landing in water is the next step in transatlantic flying.” But he should have known better.

When Amelia first saw the Fokker in the shadows that mid-May of 1928, it still had wheels—but mechanics and welders were working on the struts for the pontoons that were shortly to replace them. As she noted, the pontoons were experimental, and “no one definitely could tell in advance whether or not it would prove practicable.” Not only was this the first Fokker to be fitted out with pontoons, it was the first pontoon-equipped plane to attempt a nonstop Atlantic crossing. The particular pontoons chosen—made of thin sheets of a new wonder metal, duralumin, a recently developed copper-aluminum alloy a third the weight of steel yet possessing the same strength, constructed by the Junker factory in Germany—were each divided into nine watertight compartments. Each of the huge pontoons, measuring twenty-nine feet in length by four feet in width, could supposedly float, airtight, for weeks in water.

The advantage of a seaplane for a transatlantic flight was obvious: if
there were engine trouble and the plane was forced down at sea, the fliers stood a chance of survival because the plane wouldn't sink. The disadvantage, more subtle, understood only by experts in the fledgling new world of planes, was formidable. It boiled down to the fact that a seaplane could not lift nearly as heavy a load as a land plane, therefore not as much fuel could be taken, therefore the range of the plane was cut down. Byrd publicly estimated that pontoons would cut two hundred miles off the range of the plane. He was way off, as the
Friendship
crew would learn. A second and related problem, as Commander Robert Elmer, USN retired, whom Byrd had chosen to supervise the day-to-day fitting out of the Fokker, noted, was that seaplanes needed a wind to become airborne at all; if there were no waves and the water was smooth, it was difficult for a fully loaded seaplane to rise, according to Elmer, “because pontoons stick to water much as a dime sticks to a wet table.”

Charles Lindbergh, meticulous planner that he was, knew exactly why he had chosen a land plane to fly the Atlantic: because flying boats couldn't take off with sufficient fuel to go the distance. Byrd, on the other hand, was juggling the safety factor of a plane's being able to land anywhere on the gray-green sea against its drastically curtailed range. He knew that a seaplane couldn't make the direct flight from New York to Europe—that was why he had used wheels on the
America
the summer before. So whereas Byrd's Fokker
America,
with engines similar to the
Friendship,
had been able to take off from Roosevelt field on Long Island with four men aboard and fly nonstop almost to the shores of France, Amy Guest's Fokker
Friendship,
loaded down, handicapped, as it were, could not even approach making such a long flight even with one less person aboard—it didn't have the range. The plan, therefore, was to fly to Newfoundland, refuel, and then to take off from its easternmost end, from Trepassey Harbor on the Avalon Peninsula, where the navy seaplanes had started off on their flight across the ocean in 1919—a much shorter flight of eighteen hundred miles.

In addition to loading the plane down with pontoons, Elmer, under the direction of Byrd, loaded it down with equipment. Lindbergh's disciplined approach, which had led him to weigh every single necessary item—to go to the lengths of having a special lightweight seat made out of rattan, and special boots made of lightweight materials, of cutting out unneeded sections of charts, of worrying about the few letters he carried, of deciding against a radio, of deciding to fly alone because “I had decided to replace the weight of a navigator with extra fuel and this gave me about three hundred miles additional range”—was antithetical to Byrd's thinking.