East to the Dawn (77 page)

But something went wrong in his life; he had started to drink—and Pan Am let him go. Since the circle of fliers in those years was so small, “everyone” knew about it. Amelia certainly knew about it; Clara Livingston, a member of the Ninety-Nines, a pilot and a friend with whom she and Fred would later stay with in Puerto Rico, “didn't think he was a great risk” as Amelia's navigator. “He was a pleasant person, you know.... He had tried so hard to reform.” Not everyone was convinced that he had succeeded. Gene Vidal thought that including Fred Noonan on Amelia's flight was a great mistake, and he told her so. She then asked Gene to go in his place, but Gene demurred on the grounds that he wasn't a good enough navigator.

Pan Am pilots, who presumably knew what they were talking about, believed that although Noonan “might have missed a trip or something,” he
never
drank on the job. It was planned that he would leave the flight at Howland, having done the “lion's share” of navigating up to that point, letting Manning mainly concern himself with operating the radio. But he had had an automobile accident in the recent past. Amelia wasn't bothered by this knowledge; she knew that he was in the process of changing his life, that he and his first wife had gotten divorced just that spring, and that he had a new, serious lady friend.

Once Noonan had signed on, he made one request: for an octant to shoot the sun and stars—it was his principal tool. Amelia asked the naval station at San Diego to loan her one. “Amelia Earhart urgently requests air station loan Navy octant for projected trans Atlantic flight and shipment air express to Oakland immediately,” they cabled Washington. Clearance was granted on Tuesday, March 16, by the secretary of the navy.

Amelia hadn't any thought of bringing Paul Mantz to check things out in Honolulu, but there he was sitting it out with her in California because of the weather, and at the last minute he asked to come—to help her out, he said, but also to join his fiancée, Terry, who was on her way by boat to Hawaii. Amelia could hardly refuse. He could be co-pilot for the first overnight flight, allowing her to rest and be fresh for the difficult Honolulu—Howland passage, and he could be counted on, as Carl Allen noted, “to assume complete responsibility for preparing the ‘flying laboratory' for the next stage of the trans-Pacific flight.” Obviously Allen thought including Mantz was a splendid idea, or he wouldn't have mentioned it.
In light of later developments, it is instructive to make particular note of Allen's thoughts. Amelia made a similar assessment: “By the end of this first long hop any incipient mechanical troubles should show up. It will be fine to have him on hand for a final check before I shove off westward.”

Government vessels were on the move. Richard B. Black, of the Department of the Interior, was aboard the coast guard cutter
Shoshone
at Howland Island and reported that the three runways there were ready and waiting. The navy minesweeper
Whippoorwill
was steaming into position between Honolulu and Howland Island; the navy tug
Ontario
was moving into position between Howland and Lae, New Guinea.

In hopes that a Sunday takeoff might be possible, loading began. Between two and three hundred pounds of equipment was weighed and stowed in the plane as Amelia watched and made mental notes so that she would be able to locate anything without effort. Five vacuum bottles for hot drinks, water canteens, a desert waterbag for keeping water cool in hot climates, a life preserver for each person, a rubber life raft with oars and a kite sail (which could serve as an emergency radio antenna), more chocolate bars, raisins, canned tomato juice, standard army emergency rations, fishing tackle, a hand-operated battery charger for use if the motor-driven generator failed, a spare tail wheel, and the small package of “no-fog” that she was supposed to test for its ability to dissipate fog (which Fred Noonan would eventually make her get rid of).

All the activity heightened the tension and public's interest. A crowd estimated at nearly ten thousand camped behind the steel fence near the navy hangar that housed her plane.

American women waited nervously, impatiently, proudly, for Amelia to take off. The Oakland airport switchboard was being bombarded with hundreds of calls each day of which at least seventy-five percent were from women, “who seem to feel Miss Earhart is a champion of their sex's ability to accomplish feats of flying equalling those of any man,” according to C. A. Weaver, who presided over the switchboard.

In the Hawaiian Islands, hundreds of outlying islanders gathered on Oahu to attend the unveiling of a plaque for Amelia that was to take place on her arrival.

The headwinds that had kept the Pan Am Clippers from starting out earlier in the week built up again on Sunday, forcing one Clipper that had finally taken off and was a third of the way to Oahu to turn back. In the face of the adverse weather, Amelia postponed her start by twenty-four hours, to the delight of Oakland airport personnel; for them the extra day and the high winds, which would help dry out the field, were a gift from Providence. Paul Mantz, after driving his car up and down the hard
surface apron to test it, had found that the unending drizzle had made it much too soft for the Electra, and airport superintendent G. M. Turner had been working frantically with a crew of men and trucks, scrapers, and a steamroller to fill in the soft spots, afraid Mantz would opt for Mills field across the bay in San Francisco.

At a Monday-morning conference at the Pan Am base on the Bay at Alameda with John A. Riley, the Oakland airport government weather forecaster, and Willis Clover, the chief meteorologist for Pan Am's Pacific Division, Amelia and Paul learned that the low-pressure areas and adverse winds were still sitting some five hundred miles off the California coast and that Pan Am had grounded their Clippers till Wednesday. They had no choice but to do the same.

By Wednesday, March 17, the winds had finally changed; Pan Am prepared to send off its planes, and Amelia began her final preparations. It was St. Patrick's Day, and from somewhere Amelia obtained a collection of shamrocks. She pinned one on each member of the Electra flight crew, including herself. “Her husband was similarly decorated by the smiling airwoman,” reported the newspapers. They ate a quick lunch perched on stools at the lunch counter, then Amelia repaired to her room for a short nap. Meanwhile, Bureau of Air Commerce executive William Miller and Superintendent Turner staked out the runway Amelia would use with a series of cardboard placards, placed on alternate sides of the takeoff strip every 150 feet.

The crowd, uncertain about Amelia's departure time, was down to a more managable five thousand or so. She smiled and waved at the friends who were waving at her from the edge of the runway. She appeared relaxed as always and was dressed “as usual,” wrote Carl Allen, in brown slacks, and a brown, gray, and blue plaid shirt, with a brown linen scarf knotted loosely around her throat and a tan leather jacket.

At 3:13 in the afternoon sunshine broke through, and Captain Dahlstrom piloting the Pan Am Hawaiian Clipper took off. At 4:19 Captain Musick, piloting the Clipper on the survey flight to New Zealand, took off. At 4:36 Amelia was in the air. All three planes were bound for Honolulu. Amelia, of course, was taking off from a muddy field, whereas the Clippers, being seaplanes, took off across the water of the bay.

As Amelia moved down the field, George couldn't resist bidding her one last farewell; as he approached the plane, Paul throttled down the powerful engines. (It must have been at Amelia's request, for it was not the kind of thing he would have done on his own.) George climbed up on the wing for some final words with his wife—it was, after all, the last time he expected to see her for a long time. Then he climbed back down and got
into William Miller's car, and they chased behind the plane as it roared down the field. The field was still very wet. As the Electra approached the red flags marking the halfway spot, it was throwing up a wake like a hydroplane. Still, it managed to get off in a little over eighteen hundred feet. Pan Am officials purportedly instructed both Musick, bound by way of Kingman Reef, Pago-Pago, and Samoa, and Dahlstrom, in another Pan Am trans-Pacific Clipper Manila bound by way of Wake, Midway, and Guam, both of whom would also land in Hawaii, to reduce their normal cruising speed by fifteen knots so that Amelia would pass them easily and there would be no speculation about a Pacific “race.” An excellent public relations move, it made Pan American look good and obscured the truth about the planes: that Amelia's was faster.

Back at the field, Bill Miller sent off the cable containing his carefully detailed notes on the beginning of the flight to naval headquarters, and he alerted all ships along the route as well. Some reporters told George that there was a move in Congress to award a congressional medal to Amelia for her flying achievements. He smiled and expressed his hope that he would receive one too.

20

The Beginning

• • • • The Electra made the passage from Oakland to Honolulu in 15 hours, 47 minutes, setting a new speed record. Amelia flew fifty minutes of every hour; Paul kept track of fuel consumption. Manning worked the 500-kilocycle band—so long, noted Amelia, that he blew out the generator. For the last few hundred miles Noonan and Amelia set their course with the aid of the Bendix radio direction finder: Fred directed Amelia to locate the Makapu beacon with the DF and keep it ten degrees to starboard. It worked like a charm. Eighty miles from Makapu, “Fred says start down.” She turned over the controls to Paul Mantz.

Paul circled the field twice; airport personnel watching the plane feared that the winds were causing trouble. Paul admitted to wrapping the plane around “in a steep bank” in order to check the wind sock. The landing was terrible—so hard, in fact, that the impact weakened the landing gear. Amelia was not happy.

Paul would later tell his biographer that Amelia complained about his landing because she was exhausted, “very fatigued and kind of exuberant,” but it was actually he who was in a high state of bother. He landed the plane without cutting the engines on the ramp, as was expected; instead he taxied into the hangar, thereby leaving the welcoming committee,
which included three generals plus a squad of men, waiting in the drizzle, according to First Lieutenant K. A. Popers, Station Engineering Officer at Wheeler field. Paul was actually in such a state that he left the field without giving comprehensive instructions: “Mr. Mantz departed with the rest of the crew with no word whatsoever as to what was to be done to the plane in the way of service and check-over. Mr. Thomas, the Pratt and Whitney engine man for this territory, was present and he and the Engineering officer took it upon themselves to do what is usually done to put an airplane into suitable condition for the continuance of such a flight,” according to army records. Paul flung out as he left that for the last six hours of the flight, the right-hand Hamilton constant speed propeller had been frozen in position. And yet he didn't bother to mention it in his flight log. He also told them, “insisted,” that the generator had blown because the control box was “out of order,” but the mechanic traced the trouble to a blown fuse—a piece of information Paul should have relayed to Amelia, but never did.

Certainly Amelia exhibited no fatigue. Immediately after they landed she made the photographers who were intent on snapping her with Paul wait until Harry Manning and Fred Noonan were also standing alongside. Then she went off and ate a huge breakfast. “And speaking of breakfast, a bright particular memory ... were the so-fresh scrambled eggs miraculously awaiting us,” she recollected.

Paul and Amelia were not getting along, and within a very short time, Amelia had all but fired him—in her own fashion, which is to say, she referred to him in
Last Flight
as still being her technical adviser but in fact was consulting him only when it was absolutely necessary. Paul took great pride in being her adviser as well as her business partner; he wasn't used to such treatment, and from then on he never spoke of Amelia except condescendingly. The wound, the rejection, rankled for the rest of his life, causing him, after she died, to tell a number of untruths about her, denigrating her intelligence and competence, with the aim of inflating his role and his guidance. There is no other explanation for the studied lies and the amazing male chauvinist tone that exists in his biography—Ruth Nichols called it the last grumblings of a jealous colleague. None of which would be worth mentioning if so many people hadn't swallowed it whole and used his comments as the basis for an assault on Amelia's piloting skills.

Amelia went off to Christian and Mona Holmes's house at Waikiki to rest and to write her story for the
Herald Tribune;
it appeared next day on the front page. Before she left Oakland, Amelia had given George an estimated flight time; her prediction turned out to be almost on the nose—she was
only five minutes off. (After she landed, George sent her a teasing cable, “Please try to be more exact.”)

Army mechanics disassembled the self-adjusting pitch mechanism on the propeller and found that an improper lubricant had been used that had congealed when the Electra had briefly hit icing conditions. Since they didn't have the necesssary tools at Wheeler to fix the problem, both propellers were removed, and taken to the Hawaiian Air Depot at the navy's Luke field, where they were worked on through the night. It took hot kerosene to loosen the frozen blades. At two A.M. the propellers were returned to Wheeler and reinstalled on the plane, working perfectly.

Mantz showed up at eleven o'clock accompanied by his fiancée Terry Minor and Christian Holmes, and took off in the Electra with his companions, first announcing that he would land at Luke field to see if the concrete runway there would be better for the final takeoff than Wheeler's dirt runway. This, of course, seriously affected all the armed forces' preparations, but responding to the situation, the Luke group operations officer immediately recalled all planes and cleared his field. After landing at Luke, Paul decided its runway was preferable to that at Wheeler and that Amelia should take off from there. He ordered the plane to be gassed up. Then he left, according to government records. Lieutenant Arnold, the Luke depot inspector, was watching as Standard Oil began the refueling, which was being executed as usual through a chamois strainer. The lieutenant immediately noticed “considerable sediment” on the chamois and ordered the gas flow stopped. Military aviation fuel was subsequently used.