“Paul isn’t risking his life.”
“G. P. insists on Fred.”
“G. P. isn’t risking his life, either. Why does G. P. want Noonan?”
“…Because Fred’s…never mind.”
She looked away from me again.
I pressed: “What?”
“I think it’s because Fred’s an…economical choice.”
“Oh, Christ!”
She returned her eyes to mine and her gaze was almost pleading. “Nathan, most of the good navigators are military and they obviously can’t be accessed. Fred Noonan is the man who charted all of Pan Am’s Pacific routes —”
“Didn’t you say Pan Am fired him?”
“Please don’t be cross, Nathan. I didn’t look you up so I could spend the evening wallowing in my problems…”
This was one of those rare times when she seemed near tears.
I gathered her into my arms and kissed her on the forehead. “You mean, you were lookin’ for a good time? Did you find my name scribbled on a phone booth wall?…I’m sorry, Amy. We won’t talk anymore, about any of this.”
She kissed my nose and said, softly, “This is the last flight, Nathan. When I come back, I’m going to have a different life.”
Was she implying I’d be part of it? I was afraid to ask. I preferred to think she was. In my bed that night, city lights filtering through sheer curtains like neon stars, her slender white form had a ghostly beauty as she rode me, cowgirl-style. She seemed lost in the act of lovemaking, just as I was lost in her, and I like to think she found a joy with me, in our sexual flight, that rivaled whatever it was in the sky that drew her there.
When Amy began her around-the-world-at-the-Equator flight, she took steps to keep it from the press, telling reporters on May 21 that she was heading out on a shakedown cruise to Miami, to test the Electra’s special equipment. With Noonan, her mechanic “Bo” McKneely, and her husband, Amy flew to Tucson that afternoon, one of her engines catching fire shortly after landing. She requested an overnight checkup for her ailing plane, knowing that her Electra had a history of malfunction, having flown it in the 1936 Bendix race in which the oil seals leaked and the hatch blew off.
From Tucson she flew the repaired Electra to New Orleans, arriving at 6:00 P.M. Saturday evening at Shushan Airport; checking in at the airport hotel, she and G. P. spent a quiet evening out with Amy’s old friend Toni Lake. All of these tidbits I picked up in the papers, following my friend’s flight long-distance, and even having to work at it somewhat, as the press didn’t seem to care all that much, this time around.
She was strictly an inside-pages phenomenon now, even when at Miami, the next morning, she brought her silver bird in with a shocking thud. She climbed from her cockpit after this “almost” crash landing to be quoted as saying, “I sure smacked it down hard that time!”
The Electra was misbehaving again: faulty shock absorbers, leaking fluid all the way from New Orleans, had caused the hard landing. The oil lines were also leaking, and McKneely led mechanics in an all-out assault on the problems.
On May 29 Amy told the press she would be taking off from Miami Airport, flying east to west on Pan Am’s route through the West Indies and then on down along South America’s east coast. Leaving G. P. and McKneely behind, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan lifted off at 5:56 A.M. on June 1 with five hundred fans in attendance, held back by a line of policemen, her loyal admirers waving and cheering their heroine of the skies.
The papers were less easily impressed. In Chicago the headlines of the next day’s papers belonged to the police riot on the South Side of Chicago in which ten striking Republic Steel workers were killed; and the next day, every front page seemed devoted to Edward of England marrying Baltimore’s Wallis Simpson.
Over the next six days, to modest press attention, the Electra glided over the east coast of Central and South America, with stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico; Caripito, Venezuela; and Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; and—after a ten-hour flight, crossing 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean—touched down at Fortaleza, Brazil, with Natal her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic.
According to the papers, on her overnight stops, she was up at three or four in the morning after no more than five hours of sleep. But the flights themselves, in the noisy plane with its cramped cabin, were the real endurance test: she mostly communicated with navigator Noonan by sending him notes fastened to a pulley line with a clothespin. Otherwise one of them had to climb over the bulky auxiliary fuel tanks between her cockpit and Noonan’s navigation table.
The flight over the Atlantic went well, despite some headwinds and rainstorms, with the Electra’s performance finally on the beam and Noonan providing ace navigation. But when they neared the African coast on June 7, Amy ignored Noonan’s counsel to turn south for Dakar and instead headed north, flying fifty miles along the African coast. When she sighted St.-Louis, almost two hundred miles north of Dakar, she sent back a note to Noonan asking him what had put them north. His response: “You.” She later admitted as much.
They landed at St.-Louis, their revised destination, where barracks-like accommodations, complete with bedbugs and primitive toilet facilities, awaited them. But their first week had been successful: four thousand miles in forty hours.
After a short hop to Dakar, Amy met two days of bad weather; impatient, she switched her destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa, finding a corridor between sandstorms to the north and a tornado to the south, and making the 1,140-mile flight in seven hours and change. The next morning she made the nearly one- thousand-mile trek from Gao over the Sahara Desert to Fort-Lamy in French Equatorial Africa. The heat was so punishing that the Electra could not be refueled until after sunset, as the gasoline might ignite upon touching the hot metal. Then it was on to El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and, on June 14, another twelve hundred miles to Assab on the shores of the Red Sea, stopping for lunch at Khartoum in the Sudan and taking tea at Massawa, Eritrea. She was, at the end of her second week and fifteen thousand miles from Miami, better than halfway to her objective.
