East to the Dawn (78 page)

By the time the plane was loaded it was after seven P.M. Nine hundred gallons of gasoline were now in the Electra, slightly less than the plane had lofted into the air at Oakland. Even that was more than Amelia needed for an eighteen hundred mile trip; Howland was six hundred miles closer to Honolulu than Oakland, and the Electra had had four hours' worth of gas left when it landed at Honolulu, but Amelia was simply taking normal precautions; weather patterns could always change, and she wanted enough gasoline aboard to be able to turn around eight hours out “if it became necessary.”

Amelia had called up during the afternoon to say she would either leave at eleven that evening or at dawn. At nine-thirty the decision was made to start at dawn. Depot personnel who remained to work on the plane spent the night on cots in the final assembly hangar at Luke.

At 3:45 A.M. the officer-of-the-day reported with a guard detail of twenty men and established a rope barrier around the plane. Another officer was sent with sixteen men to establish a line of sentries at two-hundred-foot intervals along the west side of the runway and to relight
and relocate certain of the lights. Sometime between four and four thirty, Amelia, Paul, Fred, Harry, Chris Holmes, and Terry Minor arrived. It was still dark; Amelia ordered the runway lights on, surveyed the field, and then announced that she would wait till daylight to start. At Howland Island, the coast guard cutter
Itasca
waited.

At five thirty the motors were started, and Captain Manning and Noonan took their places, and at five forty Amelia taxied out to the northeast end of the runway, preceded by Paul in a car.

As the Electra roared down the runway gathering speed, it swung slightly to the right, whereupon Amelia throttled down the left engine. The plane then started swinging left, and as it did, it tilted outward, throwing all the weight onto the right wheel. Suddenly the right-hand landing gear collapsed, and “The airplane spun sharply to the left sliding on its belly and amid a shower of sparks from the mat and came to rest headed about 200 degrees from its initial course.”

The official crash report described the accident. But the official report did not mention that army aviators thought the wet runway had added to the problem, that after the heavily loaded plane began skidding, it would have been almost impossible to straighten it out.

Amelia immediately shut down the engines, thereby preventing a fire. She would later write that the plane was moving so easily down the runway “that I thought the take-off was actually over. In ten seconds more we would have been off the ground, with our landing gear tucked up and on our way southwestward. There was not the slightest indication of anything abnormal.” She studied the accident, naturally, and listened to the comments of witnesses who said the tire blew, but she thought the fault lay in the landing gear, weakened by Paul's hard landing. “Possibly the landing gear's right shock absorber, as it lengthened, may have given way,” she wrote for publication. Her first intimation that something was wrong was when she felt the plane pull to her right: “I reduced the power on the opposite engine and succeeded in swinging from the right to the left. For a moment I thought I would be able to gain control and straighten the course. But, alas, the load was so heavy.”

It was a disaster of the first magnitude—and totally unexpected. All the preparations, all the people, all the hoopla—there was nowhere to hide. The first thing she did was call George.

“It is amazing,” she said later, “how much can happen in one dawn.”

Amelia left the next day at noon aboard the SS
Malolo,
having given brief statements to reporters that she would resume her flight later. A week later
the air force put the plane aboard the SS
Lurline;
“based on the written request and authorization of Miss Earhart,” its destination was the Lockheed plant at Burbank.

The mechanics at Lockheed found that the right wing, both engine housings, the right-hand rudder, the underside of the fuselage, and both propellers were seriously damaged. The oil tanks ruptured. In the process of repairing the plane Lockheed strengthened the landing gear—tacit acknowledgement that a full load of gasoline subjected it to “excessive” strain.

The accident was such a stunner that many just couldn't cope with it, least of all Amelia and George. Back in California, they were faced not just with the fact of the accident, as unsettling as that was, but with the incidental expenses, which were huge. Six mechanics were on the verge of setting out for various parts of the world to service the plane, at least one had left; their travel expenses and salaries had to be paid. Then arrangements had to be made to safeguard the supplies and the fuel that were in place. Then the Air Corps demanded that George pay $1,086 to the Hawaiian Air Depot as payment for the materials used in the overhauling, repairing, and preparing for shipment of the plane. Then there was the cost of transporting the damaged plane back to Lockheed, and the cost of the steamship tickets for Amelia, Harry Manning, and Fred Noonan. And there was the plane itself; Lockheed's bill came to $14,000.

Amelia and George needed help to get back on track; they went to Harry Bruno, pilot and public relations adviser—a genius at raising money. Harry had been Charles Lindbergh's press agent in 1927 and had gone on to represent everyone in the flying world from Anthony Fokker to Richard Byrd.

Amelia visited him first, and told him how sorry she was that the accident had happened “because she thought it would mean a lot to aviation.” The next day George went to see Harry and asked him to help raise money, which Harry quickly did—$20,000 from Vincent Bendix and $10,000 from Floyd Odlum. That kept the project alive.

“On the prosaic dollar-and-cent side friends helped generously, but even so, to keep going I more-or-less mortgaged the future. Without regret, however, for what are futures for?” wrote Amelia in
Last Flight.
It was charmingly put, but still, it was one of the rare times when she talked about money. She dedicated her book to Floyd Odlum, who opened his deep pockets to her; he, too, wanted to keep the project alive.

Then Harry Manning pulled out, for the repairs would take till mid-May and he had to get back to work. Rumors had it that Amelia was relieved. She took to spending hours every day at the Lockheed plant,
keeping herself “busier than ever before.” She had again started working with Kelly Johnson, getting his take on the causes of ground looping and working to get the most out of the Cambridge analyzer, which was so crucial to fuel consumption.

Then she made a big change in plans: she decided to fly east around the world instead of west. The reasons were several. First, if she proceeded west, the delay meant she would reach the Caribbean and Africa—the last leg as planned—at the start of the monsoon season, but if she reversed, she could fly through before they started. Second, changing direction would afford her the luxury of flight-testing the plane as she flew from Oakland to Miami, the revised jumping-off place, thereby saving the time of running such tests in California. And a third, a huge advantage, she would be flying around the world with the prevailing winds instead of against. Many pilots agreed that this route was more sensible, but the change also meant that she would be taking the most difficult navigational stretch—the long Pacific hop to tiny Howland Island—at the end instead of the beginning. But that meant another adjustment: Fred Noonan had to be along for the entire flight, for to fly the Pacific and hit such a small island required celestial navigation, and it wasn't possible to pilot and take sun and star sights at the same time. Nor was she trained to do it.

Paul Mantz was not consulted.

She sent off mementos: to Gore, the blue-and-white-checked leather belt he had often seen her wear; to Gene, her old watch. She sent the flight coat in which she had flown the Atlantic, plus a fine buffalo coat that William Hart had given her and other personal belongings to Carl Dunrud to store for her. She attached a note to the buffalo coat: “To you Carl. I know of no one that can put this to better use than you.”

On the way home from the army-navy game at West Point with Gene and Gore the previous fall, she had talked about her round-the-world flight. Gore had asked her what part of the flight most worried her. “Africa,” she had answered. “If you got forced down in those jungles, they'd never find you.” At that point Amelia was envisaging a solo flight across Africa, having dropped her navigator after landing in Australia and being alone above the jungle. Gore and his father each responded with worries about the Pacific. Amelia, though, planning to have a navigator aboard on that leg and in love with Gene, answered “Oh, there are always islands,” then continued, “Wouldn't it be wonderful to just go off and live on a desert island?” Marooned on an island, she added, she could finally write the two books she had in mind. One, based on learning at Denison House that sometimes parents got it all wrong, was going to be about bringing up children; the other one—she had an aversion to bankers—would
be on the capitalist system. Gene was quite dubious, according to Gore. “Then,” Gore remembered, “they discussedjust
how you
could survive; and what would you do if there was no water? and if there was no water, you would have to make a sunstill and extract salt from sea water and how was that done?” So there was no doubt such thoughts were in her head.

Carl Allen thought the flight was a dangerous undertaking. It wasn't that she wasn't well prepared or skillful enough, he told her when she asked him what he thought her chances were. She was as well prepared as anyone, and her flying equipment just as good. Still, he answered, he thought her chances of completing the flight successfully were fifty-fifty. She replied:

She never talked about God. Once she was asked by another pilot, who admitted to praying “like crazy” when she was in a tough spot, if she ever prayed in like circumstances. “No-o-o I don't believe so,” Amelia replied slowly, a ghost of a smile flickering across her face. “I guess I think it would be a little unsportsmanlike, to wait and only send God a hurry call when I was in a jam.”

On Thursday, May 21, 1937, at 3:50 P.M., ten years and one day after Charles Lindbergh had taken off on his solo flight across the Atlantic, five years and one day from the time Amelia had taken off on hers, Amelia lifted her Lockheed Electra off the runway of the airfield in Oakland, and officially began her flight around the world. The sky was clear and the temperature was mild as she winged her way toward Tucson.

A key player—Bill Miller of the Bureau of Air Commerce—was no longer working with Amelia. His absence was not Amelia's choice, however: Gene Vidal was no longer head of the Bureau of Air Commerce, and Bill had been sent off on another assignment. Nor was Paul Mantz with her; he was in St. Louis, flying competition acrobatics. He hadn't even known she was going to start. He was furious he hadn't been in on the plans and called it a “sneak departure.”