Amelia Earhart (42 page)

During the call G. P. asked her if she was the first person to fly from the Red Sea across Arabia to Karachi. She hadn’t thought about it, she said, but she would try to let him know. He didn’t wait. He secured a statement from the air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington who said it was probably the first time the route across the Arabian sea had been negotiated—“a pretty long and difficult one.” This feat did not boost news coverage of the flight. The
New York Times
ran three sentences on her
arrival at Karachi on page 25 with most newspapers following suit.
^‡

She stayed in Karachi for two days with little or no rest in the blistering subcontinental heat. She went to the post office to choose the stamps and supervise the cancellation of the seventy-five hundred covers
she was now carrying. She also took two camel rides, which added interest to her daily travelogue for the
Herald Tribune
, before leaving on June 17 for
Calcutta. During the first part of the flight
across the subcontinent, she found no escape from the heat, not even at fifty-five hundred feet where the temperature was still 90° Fahrenheit. Later there were rainstorms and air currents, which pushed her plane up and down as much as one thousand feet in seconds. At Calcutta there was a
telegram from G. P. assuring her that the Dutch airlines KLM which also used the type of fuel analyzer she did would repair hers there or replace it in Singapore. He also asked her to call in her next story to the
Herald Tribune
.

Amelia’s old friend from Boston and Maine days, Paul Collins, said there was a second telephone call from India that he and Eugene Vidal overheard G. P. take at his Hotel Seymour suite. Collins heard Amelia say, “I’m starting to have
personnel trouble.” When G. P. told her to stop the flight immediately, she said there was “only one bad hop left and I’m pretty sure I can handle the situation.” G. P. did not explain what Amelia meant by “personnel trouble,” but Collins and Vidal assumed that Noonan was drinking.

On June 18 Amelia took off from a water-logged runway at Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport; the Electra barely cleared the trees at the end of the runway. The monsoon rains “beat patches of paint off the edges of the plane’s wings” while she crossed the Bay of Bengal and headed for
Rangoon, Burma, and she had to put down at
Akyab [Sittwe] on the west coast. She tried to reach Rangoon once more that day but failed, an effort Noonan described as “two hours and six minutes of going nowhere.” On June 19 they reached Rangoon and the following day went on to Singapore, where Amelia collected twenty-five dollars for winning a
race with a KLM plane from Rangoon. In Singapore she was told that KLM mechanics would overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, in the Netherlands East Indies [Bandung, Indonesia]. She reached it on the last day of her third week out of Miami, but not without alarming observers who watched her circle the field for fifteen minutes on a clear day, “apparently unable to see the airdrome markers.” She may have panicked the way Mantz claimed she had at Honolulu the previous March, when she shouted at him to pull up and circle the field once more in a frenzy he diagnosed as “extreme pilot fatigue.”

She had flown twenty thousand miles by then in 135 hours. For twenty-one nights she had slept in strange, often primitive accommodations,
w
ithout air-conditioning in a tropical climate. She was always awake by three or four o’clock in the morning, ate very little, and suffered from nausea and diarrhea. She may have realized how near the edge she had pushed herself because she announced that she would remain at
Bandoeng for three days for repairs to the Electra but stayed without too much protest for six except for one abortive start that ended 350 miles later in Soerabaya [Surabaya].
Malfunctioning navigational instruments forced her to return to the KLM base for more repairs. At sundown on June 27, three days after G. P. had hoped she would already be at Howland, she landed at
Koepang [Kupan] on Timor Island, unable to reach Port Darwin [Darwin] Australia before nightfall.

At Koepang, high on a cliff where the grass-covered field was bordered by a stone wall “to keep out the pigs,” Amelia and Noonan, with some help from villagers, turned the Electra around and staked it down for the night. “I will rise at 4
A.M
.,” she wrote, “and would like to reach Lae but fear headwinds will make it imperative to stop at Port Darwin.” It was imperative. She did not reach Port Darwin until ten o’clock on Monday morning, still Sunday night, June 27, in New York. That same day the
Herald Tribune
used G. P.’s announcement that she would make three
radio broadcasts, the first as soon as she arrived in Honolulu, the second from San Francisco, and the third on WABC’s “Radio Theater” on the first Monday after her arrival at Oakland.

From the time she arrived in Darwin it was evident that the flight was the most mismanaged she had ever made, and the most difficult part lay ahead—from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island. This time there was no Bill Miller to take over. Instead management, such as it was, had become a triumvirate: Putnam, Richard Black of the Department of Interior who was G. P.’s representative aboard the Coast Guard cutter
Itasca
, and Cmdr. W. K. Thompson, captain of the
Itasca
. These three, often working at odds with one another, could not provide the help Amelia needed. G. P. worked first through Washington, while he was still in New York, and after June 24, through the Coast Guard’s division command in San Francisco. Black did everything he could to oblige Putnam but with an eye on the interests of his own department, which administered Howland Island. Commander Thompson set up a network of weather information stations for Amelia and tried to confirm radio arrangements
but he had no control over her decisions and clearly thought the
Itasca
deserved more significant duties than looking after a “stunt” flyer.

G. P. sent his messages from the Coast Guard’s radio station in San Francisco to Black on the
Itasca
to be forwarded to Amelia wherever she might be. Even before she reached Darwin he asked Black to make certain that she brought negatives and motion pictures if any were taken of her arrivals and departures at Lae and Howland. Black was also to remind her to file her story directly from Howland to the
Herald Tribune
in Oakland and to get some aerial pictures of Howland.

G. P. wanted her home by the Fourth of July, a Sunday. His first message to her was followed by another Black was asked to forward to Lae:

The last three words were both promise and apology.

He repeated this query the next day, asking again if there was any likelihood she might arrive in Oakland by Monday morning. There was also a request from his Honolulu representative, William Cogswell, to Black for word on whether she would arrive at Luke or Wheeler Field in Honolulu. Cogswell needed to know because G. P. had arranged for her to broadcast immediately after her arrival.

While G. P. pressed Amelia for an early arrival, he also gave erroneous information on her radio equipment to the Department of Interior to pass on to Black on the
Itasca
. Assuming that her five-hundred-kilocycle radio range had been made operative by Pan American in Miami, G. P. said Amelia would broadcast on radio telephone at a quarter to and a quarter after the hour on 6210 daytime and 3105 at night and would also “try 500 close in” (when she was close to her destination). On June 25 he again informed Black that Amelia would broadcast on 500 (no “close in” this time) as well as 3105 and 6210. He added that her DF (direction finder) covered a range of 200 to 1400 kilocycles.

G. P.’s messages were not the only ones handled by the second man in the triumvirate, Black. He also sent and received information from the Coast Guard in San Francisco, the Navy and Army Air Corps in Honolulu,
and the Department of Interior in Washington. In doing so Black proved a constant irritant to the
Itasca
’s captain Commander Thompson.

A by-the-book, seagoing regular Coast Guard officer, Thompson had been ordered to take his ship to Honolulu ahead of its scheduled departure from San Pedro and, once there, to leave immediately for Howland Island “to act as plane guard and furnish weather” to Amelia Earhart. He had also been required to take along four passengers, two reporters, James Carey of Associated Press and H. N. Hanzlick of United Press, an Army Air Corps observer, Lt. Daniel Cooper, and Black. Without consulting Thompson, Black and Cooper borrowed an experimental DF from the Navy to set up on Howland. Thompson let them bring it along but logged an official opinion that the equipment was inadequate and that the Coast Guard did not request and would not receipt it. When Black recruited several additional radiomen from the Navy, Thompson flatly refused to accept them. Eventually he did add one extra radioman second class from the Coast Guard to the ship’s company.

As soon as the
Itasca
left Honolulu, Thompson began to organize a chain of weather reporting and relay stations reaching across the Pacific from the west coast to Australia and New Guinea, employing stations at Honolulu, American Samoa, Christmas and Fanning islands, and two other Coast Guard cutters, the
Ontario
and the
Swan
, also on plane guard for Amelia. Added to this heavy radio traffic were the messages from and to Black, Putnam, the Department of Interior, and the San Francisco Coast Guard. By June 26, before Amelia left Bandoeng, Thompson could endure no more. He demanded that division headquarters give him complete control of communications. He would do his best for Mr. Black, he said, but Coast Guard–Navy procedures would be used with no interference from San Francisco.

Thompson had done what he could to provide Amelia with weather reports although transmission was so slow that the data was never current. For the other part of his mission, to act as plane guard, he needed to know when and how Earhart intended to communicate with the
Itasca
once she left Lae. He had the information G. P. had forwarded and Black’s assurances that Amelia would send her requirements to the
Itasca
, the
Ontario
stationed between Lae and Howland, and the
Swan
midway between Howland and Honolulu. He had also seen the message Black sent to Amelia at Darwin, giving her the
Ontario
’s range as 195 to 600
kilocycles (too low for her without the aerial) and the
Swan
’s (too far away to matter until after she reached Howland).

Suspecting there were too many amateurs providing information, Thompson wanted to hear directly from Amelia. On June 23, the day the
Itasca
reached Howland, he sent her a message requesting she advise him at least twelve hours before she left Lae of her preferred frequencies and communications schedule. He would conform to any frequencies she wanted, he said, and pass the information on to the
Ontario
and
Swan
.

Two days later he received two contradictory messages, the first from San Francisco and the second from Amelia. San Francisco quoted Amelia as saying her DF range was from 200 to 1500 and 2400 to 4800 kilocycles. However the San Francisco command suggested Thompson should try a low range, 333 or 545, because high frequencies for DF were unreliable. The second message from Amelia directly to Thompson stated that she could not give him a definite broadcasting schedule as yet but would probably give a long call by voice on 3105 at a quarter after the hour and “possibly a quarter to.” She asked that the
Ontario
transmit on 400 kilocycles the letter “N” for five minutes with its call letters repeated twice at the end of every minute and that the
Itasca
follow the same procedure using the letter “A” on the half hour at 7500 kilocycles.

What was Thompson to do? With the exception of the
Ontario
, Amelia was asking for high frequencies up to 7500 from
Itasca
. San Francisco requested he use 333 or 545 for her DF and gave her highest range as 4800, yet she asked for 7500. Thompson opted for the message directly from Amelia. She was the pilot. Hers would be the
key message
for him, the one on which he would base his future communications with her. Thompson did not know she had left both her CW or key transmitter and her antennae for receiving 500 kilocycles and below in Miami when he radioed to her that the
Itasca
’s transmitters were calibrated for 7500, 6210, 500 and 425 on CW (of no use to her without the key) and for 3105, 500 and 425 on voice. The last two were out of her range without the antenna, leaving one—3105—on which she could send and receive, not a reliable range at dawn just before the change from nighttime to daytime frequencies. Thompson also informed her that the ship’s DF worked only from 550 down to 270, again too low for her to receive.

While Thompson worried about radio communication and Putnam worried about publicity, Amelia was more concerned about the weather.
She sent daily queries to the
Itasca
and informed the ship that adverse reports kept her from leaving Lae. Impatient to be off, she was delayed from Wednesday, June 30 to Friday, July 2 (Howland time). The weather was not her only worry. In her report to the
Herald Tribune
, she said
Noonan was unable to set his chronometers because of radio difficulties, but in a private message to G. P. she warned that “radio misunderstanding and personnel unfitness probably will hold one day.” “Personnel” had to be Noonan.

In notes she made for her book on the flight she crossed out one line that read, “
I think will have recovered tomorrow,” and left, “perhaps was well did not try to fly today.” Paul Collins said that Amelia called in her report from Lae on June 30 to G. P. at the
Herald Tribune
office. Gene Vidal was with him and told Collins about the call later. Amelia said she was still having “
personnel trouble” but she thought the situation had improved and expected to leave the next day.