Flying Blind

The next day she crossed the Red Sea, then the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan. Here she stayed for two unpleasant days in the unremitting desert heat, taking two camel rides, and the time to stop at the post office to choose stamps and supervise the cancellation of the 7,500 first-day covers in her keeping. On June 17 she and Noonan headed for Calcutta, but even in the air, no relief from the blistering heat could be found: at fifty-five hundred feet, the temperature was a brutal ninety degrees. Finally the heat let up, and rainstorms took over, including air currents that sent the Electra up and down at a rate of one thousand feet in seconds.

When she took off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport on June 18, the Electra struggled off a water-soaked runway, barely clearing the trees, and monsoon rains accompanied them over the Bay of Bengal on the way to Rangoon, Burma. She didn’t make it to Rangoon, settling on Akyab, but on June 19, they reached their destination, where they took in the Golden Pagoda, taking off the next day for Singapore. Word awaited her that mechanics would be on hand to overhaul her plane at Bandoeng, Java, which she made on the last day of her third week out. Her landing was an unsteady one, however, and she undoubtedly was suffering from what Paul Mantz later described as “extreme pilot fatigue.”

She had, after all, flown in 135 hours an amazing twenty thousand miles. She had slept in unfamiliar, sometimes primitive, even bizarre, surroundings; she had eaten little, slept less, and suffered from heat exhaustion, diarrhea, and nausea.

Three days of scheduled repairs for the Electra turned into six, and it wasn’t until June 27—suddenly behind schedule, playing hell with G. P. Putnam’s plans to have her back by the Fourth of July for some grand press attention—that she and Noonan landed at Koepang on Timor Island, having given up on reaching Port Darwin, Australia, before nightfall. High on a cliff, Amy and Noonan and some villagers staked down the Electra on the grass-covered field, bordered by a stone wall designed to keep out wild pigs. She rose at 4:00 A.M., hoping to reach Lae, but was forced by headwinds to settle for Port Darwin, where she set down at 10:00 A.M. Some minor repairs were made, and—after a seven-hour-and-forty-three-minute and twelve-hundred-mile journey—the Electra reached Lae, Papua New Guinea, on June 29.

Weather and instrument problems delayed takeoff till Friday, July 2, when at 10:22 A.M., the Electra—carrying more than one thousand gallons of fuel, as well as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan—wheeled lumberingly down a crude dirt runway a mere one thousand feet long. A 2,556-mile flight lay ahead, with navigator Noonan responsible for pinpointing tiny Howland Island somewhere in the mid-Pacific.

At the end of the runway was a cliff, a dropoff into Huon Gulf, and—providing spectators with a literal cliff- hanger—the Electra’s wheels stayed on the dirt runway until the final fifty yards, her propellers churning up puffs of red dust. No wind to help liftoff on this hot, clear morning. Spectators said it was as if the plane had jumped into the ocean, committing suicide; and indeed it did seem to fall off the runway, dropping behind the edge of the cliff.

When it reappeared, the Electra seemed to ride the gulf, no more than five or six feet above the surface, props throwing spray. It took a long time, the spectators said, for that plane to finally rise from the ocean’s surface into the sky, but at last it did. And on this clear morning, the Electra stayed visible for a long, long time.

Then, finally, it disappeared.

For the first seven hours of her flight, Amy stayed in contact with a radioman on Lae. On course, 750 miles out, still clearly heard, she was advised to maintain the same radio frequency until further notice. But that was the last she was heard on Lae.

The U.S.S. frigate Ontario, midway between Lae and Howland in the Pacific, waited to provide navigation and weather updates; the Electra should have passed over the ship where three sailors kept watch and a radio operator stood by. No sign of her. Of course, the good weather had turned bad after midnight, a nasty squall kicking in and holding on till dawn. This might have slowed Amy down and/or caused her to use up a considerable amount of fuel, outmaneuvering the storm, and unintentionally escaping the Ontario’s sight.

The Coast Guard cutter Itasca lay anchored just off Howland Island, assigned to help Amelia Earhart with radio direction signals, voice communication, and surface smoke. But starting at midnight, Itasca’s radio room had sent weather reports on the hour and half-hour, and Amy had not acknowledged any of them.

Then at 2:45 A.M., the chief radioman—with two wire service reporters, eavesdropping at the off-limits radio room doorway—thought he recognized her voice; so did the reporters, and at 3:45 they heard her again, more clearly now, saying, “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycles on hour and half-hour.” So at 4:00 A.M., the radio operator called on 3105, asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge.”

But she didn’t, though at 4:53 A.M., as the operator was issuing a weather update on 3105, Amy interrupted with a faint, muffled, garbled message, with only “partly cloudy” discernible amidst static.

Fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, at 6:14 A.M., Amy’s voice could be heard saying: “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour. Will whistle in microphone.” But her whistle got lost in the harmonic whines of Pacific radio reception at dawn, and the operator couldn’t get a fix on her.

At 7:42 Amy’s voice, stronger, said, “We must be on you but cannot see you…gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. Flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A minute later, interrupting Itasca’s frantic transmissions, Amy’s voice, louder yet, chimed: “Earhart calling Itasca. We are circling but cannot hear you….”

The radio operator on the Itasca sent messages by voice and key and listened on every frequency that Amy might use. Her final transmission, at 8:44, was shrill and frightened: “We are on the line of position 156-137. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”

With no frame of reference, her “position 156-137” and “running north and south” were meaningless. Until 10:00 A.M., the radio operator continued trying to make contact.

At 10:15 A.M., the commander of the Itasca ordered full steam, beginning a desperate search at sea, soon to be joined by the minesweeper Swan, the battleship Colorado, the aircraft carrier Lexington, and four destroyers in a sweeping mass rescue effort the likes of which had never before been expended on a single missing aircraft.

Amelia Earhart was back in the headlines.

9

I was drawn into the matter of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance well before she got around to disappearing.

Midafternoon on Friday, May 21, in my office, in my swivel chair with my back to the uninspiring view of the El and Van Buren Street, a warm, barely discernible breeze drifting in the open window, I sat hunkered with a fountain