East to the Dawn (81 page)

She put down in Rangoon as the sun's rays touched the golden roof of the great Shwe Dagon Pagoda on the outskirts of the city.

Austin C. Brady, the American consul, put them up and lent them his car; the Standard Oil representative acted as their guide. Amelia visited the pagoda. She had time to note the condition of women in the Burmese city: that although men and women were segregated in streetcars, there were many women in business, and they had had the vote for many years. It was all very pleasant, but Rangoon was only four hundred miles from Akyab; they had fallen behind schedule by another day.

Singapore was the next stop, a flight of just over twelve hundred miles, made without a hitch. She collected twenty-five dollars from the pilot of a KLM airplane for beating him to Singapore. (They had taken off at the same time from Rangoon.) That was followed by a flight to Bandung, in what was then called the Netherlands East Indies.

An hour after their arrival in Bandung that Monday, June 21, Amelia received a telephone call from New York, presumbably from George. Unfortunately the only knowledge we have of what was said is Amelia's version, which she sent off to be printed as part of her daily story in the
Herald Tribune.

She and George spoke about the arrangements being made with the navy and the coast guard for the overwater flights from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, and from Howland to Honolulu: “There were details to settle about radio frequencies, weather reports and the like,” she wrote.

Unfortunately it was George who was seeing to all these details for Amelia. As energetic and efficient as he was, when it came to radio frequencies and direction finders, he didn't really know what he was talking about: he was a publisher, a promoter, not a pilot. In the past Bill Miller, who was a pilot, had taken care of all weather and communications details with the coast guard and the navy, but Gene was no longer at the Bureau of Air Commerce, so they no longer had Bill Miller to ask the right questions, no one who knew the intricacies of radio communication and could make sure that there was no snafu. Amelia thought everything was settled and organized, but it wasn't, as she would later find out.

Some minor instrument adjustments had to be made on the Electra, so Amelia and Fred planned to stay in Bandung an extra day to take advantage of the expertise of the KLM mechanics, who were familiar with the Electra's instruments because their Dutch Douglas DC-3s were equipped with similar ones. The hotel was good; Amelia's room was “filled with flowers.” Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing. They walked on the rim of a volcano, were entertained by yet another American consul-general, took a three-hour car trip to Batavia (Jakarta) to visit some close friends of Fred's, and flew back to Bandung on a local airline. While in Batavia, Amelia telephoned
New York to say that KLM mechanics had “licked a small trouble with my fuel regulator.”

Wednesday at 3:45 A.M., the usual time they started, Amelia was warming up the engines to take off and noticed that one of the instruments refused to function. It was not until two that afternoon that they got off, reaching Surabaja at sunset. But, Amelia wrote, “certain further adjustments of faulty long-distance flying instruments were necessary.” There were no good mechanics there, so she turned back to Bandung. They remained there in total from Sunday, June 20 to Saturday, June 26.

When George talked with Amelia again, she told him she believed she would get off the following day, and be in Kupang by evening. As a result, he announced, from Oakland, that Amelia would reach Howland Island Sunday, Hawaii on Monday, and be back in Oakland on Tuesday, June 29, or Wednesday the thirtieth. He had lined up various broadcasts, and Amelia was supposed to be the speaker at the dinner concluding the Institute of Technology program at Purdue on Friday, July 2. But although Amelia took off as expected, that was the day she had to return because of instrument malfunctions.

Biographers have speculated that the purpose of the Bandung layover was for Amelia to recuperate: from exhaustion, from stomach ailments, from whatever. But from reading Amelia's account, and more to the point, from reading a letter Fred wrote to Helen at this time, the picture that emerges is of the two of them being no worse for wear. The letter to Helen is seven pages long, and Fred makes no mention of Amelia begging off a shopping or sight-seeing trip, no mention of her being other than a good companion. Besides the sight-seeing trip to Batavia, Fred wrote, they both made several sight-seeing trips “to nearer places.” They both had had problems digesting the twenty-one courses of the rijst tafel but nothing serious. The climate was excellent; the days not too warm, the nights cool. “We had a most enjoyable time,” he wrote, even though they spent considerably more time in Java than expected, due to some minor, but important, instrument adjustments to be made.... Took off once and got as far as Surabaya—about three hundred and fifty miles—only to have the instruments fail again—so returned to Bandung. They are functioning perfectly now, thank goodness for the Dutch mechanics.

Amelia, too, felt that the instruments were finally fixed for good. She placed a call to George from Surabaja to tell him; she caught him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the United Airlines plane he was flying west
had put down to refuel; it was on the ground only twenty minutes. George included only the end of the conversation in his book, stating that it was “the last conversation” he had with her.

“Is everything about the ship OK now?”

“Yes. Good night, Hon.”

“Goodnight.... I'll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”

Amelia and Fred took off on Sunday, June 27, planning to refuel at Kupang, on Timor Island, and continue on to Port Darwin in Australia. But their start was late, and the day short. (Flying directly east meant they lost almost two hours of daylight each day.) They landed at 12:07 P.M. After dealing with customs and the local greeting committee, inspecting the plane carefully, and refueling, so much time had passed that Amelia, deciding that prudence was the better part of valor, decided to spend the night and get an early start the next day. Facilities were quite primitive on the island. There was no hangar for the plane, so they staked it down and put covers on the engine and propellers. There was no hotel, either, but there was a government guest house where they could stay, staffed by native cooks who set before them an “astonishingly splendid lunch,” as Fred wrote Helen. As usual they went sight-seeing, to get the feel of Kupang, “perched as it is on cliffs with winding paved roads,” then returned to the guest house for tea, bath, and a rest. Advised that Amelia and Fred would be leaving before dawn, the staff set to work to provide an early dinner, which was announced as Fred was closing his letter to Helen. “I hear the dinner gong—or its equivalent—and Amelia is calling—so I must close.”

The next day they were driven out to the field at five A.M. Amelia, it was noted, thanked everyone gracefully for the help they had given her; the Electra took off at six thirty. They reached Port Darwin, their destination in Australia, in 3 hours and 29 minutes. As they approached Port Darwin, Amelia and Fred kidded each other about a small boat they saw in the distance, which Amelia insisted was a pearl-fishing lugger. Fred replied (via a scrap of paper), “Once aboard the lugger and the pearl is mine.” They landed just after ten A.M.; it was Monday, June 28. Australia was a new landscape, observed Amelia, “endless trees on an endless plain.” She began thinking of the long flight facing them over water. Their parachutes would be useless, she decided, and arranged for them to be shipped back to the United States.

A telegram from Jean Batten, Australia's top flier, was waiting for her; Amelia hoped finally to meet her, but because of time constraints it couldn't be arranged. She also received a query from the Australian government
direction finding wireless station. They wanted to know why there had been no radio communication from the Electra to them. Amelia informed them that her DF receiver was not functioning, whereupon airport personnel arranged a ground test and discovered that the fuse for the DF generator had blown. They replaced it, ran a ground test that was satisfactory, according to A. R. Collins, Aircraft Inspector and officer-in-charge of the airport, and advised her to inspect the fuse in the event of further trouble.

At dawn they took off into headwinds “as usual.” Collins reported that during the Electra's journey from Darwin to Lae, communication was established with Darwin for a distance of two hundred miles from this station, “radio phone being used by Miss Earhart.”

Seven hours and 43 minutes later, Amelia and Fred landed in Lae, New Guinea, a flight of some twelve hundred miles, mostly over water. It was Tuesday, June 29.

22

Lost

• • • • Longitude and latitude are imaginary lines drawn on the globe. The equator is the beginning point of latitude, from which all degrees of latitude are measured. All other latitudes run parallel to it. It is also the only great circle of latitude—the only one that passes through the center of the earth. So circling the earth at its waist means traveling at zero degrees latitude. Put another way, it means, roughly, always flying east or west.

Longitude is harder to pin down. The meridians of longitude are not parallel; they are all great circles that pass through the North and South poles. That makes the distance between them zero at the poles and the maximum at the equator.

As Dava Sobel points out in
Longitude,
any sailor worth his salt can gauge latitude—that was how Columbus sailed straight across the Atlantic in 1492. Latitude depends on taking sights on the sun, or “shooting the sun,” measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon when it is highest in the sky at noon. Time is not a factor. Fred had no trouble figuring latitude.

But figuring longitude is much more of a problem because time is a factor. Zero degrees longitude is an arbitrary line. Navigational aids calculating longitude began when the Englishman John Harrison perfected
the chronometer, so the meridian passing through Greenwich, England, became zero degrees. Likewise, the measurement of time was based on the observatory in the town of Greenwich. Greenwich Time—GMT—became the universal benchmark from which times all over the world are calculated.

Longitude is measured in degrees, but to plot one's position the navigator must know the time—exactly. The earth makes one complete spin—one 360-degree circle—every twenty-four hours. Every hour is 15 degrees of longitude, always. But the distance between the meridians is greatest at the equator and least at the poles. One degree of longitude always equals four minutes of time, but only at the equator does one degree stretch for sixty nautical miles. Latitude, by contrast, is always the same—one degree of latitude equals sixty miles no matter where on earth you are.

When navigating by the sun and stars, the only tools available on ocean passages in 1937, longitude—that is, the distance traveled around the earth—was determined by consulting the Greenwich Hour Angle, a detailed compilation of star positions, upon which Fred Noonan also relied. The
Air Almanac
gave the Greenwich Hour Angle—the geographic position of the important celestial bodies for every day, hour, minute, and second of the year. Using his octant to “shoot” heavenly bodies, Fred could locate the spot on the earth, the geographic position, that was directly under a given celestial body—it's splash-down position—and work out the plane's distance from that spot. Then he could enter the Electra's probable position on his chart. But to do this he had to know what time it was—exactly—for each minute of error would result in a fifteen-mile miscalculation. That was why radio communication was so important to Fred: he had to check the rate of his chronometers.

Amelia kept the Electra at an altitude of eleven thousand feet for most of the way to Lae, to stay above a heavy cloud layer. Proceeding by a combination of celestial navigation and dead reckoning, Fred positioned them perfectly; they came down, as planned, on the western flank of New Guinea's mountain range, reached the coast, found Lae, and set down.