Amelia Earhart (14 page)

No matter what her commitments she was always eager to fly. Most of the time she used the only plane she had, the Avian, although she had had two forced landings before the end of March. The first was en route from
New York to Washington when engine failure brought her down at Philadelphia. The second occurred when hail during a violent thunderstorm
threatened to split the propeller. She landed in a cornfield near Utica, New York,
waded through the mud to a farmhouse and telephoned for a truck to haul the plane to town, then invited Muriel who was teaching in Utica to have dinner with her.

Whenever she was offered another airplane to fly, she accepted. After being “manhandled” by fans at an air show in Buffalo the night of March 26, she flew for most of the next day in several airplanes that were new to her, among them a new trainer intended for the army by its maker, Maj. R. H. Fleet, head of
Consolidated Aircraft. She was accompanied by Fleet’s test pilot, Leigh Wade, veteran World War aviator and later a major general in the Air Force. Wade had been pilot of the
Boston
, one of the three Army Air Service planes in the first round-the-world flight in 1924. The trainer he was demonstrating for Fleet was designed with “neutral stability,” to respond to any change on the controls, good or bad, on the part of the student pilot. When Amelia took off into a strong southwest wind, Wade braced himself to take over quickly in case she made a mistake. She did not. “She was a born flier,” he said, “with a delicate touch on the stick.”

After taking the plane through a series of maneuvers Amelia looked back at Wade and laughed, pointing first in one direction, then in another. She was lost. She had been so intent on studying the controls and feeling the responses of the aircraft that she had no idea where they were.

A few years later, Wade saw what he thought was another demonstration of Amelia’s instinctive skill when he watched her take off from Clover Field in Santa Monica. As her Vega headed toward the trees at the end of the runway, he saw intermittent puffs of black smoke in its wake, evidence of a badly misfiring motor. With the aircraft nearing stall point Amelia eased it up gently over the trees, circled the field, and landed. “There,” Wade said, “was a pilot.”

At least one colleague disagreed. Elinor
Smith, holder of the women’s solo endurance record who learned to fly when she was twelve years old, thought Amelia was an incapable amateur. Amelia came to New Castle, Delaware, while Smith was there for the trials of a new plane designed by Giuseppe Bellanca in which she intended to set a second record. Bellanca’s test pilot, George Haldeman, invited Amelia to go up with him and Smith. Smith claimed later that as soon as Amelia took the controls “our big, calm bird suddenly lurched out of control.” Amelia asked to go
up again without Haldeman. When
Smith took her up the second time, the same thing happened. They “slipped and skidded all over the sky,” she said.

Smith’s recollections of the incident were written a half century after a bitter dispute with George Palmer Putnam, long after the deaths of both Putnam and Amelia. She claimed that he had tried to hire her to fly Amelia’s plane for her in the Women’s Air Derby of 1929 and when she refused his offer he said that he would see to it that she never flew again professionally. It seems likely that Smith’s differences with G. P. might have colored her view of Amelia’s ability and it seems unlikely that Amelia could have been so inept when she had just passed the tests for her transport license.

Certainly the two women disagreed on the attributes of the Lockheed Vega. Smith said the Vega “had all the glide potential of a boulder falling off a mountain.” That was after she bought one in 1931 for a transatlantic flight she hoped to make but cracked it up at Garden City four months later. Amelia, who thought the Vega was a great plane, never changed her mind. In 1933 she bought the same Vega Smith had cracked up from a subsequent owner and set three records in it.

While she looked for a Vega that was old (and cheap) Amelia flew whatever she was offered, including gliders in Michigan and, in May, a single-engine amphibian as copilot with Ralph DeVore. The flight was a near disaster. They were taking a Keystone Loening Air Yacht on an inaugural flight from Cleveland to Detroit when a fog forced them down on Lake Erie. They had no radio, so while the plane tossed on five-foot waves for almost three hours, search parties were organized ashore and newsboys were on the streets selling “extras” on the plane’s disappearance. When the fog lifted, DeVore made it to the Detroit terminal. For most of the return trip, Amelia piloted the plane and pronounced the flight “a great lark,” a phrase more suited to an Ogontz debutante than a working pilot.

Until July, most of Amelia’s
flying was in the Avian, which she took on the lecture and air show circuit whenever weather permitted. She also attempted to fly to Boston in it for
Muriel’s marriage to Albert Morrissey in West Medford on June 29, but was grounded by weather and missed the rehearsal. She made it in time for the ceremony, at which she was the maid of honor, then informed the officiating minister that she thought it
would take more courage to marry than it took to cross the Atlantic in a plane.

There is no record of whether she talked first to someone at Air Associates in New York about buying the
Vega or waited until she visited the Burbank plant of Lockheed while she was in California for TAT. She bought it in July—serial number 10, the tenth Vega built by Lockheed, registered to her as NC6911. The plane, which had been a demonstrator for a year and had been leased to New York’s Mayor Walker, was reported to be in poor condition.

Amelia took possession on July 20, ten days before the bill of sale was completed, and went to
Chatauqua, New York, where an audience of five thousand packed the amphitheater to hear her speak. She did not fly the Vega but took along a pilot, Lt. O. L. Stephens, either because she was not yet the legal owner or because she was still uncertain about her ability to land it on the fourteenth hole of the golf course like Stephens did. Years later, she told the great speed flier and test pilot Ben Howard that the
first time she took the Vega up alone, the altimeter failed to function and with poor visibility she had to estimate how low she could safely fly by using a combination of readings from the fuel mixture control and carburetor response dials, a solution Howard thought ingenious and sensible.

She had to wait another two weeks after her return from Chatauqua before she could spend much time in the Vega. G. P. had scheduled other appearances, including a publicity stunt at Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island on July 23. Part owner of a submarine along with its inventor, Simon Lake, and a third man, Putnam had tried and failed to sell Lake’s concept of an air pressure escape compartment to the Navy. Before he sold his rights to the ship, G. P. decided to use it for some free publicity for Amelia. He arranged for Amelia and Dorothy Putnam to swim out of the escape compartment of the submarine to the surface. Both women wore bathing suits but Dorothy looked a lot more attractive than Amelia, who was too thin. Amelia also donned a diver’s suit and descended thirty-five feet to the bottom of the harbor where she remained for fifteen minutes. Unfortunately two St. Louis aviators, Forest O’Brine and Dale Johnson, broke the world’s endurance record the same day, relegating Amelia’s dive to the inside pages.

She also had work to do for TAT on the West Coast. This time she
took Amy along. She was back in New York by August 3 for a national network
broadcast to Richard Byrd at the South Pole. She finished at midnight and left the next morning with Lieutenant
Stephens for
Los Angeles where they arrived on August 7.
^*

When Amelia brought the plane to the Lockheed plant for an inspection flight, Wiley Post, the test pilot, said it was unfit to fly. Lockheed offered her a replacement, serial number 36, registered as NC31E. The trade was arranged by Carl B. Squire, the new general manager of Lockheed, which had just been purchased by a holding company, Detroit Aircraft Corporation. Lockheed was currently building a new plane for Lindbergh, the Lockheed Sirius
^†
, and with Amelia in another Lockheed, Squire could claim as customers the public’s king and queen of the air.

One year after the instant fame resulting from her transatlantic flight, Amelia was ready for another exploit. The fires of that fame needed refueling; the lecture circuit, new material; and Amelia, proof that she was more than an attractive, lucky pilot with a shrewd manager. The best opportunity offered her that summer of 1929 was the first cross-country women’s air derby. Amelia took it.

I
n August of 1929 Amelia was one of nineteen contestants in the first woman’s cross-country air derby. She signed up for the race on her birthday, July 24, the same day the Vega became officially hers, but only after a six-week struggle over rules with the committee for the National Air Races. The all-male committee had suggested that the women’s event, which would precede the air races at Cleveland, begin at Omaha rather than Santa Monica to spare the women the dangers of crossing the Rocky Mountains. An alternative suggestion from the committee was that of starting in California but with each woman accompanied by a male navigator. Amelia was outraged. She immediately became the self-appointed spokesperson for the perspective contestants.

On June 11 she sent telegrams of
protest to both the NAA contest committee and the national races committee along with a statement to the press. It would be ridiculous, she said, to advertise the derby as an important event if the course was the easy route over the middle west from Omaha to Cleveland. As for taking along a male navigator, the proposal was an insult to contestants who were required to have a minimum of one hundred hours of flight time. If she were not allowed to fly solo from California, she said, she would not enter the race. She was joined in her protest by Lady Mary Heath, Elinor Smith, and Louise Thaden.

The NAA committee passed the buck to the manager of the National Air Races, Cliff Henderson, who persuaded the race committee to accept Amelia’s terms. The race, they ruled, would extend over a period of eight days,
starting August 18 at Santa Monica. The contestants would fly solo in planes to be rated as CW (85 to 115 cubic inch displacement) or DW (150 to 220 cubic inch displacement). Amelia signed up with six other women. Twelve eventually joined them.

Amelia’s effort to gain recognition for women as competent pilots was not made any easier by Will Rogers, aviation aficionado and the nation’s most famous humorist. In his nationally syndicated newspaper column, the gum-chewing pseudocowboy from Oklahoma called the race the “
Powder Puff
Derby.” Feature writers followed his lead, referring to the women aviators as “Flying Flappers,” “Aerial Queens,” and “Sweethearts of the Air.” To counteract this public perception of the derby as a female flying circus, Amelia said she thought it would be more important for all of the contestants to reach Cleveland safely than for any of them to set new
records. Most did not agree. They flew to win and before the derby was over, one would die, and nearly all would narrowly escape serious injury or death.

Once Amelia had possession of the Vega, she had almost no time to fly it. Instead she spent her time publicizing the derby or working for her new employer, TAT. The last real rest she had was on the weekend before the derby, which she spent at Lake Arrowhead with Lindbergh’s friends, Jack and Irene Maddux. One of Keyes’s partners in TAT, Maddux was very fond of Amelia but saw nothing wrong in using her presence as his houseguest to gain recognition for himself and the new airline. Three days before the race he gave a dinner aboard a Maddux transport plane for Amelia, five other derby fliers, and the mayor of Santa Barbara. All of the women spoke on a
national network hookup over the plane’s radio. Maddux also arranged for Amelia and Irene Maddux to arrive in a Goodyear blimp at the
start of the derby on Sunday, August 18.

Twenty thousand spectators gathered along the edges of the Santa Monica airfield or stood on a nearby hill under a fiery sun to see the derby fliers take off. Their nineteen planes were lined up at two starting lines on the field, six of the light CW class in front and thirteen of the heavier DW class behind. Amelia’s light-green Vega was the sixth in the DW class to leave but at the south border of the field she turned back, circling until the last plane had left before landing. Her electric motor switch had
shorted out, costing her fourteen minutes of lost flight time while repairs were made.

The first overnight stop, at San Bernardino, was chaotic. There were not enough mechanics or guards for the planes and long after midnight the women were still wrangling with officials over a scheduled stop the next day at Calexico, California, en route to Phoenix. A number of pilots in the DW-class planes who had used the field the week before said it was unsafe for heavy aircraft. One of them, Florence “Pancho” Lowe Barnes, a Pasadena heiress who had acquired her nickname from reputedly crewing on a banana boat running guns to Mexico, settled the matter. The stocky, profane, cigar-smoking Pancho, clad in riding breeches and leather boots, stomped from room to room with a petition stating that the fliers would refuse to continue the derby unless the first checkpoint was changed
from Calexico to Yuma. The officials agreed.

By the end of the second day Amelia’s hopes for a safe race to prove women were competent pilots had been dashed. She was one of the offenders, crashing at Yuma when her plane struck a pile of sand and nosed over. The accident did cause an unusual reaction from the derby fliers, ordinarily so fiercely competitive. They voted to give Amelia an extra hour and a half of waiting time without penalty for repairs. Later that day she almost cracked up again when she side-slipped and bounced in for a precarious
landing at Phoenix.