East to the Dawn (40 page)

Amelia had given the agreed-upon telegram to Mike Jackman to send to George Putnam a half hour after they left: “VIOLET CHEERIO AMELIA,” the signal for their successful departure. As they boarded the dory at 10:50, Andy Fulgoni, the Paramount cameraman, took their picture. There weren't many townsfolk about—the
Friendship
had set off too many times before, only to return, for them to turn out. Slim Gordon climbed onto the pontoons and cranked the engines; they sprang to life. At 11:10 he cast off the mooring lines, taxied slowly to the head of the harbor, dumped a can of gas, and tried but failed to take off. The engines were then stopped and examined, then the fliers were observed to dump out more gasoline and taxi back to start again. Again the
Friendship
roared off down the harbor, and again the pontoons remained glued to the water. It looked as if the day was going to be a repeat of other days. On the next try, however, the plane rose slightly. Then more cans of the gas, so carefully loaded the day before, went overboard. Now only seven hundred gallons remained. On the next attempt, taking off from the head of the harbor and heading southwest toward the open sea, after about a mile the seaplane lifted off the water, then slumped back down, but kept going. Amelia described it.

I was crowded in the cabin with a stop watch in my hand to check the take-off time, and with my eyes glued on the air speed indicator as it slowly climbed. If it passed fifty miles an hour, chances were the
Friendship
could pull out and fly. Thirty—forty—the
Friendship
was trying again. A long pause, then the pointer went to fifty. Fifty, fifty-five—sixty. We were off at last.

It was a dangerous takeoff; it took a full three minutes. She later told George Putnam that the takeoff was the most dangerous part of the flight; the plane had “rocked and staggered” as it plowed through the water, both outboard engines sputtering from the salt spray. Observers watched the plane disappear out to sea, then reappear a few minutes later, and circle very low over Trepassey Harbor at a height of about fifty feet as they made one final check of the Whirlwind engines and got their bearings. Then finally the
Friendship
straightened out and again disappeared, this time for good, heading northeast.

Mike Jackman could finally send Amelia's cable.

When she found out that the
Friendship
had actually taken off, Mabel, still sitting in St. John's, was stunned. Stunned because, faced with the same weather reports, her pilot, Oliver Le Boutillier, had decided against taking off, and his decision prevailed on the
Columbia;
on Charles Levine's plane, the pilot was in charge. Le Boutillier was quoted as saying that as he had reports of two storms approaching on the Atlantic and as his ambition was to be the oldest living aviator, he would not take any chances; he would await more favorable weather reports.

With ill grace Mabel promptly charged that Dr. Kimball had sent the
Columbia
a different and more ominous weather report than he had sent the
Friendship
—a charge Dr. Kimball vehemently denied, declaring the weather information given was “precisely the same in each case.” Dr. Kimball further infuriated Mabel by announcing that although he had freely given her enterprise weather information, since it had been gathered at the expense of Miss Earhart's backers, now that the
Friendship
was airborne, no previous financial arrangements having been made, he would do so no longer.

The
Friendship
was airborne—but with only seven hundred gallons offuel. It was the beginning of twenty anxious hours.

It was 12:21 P.M. Newfoundland time when the
Friendship
finally inched its way into the air. To plot their course, they had Bill Stultz's original and only navigation chart, upon which each day in Trepassey
Amelia and Bill had plotted the Atlantic storm and weather patterns as they received the information from New York. It was not in terribly good shape—“with its endless erasures and new markings it was almost worn through.”

Their hoped-for destination was Southampton, England. Commander Byrd had made their flight plan. Byrd's decisions were in large part a response to the problems he had encountered flying the Atlantic the summer before. He and his companions, following the example of Lindbergh before them, had flown the great circle course to Europe because it was the shortest route. But unlike the
Spirit of St. Louis,
Byrd's
America
had gotten lost; he had ended up ditching his land plane in the sea off the coast of France. Flying the great circle course took finesse; it involved periodic resetting of compasses and course changes that eventually threw his plane off course. The commander wouldn't ever admit that the
America
had been off course, but nevertheless the flight plan he decreed for the
Friendship
provided for flying the rhumb line (the same compass heading from start to finish) rather than the great circle course, obviating the necessity of altering course and resetting compasses. Bill would simply have to steer 106 degrees and adjust for wind direction and drift.

But there was a drawback—following a compass heading (a rhumb line) was always longer than following a great circle course. Using it meant adding forty miles to the
Friendship's
flight.

At first the visibility was good, as the
Friendship
winged its way northeast over nearby Mutton Bay, then Biscay Bay. The rivers and lakes of Newfoundland—“wonderful greens and blues”—appeared beneath; soon they flew over Cape Ballard on the eastern shore, and then they were over the open sea, where for the first hour the visibility was good.

Then the weather closed in.

They had hit a storm system and were in the midst of thunder-clouds—tall threatening cumulonimbus clouds rising straight up, topped by ice crystals. Bill climbed to 2,500 feet to try to find clear sky, then to 3,300 feet. At 5,000 feet, Amelia wrote, visibility momentarily improved, but then they flew into the storm. There was no way over it. Below them there were snow flurries, ahead more fog. The temperature in the cabin was a brisk forty-two degrees. They dropped to 4,000 feet, into the teeth of the storm. It was the heaviest storm Amelia had ever flown through. However, it was no more than they had expected; it was the stormy weather Kimball had predicted and that had kept Le Boutillier from taking off. They were also bucking headwinds.

Bill Stultz radioed Cape Race that they had left the banks of snow, fog, and hail behind and were now flying in clear weather. That evening
he made contact with two ships, each of which gave him a bearing, which enabled him to fix his position. He found out that he was only ten miles off course. He was pleased; he had no idea that it would be his last radio fix.

Amelia wasn't terribly comfortable. The warmest place, as far forward as she could get to the cockpit, which was heated by the exhaust from the engines, involved perching between the gas tanks. Back in the cabin it was cold, and there was no comfortable place to sit because the lifesaving cushions, along with the rubber raft, had been left behind and they were wearing their flying suits. There was a small window on either side of the cabin. On the port side in front of the window was the chart table; the radio was next to it. Amelia took several photos northward kneeling beside the chart table. So long did she kneel looking out that she complained she was getting housemaid's knee. Occasionally she went forward, trading places with Slim or Bill. When Bill came back to send or receive messages, she would look up the call letters. Once, trying to overcome a headache, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, it was morning and the radio had quit. They were enveloped in fog as they would continue to be for almost nineteen of the twenty hours of the flight. As Amelia wrote later, “We might as well have been flying over the cornfields of Kansas for all we could see of what was beneath.” At one point Bill climbed to 11,600 feet to try to get over the clouds that “reared their heads like dragons in the morning sun,” but the fog rose still higher. In fact, they were flying in the midst of towering cumulus clouds—clouds that are large, dense, tall towers with a height of anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000 feet, sometimes with merged bases and separate tops in the shapes of puffs, mounds, and towers—impossible to rise above.

Occasionally the wet weather made the outboard engines, slightly caked with salt, turn over roughly, but each time they recovered. Amelia wrote of her pilot, “Bill sits up alone. Every muscle and nerve alert. Many hours to go. Marvelous also.”

What she did not mention in her log was that she had found a bottle of liquor that Bill had stashed away.

As the hours of flying continued, the tension increased. Seven hundred gallons of fuel was barely enough to get them to Ireland; if they were off course, they would be in serious trouble.

The air speed indicator didn't give them actual speed but only speed through the air—how fast a stream of air was passing the wing of the ship. If a plane was going 80 miles per hour and there was a 20-mile wind against it, the indicator would register 100 mph—and if a plane was going 120 and there was a 20-mile following wind, it would still register 100 mph.

Wind drift indicators were used to figure out wind speed and direction, but they worked only if they could be seen. If they vanished into the fog, if the waves were never visible (another way to judge the wind was by watching the whitecaps), there was no way to estimate wind speed, and if there was no way to estimate wind speed, there was no way of knowing how many miles they had gone.

The view from the
Friendship
was zero. All those hours had passed, and the only thing they knew for sure was that they should have reached Ireland long before. In hopes of sighting land, Bill nosed the plane down between the fog layers, at first gently, then steeply—so steeply Amelia's ears hurt. Water began dripping into the window, the port engine started to cough. Then the other two began to sound ragged. At three thousand feet the descent eased, Amelia's ears felt better, and she thought the motors sounded better, although “not so good.” They began to see patches of ocean; then after a half hour, through a break in the clouds, some five miles to the south of them, they saw a steamer. It was the
America,
although they couldn't see its name. They were happy to see the ship, for it meant that they were flying over the shipping lanes, which, that close to Europe, was exactly where they should have been. But if they were on course, the steamer should have been on the same course as they were. Instead, it was going directly across their path, which threw them into confusion. Since their radio couldn't send but might possibly receive, they tried to drop a note on the America's deck asking it to radio its position.

Dropping things onto boat decks was not an uncommon thing to do in those days. As late as 1933, Ernest Grooch, a Pan Am pilot, as a lark, successfully dropped the Sunday papers onto the deck of the liner
President Hoover
when he sighted it in the China seas. The
Friendship
crew now expected the steamer would either radio them or paint the latitude and longitude on the deck, a common courtesy that ships extended in those years. So they weighted their query down with one of the remaining Boston oranges, and Amelia tied it with a silver cord, then dropped it down through the hatch; it missed the ship by two hundred yards and sank immediately. Using more precious fuel, they circled and tried again with their one remaining orange, only to miss again by several hundred yards.

They had some thoughts of giving up, of landing in the sea near the steamer and being picked up, as Ruth Elder and George Haldeman had been when they landed six hundred miles off the Azores the summer before. That way, at least, they would live to tell the tale. But Bill simply said, according to Amelia, “Well, that's out,” then swung the plane back on course and kept straight on.

Their situation was precarious. They had started out with 700 gallons
of fuel. At full power each engine burned 20 gallons an hour; Lindbergh had figured that his one Wright Whirlwind engine would burn 16 gallons per hour and had actually averaged just under 11. If each of their three engines performed as well as Lindbergh's and there were no leaks, they would be using up 33 gallons each hour, which gave them an estimated 21 hours and 40 minutes of flying time before their fuel ran out. That meant there was no margin for error. And they had detoured twelve miles off course when they sighted the ship—and then circled it—in all wasting some twenty-five minutes and at least fifteen precious gallons of gas.

As Amelia learned later from the ship's captain, they had left the scene too quickly. When the
America
realized the plane was the
Friendship,
they at first tried, fruitlessly, to communicate with them by radio. Then Captain Fried ordered the ship's name and course to be chalked on the deck, but by then the
Friendship
was gone.