East to the Dawn (54 page)

They resorted to the subterfuge that had worked so well with the
Friendship
flight—they let everyone believe the plane was part of someone else's expedition. It was widely known that Bernt was working with Lincoln Ellsworth on his upcoming South Pole flight, so they chartered Amelia's Vega to Bernt and let everyone assume that he was testing and changing and modifying it with the intention of using it in the Antarctic. It wasn't a big yawn, but at least there were no reporters circling.

With perfect trust in Bernt, Amelia had no need to watch as the fuselage was modified, the controls checked and rechecked, and the instruments installed, tested, and calibrated. She left everything in his hands. She had one major task; to learn to fly blind, so that if fog closed in, she would not lose her course. It was a task that demanded concentration
but not exhaustive hours. Nor did she have to spend time gathering weather data. George was working with James Kimball, still the meteorologist upon whom ocean fliers relied.

Nor did she, now in command of her transatlantic flight, make any postflight plans at all. There would be no Hilton Railey trip to Europe as there had been for
Friendship
and for Ruth Nichols the year before; there were no plans, even, for George to meet her abroad. So there was no pressure on that score. Her eyes were focused only on the prize.

Bernt and she worked out the route. He came over to Rye one evening for dinner, and they worked over the maps and charts. He found the house full of the flowers Amelia and Lucy had picked that morning.

On Wednesday, May 11, two fine fliers, the Scots aviator James Mollison and the English aviatrix Amy Johnson, who had just become engaged, announced that they were going to attempt to fly the Atlantic. Two days later, on Friday the thirteenth, Lou Reichers took off from Harbor Grace bound for Paris—he too was on the Lindbergh trail. He was flying a Lockheed Altair, a newer, faster plane than Amelia's, with a powerful 625-horsepower Wright Cyclone engine. An ex-army flier, he was bankrolled by physical fitness multimillionaire Bernard Macfadden, who had promised him a ten-thousand-dollar bonus if he could cut Lindbergh's time in half. Lou planned to fly the Atlantic in daylight, which had never been done before. He left Newark airport shortly after midnight, reached Harbor Grace a little after six A.M., refueled, and took off. It was a bad plan. He had been tired before he started. He rationed himself to a big swallow of hot coffee every half hour and tried to navigate. By the time he figured he should be over the Irish coast, night was falling, it was raining, his thirsty engine was getting low on gas, and all he could see was water. When he spotted a ship, the SS
President Roosevelt,
he frantically blinked an SOS with his navigation lights and bellyflopped his plane near it, totally out of fuel. The plane hit the water so hard that those on the ship said it sounded like the firing of a gun; Reichers's head was thrown forward onto the cowling with such force, his nose was broken, his face lacerated, and he was knocked unconscious. He came to as the lifeboat from the ocean liner was taking him off his plane; he was treated by the ship's doctor and put to bed, where he stayed two days.

On Sunday evening Ruth Nichols came for dinner. She and Amelia discussed the various problems that ocean flying presented—in a general way—but Amelia was vague about her own plans, although friendly and helpful. Ruth was always looking for support and help and good ideas, and it didn't occur to her that Amelia wasn't too, but Amelia, made of sterner stuff, was looking for none of those things. Ruth described
the modifications just being completed on her Vega, and particularly the safety factors that had been added, sure that Amelia was focused on safety considerations as she was, but Amelia was confident that she and Bernt had thought of everything. She just didn't think in terms of negatives. “I don't bother to go into all the possible accidents that might happen,” Ruth remembered her saying. Amelia didn't even pack a parachute, figuring it wasn't worth the weight. Nor did she query Ruth about the St. John's airfield, the field where Ruth had crashed into the cliff, Amelia's first destination now—so supremely confident was she that Bernt was right and that the problem had been Ruth and her plane. And yet Amelia had to have been more than just a little curious. She dissembled, giving Ruth the impression that if she was planning an ocean flight, it certainly wasn't imminent—there was no need for Ruth to rush her preparations. And anyway, Ruth told their mutual friend Carl Allen, her impression was that
if
Amelia took off on a solo flight, it would be “across the South Atlantic: '

It wasn't that Amelia was ultrasecretive, it was just that she was competitive and wanted to get off first. Actually, the only thing holding her back was the weather. A front was passing, according to Dr. Kimball: “Not to go just yet,” wrote Lucy.

On Tuesday a Fox MovieTone crew showed up at the field, so instead of flying she marked time by picking up a barograph in Newark and checking in with Doc Kimball. She headed back to Rye for dinner.

She took the next day off, driving out to Long Island for a ride in the new Goodyear blimp
Resolute.

Lucy's diary entry for Thursday, May 19, 1932, begins, “Breakfast as usual, Mill to fly.” However, it really wasn't “breakfast as usual” at all—it only seemed that way to Lucy because Amelia had been her usual calm self. They had all been counting down the days waiting for the right weather—and because, as everyone in the flying world knew, May 20—the next day—was the fifth anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's flight. If Amelia were to take off for Europe exactly five years to the day after Charles had, which was her intention and which would add immeasurably to the excitement and significance of her flight, she had to get to Harbor Grace by Friday. That meant that the dawn of the nineteenth was the dawn of the last day Amelia could start out from Teterboro. They—Amelia, George, Bernt, and Eddie Gorski—all knew that if the weather gave a promise, even a hint of breaking, it would be D-day And that morning dawned with a clearing sky, a northwest wind, and temperature in the low sixties. The weather would have been foremost in Amelia's mind.

But Lucy was unaware of the significance of May 20 as a starting date, and lulled by Amelia's ordinary manner into assuming that if she went out to Teterboro with Amelia, it would be just another day of flying for Amelia and waiting around for herself, Lucy decided to stay home, do “bits and pieces,” and lunch with a friend. To her misfortune: upon returning from lunch, she found that Amelia had returned briefly to the house and left her a cryptic note—“Came to fetch you.” A bit later George called to tell Lucy that Amelia had taken off from Teterboro at three fifteen.

In fact Amelia had returned to Rye not just to “fetch” Lucy, as she so considerately wrote her friend, but to don her jodhpurs and yellow silk blouse and retrieve her windbreaker, her flying suit, and some miscellaneous maps and charts.

Twenty minutes after Amelia returned to Teterboro, the trio were airborne. With Bernt at the controls, Amelia, in the fuselage with Eddie Gorski, tried to rest. Bernt flew for three and a half hours, arrived at St. John's at dusk, and landed without incident; the airport where Ruth Nichols had cracked up held no surprises for them. They stayed the night, took off the next morning, and arrived at Harbor Grace at 2:01 Atlantic Time (one and a half hours later than Eastern). Bernt again did all the flying so that Amelia could save her strength.

The airfield at Harbor Grace, running east-west, lay between the town and Conception Bay to the southeast and Lady Lake to the north. Fred Koehler from Stinson Aircraft, sent looking for a place to put an airfield for transatlantic flights, had spotted the location in 1927 and talked the townspeople into building the field. It was a high natural plateau, a natural elongated plain, four thousand feet long, two hundred feet wide, with a stone and gravel surface, a dream field. Best of all, there was a hill at its eastern (starting) end that made the field slope downward for half its length, which greatly helped the heavily loaded transatlantic planes gather speed as they took off. It was here that Mabel Boll and the
Columbia
had waited four years before.

Immediately upon their arrival in Harbor Grace, Amelia was taken into town to the customs and immigration offices. Then she and Bernt went over the latest weather information from George: the outlook was not perfect, but it was “promising.” On the assumption that she would take off at dusk, Amelia went to Archibald's Hotel and took a nap while Eddie and Bernt supervised the servicing of the Vega. Several hours later she returned to the field.

In the meantime more telegrams arrived from George, giving them Kimball's final weather forecast, based on reports from weather stations in the United States, from some forty vessels scattered from Iceland and
Greenland, from Labrador and Baffin Land, from England, France, and Germany. It all pointed to not perfect but reasonably good weather. Amelia made the final, irrevocable decision to go.

Twenty-four miles away at Holyrood, Captain Christensen, the skipper of the greatest plane in the world, the Do-X, who had planned to precede Amelia and help her by flashing wireless weather reports of the weather she would encounter, made the opposite decision and stayed on the ground, waiting for better weather.

Amelia appeared very calm. The AP reporter Bill Parsons, watching her as she returned to the airfield, wrote that “there seemed to be an aura surrounding her. Even though everyone wanted to get as close to her as possible, to shake hands, to wish her well, to touch her, she was very patient, and showed no signs of anxiety or fear.” Her confidence was so palpable, “it just oozed.”

Was she really as cool as everyone thought? She was, for she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to pass on to someone else a job she had had no time for, and now she tended to it. At 6:11 she sent a telegram to Louise Thaden:

Five hours and thirty minutes after landing at Harbor Grace, one hour and nine minutes after sending off the telegram, carrying with her some canned tomato juice and a thermos of Rose Archibald's soup, Amelia climbed into her Vega. Bill Parsons snapped some final pictures, and when he pleaded for “just one more,” she paused obligingly and smiled. Then she settled herself down into the Vega, gunned the engine, and waved good-bye to Eddie and Bernt and the small watching crowd. The chocks were removed, and she roared off down the field.

The plane gathered speed nicely as it roared down the field and took off into the southwest wind. Then it climbed into the twilight sky, made a wide turn over Lady Lake and out across the town and the blue waters of Conception Bay, and disappeared. Weather reports indicated that there was a storm to the south of her proposed course but nothing serious between her and France.

Amelia was now on the Lindbergh trail, her destination Paris. “They gave me clearance papers, and I filled a blank space saying I was going to Paris,” the AP reporter quoted her as saying. It would have been a nice touch, exactly five years after Lindbergh, to land, as he had, at Le Bourget.

It was such a clear evening that from an altitude of twelve thousand feet, Amelia could see icebergs and a fishing boat on the water's surface. One hour out, as clouds began to scud over the waves, the altimeter failed, but the visibility was still good; the moon came out, and the stars, so she had time to adjust to the fact that she would have to rely on her eyes to see how far above the sea she was flying. After three hours she smelled burning oil and, looking out, saw that a small blue flame was licking through a broken weld in the manifold ring where the hot exhaust gases from the cylinders went. It was worrisome: weighing the alternatives, she decided it was safer to continue than to turn back, try to find the unlit Harbor Grace field, and land there still carrying a heavy load of gasoline.

There was a cold front over the North Atlantic. As she continued flying, the weather began to deteriorate; she ran into a storm that, according to Kimball, should have been to the south. Ahead she saw black cumulus clouds that extended from the ocean to “very very high”—too high to fly over. Four hours out she plunged into the black clouds, found herself in a rainstorm, then saw that the rain on the windshield was turning to ice—and then felt the ice as the controls froze and the Vega went into a spin: “How long we spun I do not know. I do know that I tried my best to do exactly what one should do with a spinning plane, and regained flying control as the warmth of the lower altitude melted the ice.” She skirted “too close for comfort” to the whitecaps. Twice more she ventured higher, only to encounter ice; twice more she came down and flew just above the breaking waves, which she could not always see. She was using the fuel mixture control and the carburetor to give herself some sense of altitude. It gave her her lowest low-level limit—warning engine sputters—but it was a delicate process requiring maximum concentration, staying high enough to require a little leaning of the engine to get it to operate properly. (When Ben Howard, another fine pilot, heard about it later, he said, “I thought, doggone it, I don't know many pilots—that is many men pilots—who would have sense enough to do that, let alone a gal.”) As dawn broke, she found herself between two layers of clouds, then eventually climbing, flying in brilliant sunlight on top of white clouds that looked like endless snowfields.

More hours out, she turned on some of the reserve tanks of gasoline, only to find that a cockpit fuel gauge was defective; gasoline started trickling down the side of her neck.