CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
At 5:56 on the morning of June 1 Amelia’s friend Carl Allen watched the silver Electra lift off the runway at Miami Airport. This was to be her last “stunt” flight. “I have a feeling there is just one more flight in my system,” she told him. “… this trip around the world is it.” After that she was going to settle down “for keeps,” to fly only for lecture tours, for research at Purdue, and “for fun.”
Amelia had left the hotel at 3:15 with G. P. in the first car of an entourage. David and Nilla Putnam were in the second, and Noonan in the third, driven by a woman friend. Five hundred of Amelia’s admirers also came to see her off, the light from their cars piercing the darkness on every road leading to the airport. When the Electra was rolled out onto the ramp and the gates of the field opened for the spectators they rushed forward, pushing back a line of policemen for a glimpse of their idol.
Amelia could still attract five hundred people willing to get up in the middle of the night just to see her take off. Newspaper editorials praised her for her courage and “careful planning” even as they claimed the risk outweighed the value of the flight. But banner headlines on June 2 went to a battle between striking steel workers and police in South Chicago in which five died and one hundred were injured, on June 3, to the marriage of Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore to Edward of England. That week Germany and Italy abandoned any pretense of neutrality in the Spanish civil war and Franklin Roosevelt continued his efforts to “pack” the Supreme Court with three additional justices. Amelia’s flight was relegated to short stories on inside pages of most newspapers.
For six days she flew along the eastern coast of Central and South America, stopping at San Juan, Puerto Rico, Caripito, Venezuela, Paramaibo, Dutch Guiana [Surinam],* and Fortazela and Natal in Brazil. She was up most mornings by three or four, averaging five hours of sleep a night. On the longest flight, from Paramaibo to Fortazela, she crossed 1,628 miles of jungle and ocean in ten hours.
At Natal, her last stop before crossing the South Atlantic, she wrote in her log, “Gas fumes in the plane from fueling made me sick again this morning.… Stomach getting weak, I guess.” The plane was noisy, the cabin cramped, and her chief means of communication with Noonan was by notes fastened to a line with a clothespin and passed back on a fishpole that hung along the top of the bulkhead at her right. The alternative was for one or the other of them to climb over the auxiliary fuel tanks that blocked the area from cockpit to the table at which Noonan worked at the rear.
The flight across the Atlantic was the first real test of the Electra and her crew. The plane passed with honors. So did Fred Noonan, whose navigation was very accurate. Amelia did not do as well. When they were near the African coast, she chose to ignore Noonan’s advice to turn south for their destination of Dakar, French West Africa [Senegal]. Instead she turned north flying for 50 miles along the African coast until she sighted St. Louis, 163 miles north of Dakar, then sent a note to Noonan asking “What put us north?” She did. She admitted the error soon after, writing “The fault was entirely mine.”
Navigating by instinct was not her worst mistake. She had already made that in Miami when she dropped the trailing antenna for her DF and the CW (telegraph code key) transmitter. Over the Atlantic she passed two Air France mail planes during the night but could not communicate with either because they were equipped with CW only, a far more dependable system than her MCW (microphone voice transmission).†
Amelia’s neglect of so vital an element as telegraph-radio originated in her own nature and past experiences. In spite of her denials she was a romantic about flight. It was a near-transcendent experience for her and she instinctively avoided the communication that broke her isolation from the earthbound and mundane. As a student she was intelligent but impatient, reluctant to record the steps by which she arrived at an answer. Learning telegraphic code was dull, time-consuming work—the kind she avoided whenever possible. She also lacked the time. Joseph Gurr, the radio expert who worked on the Electra’s system before and after the aborted March flight, said, “I finally got her into the airplane on the ramp at Paul Mantz’s.… We had barely covered the preliminaries when Amelia had to leave. She was hard to pin down because she was obviously in demand in other places.” On her 1935 flight from Hawaii to Oakland, she had used the radio to listen to music from the West Coast, to talk with G. P. and to report the weather, but not to give her position. Without a position report the crews of four Coast Guard cutters one hundred miles out from San Francisco to escort her home could not find her and had to return to port without making contact.
Amelia reached St. Louis on the African coast on June 7, after thirteen hours and twenty-two minutes fighting off recurrent nausea while bucking rainstorms and headwinds, and nursing the Electra’s two engines, which she was reluctant to “open up” for fear of damaging them. She spent that night at the airfield in a barracks-like room where she discovered “a couple of bugs” in her bed and kept the light on all night “thinking the creatures might not venture out under the glare.” The toilet facilities she described as “execrable.”
Nevertheless that first week was a good one. She had flown more than forty hours for four thousand miles. Added to the official start from Oakland, she had completed one fourth of her journey. Although the story of her flight was relegated to the back pages of most newspapers, on June 8 she was the subject of Eleanor Roosevelt’s widely read syndicated column, “My Day.” The president’s wife wrote that she was relieved to hear that her friend Amelia Earhart was safe in Africa. “All day I have been thinking about Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic,” she wrote, adding that she would be glad when the entire trip was over because she was much more interested in Amelia as a person than as a recordbreaking pilot.
After a short flight the next day to Dakar, Amelia was held up for two days by bad weather. Too impatient to wait any longer, on June 10 she changed her next destination from Fort Niamey to Gao in French West Africa [Mali]. She would try to “squeeze between” a tornado to the south and sandstorms to the north. She succeeded, flying eleven hundred forty miles in under eight hours. The next day she flew almost one thousand miles, from Gao over the Sahara to Fort Lamy, now N’Djamena in French Equatorial Africa [Chad], where it was so hot the plane could not be refueled until after sunset for fear of gasoline igniting on hot metal. She left early the following morning for El Fasher in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan [Sudan] and “pressed on” the day after, June 14, to Assab, present-day Aseb, Ethiopia on the shores of the Red Sea. It was a twelve-hundred-mile flight, a “long day” in which she had lunch and wrote a dispatch at Khartoum in the Sudan and had tea at Massawa, Eritrea [Mits’iwa, Ethiopia]. In two weeks she had flown fifteen thousand miles from Miami and was more than halfway to her goal.
On June 15 she crossed the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea to Karachi, Pakistan (then part of British India), almost two thousand miles in thirteen hours and twenty minutes. The trip was without incident except for a broken fuel analyzer. Jacques de Sibour met her at Karachi and G. P. called that night from the Herald Tribune office in New York where their conversation was recorded for a story. He was already pressing her to give him a possible ETA for Howland Island, but she put him off with a promise to give him one at her next stop, Calcutta.
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, without 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:
FLIGHT CONTINGENCIES PERMITTING IS ARRIVAL SATURDAY LATELY [sic] SUNDAY EITHER PERFECT STOP CONFIDENTIAL WANT YOU TO KNOW VERY IMPORTANT RADIO COMMITMENT MONDAY NIGHT NOTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER.
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 theHerald 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.
On their first night in Lae, Amelia had dined with a local couple, the Eric Chaters, and Fred spent the evening at the hotel with J. A. Collopy, the District Superintendent of Civil Aviation for the Territory of New Guinea. Collopy said he and Noonan “forgot to eat” and were up rather late, long after Amelia retired. When Noonan was escorted to his room by Collopy he failed to see the mosquito netting tucked under the mattress and threw himself onto the bed causing “a very loud noise which awakened the whole place including Amelia.” However, Collopy said, on the night before takeoff, both Noonan and Amelia, who had spent most of her time at the hangar or in her room resting, went to bed early. Noonan told Collopy that he had had some differences with Amelia during the trip but the district superintendent thought none seemed of any consequence and neither Noonan nor Earhart appeared unduly worried about the flight to Howland. They should have been. Although Amelia told Carl Allen that Howland was so small “every aid to locating it must be available,” every aid was not.
Even if Noonan was not drinking he faced a formidable task in locating a sand bar in the mid-Pacific that was two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, with a maximum elevation of twenty-five feet. His chronometers had given him trouble both in Indonesia and again at Lae. His gyroscope, like most at that time, did not always hold a true course when subject to vibration. He would need star sights for celestial navigation but the latest meteorological reports cited headwinds of twenty to thirty knots with rain squalls and overcast skies for most of the way. The government charts on which Clarence Williams relied for Amelia’s course were inaccurate, placing Howland seven miles northwest of its actual location.
Amelia must have been far more worried than Collopy thought. She invited Harry Balfour, the New Guinea Airways radio operator at Lae, to accompany her and Noonan to Howland either because she wanted someone to watch Noonan or because she realized how inadequate her radio skills were and how desperately they might be needed. She was in a hurry. The weather reports were far from promising but G. P. was pressing for her return and she was eager to put this most difficult leg of the entire journey behind her. The Electra would require a full load of fuel, more than one thousand gallons, for the 2,556-mile flight but she had to take off from a one-thousand-foot-long dirt runway. Once airborne, she needed to calculate her fuel consumption with great accuracy but the Cambridge fuel analyzer had already malfunctioned in India and again in Indonesia. Taking precedence over all these problems was her own exhaustion. Since Miami she had flown on twenty-one of thirty days, on three of those days for more than thirteen hours, and on another seven of them, for more than seven hours. Her previous long-distance flights had been a matter of hours, not weeks. She was never physically strong, only determined. This time her once slim body was emaciated, skin over bones. But if pride and willpower could not get her to Howland, they could not permit her to turn back.
At 10:22 on the morning of July 2 at Lae, the heavily laden Electra lumbered down the crude runway for a “hair-raising” takeoff, earthbound until the last fifty yards. The propellers were so close to the ground their turbulence raised clouds of red dust. For a moment the silver plane was lost to view, disappearing behind the dropoff at the end of the runway. When it reappeared, it was no more than five or six feet above the water of the bay, rising slowly to one hundred feet before it vanished into the morning mist.
For the next seven hours, Lae radioman Harry Balfour was in touch with Amelia. She was on course and 750 miles out when he advised her to maintain the same radio frequency because he was still receiving her clearly. Whether she did or not, he lost her soon after. No one heard from her again until after midnight on Howland. She should have passed over the Ontario where three men kept visual watch and the radio operator stood by but they neither saw nor heard her. The weather had been good in that area until nightfall but after midnight there was a severe squall, lasting until dawn. It might have slowed Amelia down considerably or required a dangerous amount of fuel to outmaneuver.
Not until the early hours of July 2 in the United States did others who waited for news hear that she had left Lae. G. P. was at the Coast Guard radio in San Francisco. Amy was at the North Hollywood house with Amelia’s secretary, Margot DeCarie. Muriel was in Medford, where she had mailed a letter to her mother the day before saying she hoped to “get some broadcasting” fees for radio interviews about her sister, money to be paid on an overdue S.S. Pierce bill. Amelia’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt, who had already declared how relieved she would be when the flight was over, was at Hyde Park for the long July Fourth weekend after the marriage of Franklin, Jr., and Ethel DuPont on June 30. They all waited but there was no more news.
Aboard the Itasca Commander Thompson was worried. He did not even know when she left Lae until San Francisco radioed him two reports, the first of which gave the wrong time. She had not acknowledged any of the weather reports the Itasca sent on the hour and half hour starting at midnight. At 2:45 A.M. chief radioman Leo G. Bellarts heard her, along with the two wire-service reporters, Carey and Hanzlick, who recognized her voice.
At 3: 45 they heard her again. This time so did Black and Lt. Cooper, standing with Hanzlick and Carey in the doorway of the radio shack, which was off-limits to unauthorized personnel. Her voice was muffled, the delivery abrupt but they heard “Earhart. Overcast. Will listen on 3105 kilocycle on hour and half hour.”
On schedule at 4 A.M., the Itasca called her on 3105 asking, “What is your position? When do you expect to arrive Howland? Please acknowledge this message on your next schedule.”
She did not.
At 4: 53 A.M., while the Itasca was sending her the weather in code and voice on 3015, Amelia broke in, off her schedule, with a garbled message at a volume of S-1, the lowest grade of five, too faint to discern anything except, “partly cloudy,” before she was drowned out by static.
Thirty minutes later, Lt. Cooper and radioman Frank Cipriani went ashore to Howland to man the high-frequency radio borrowed from the Navy and powered by gun batteries from the ship.
At 6: 14 A.M. Amelia came in again on schedule, fifteen minutes before she was due at Howland, according to Noonan’s ETA. The volume had increased to S-3. “Want bearing on 3105 kilocycles on hour,” Amelia said. “Will whistle in microphone.” Her whistle was difficult to distinguish from the whining sounds of Pacific radio reception at dawn. Cipriani could not get a “fix” on her.
At 6: 45, fifteen minutes past Noonan’s ETA, Amelia came in at S-4. “Please take bearing on us and report in a half hour. I will make noise in microphone. About one hundred miles out.” Her voice was clear but the message too brief to take a bearing on her.
Answering her request for a bearing in a half hour the Itasca broke its own schedule and broadcast to her by voice on 3105 at 7: 18, “Cannot take bearing on 3105 very good. Please send on 500 or do you wish to take bearing on us?”
There was no answer.
At 7: 42 she came in at S-5, her delivery much as Paul Mantz once described it, “a quick drawl like from a rain barrel.”
“We must be on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable reach you by radio. We are flying at altitude one thousand feet.” A second radioman’s log, claiming she said “Only one-half hour gas left,” was verified by other witnesses.
The Itasca’s operators immediately began transmitting on both 3105 and 500 assuring her that they heard her and asking her to acknowledge. A minute later she came in again, “Earhart calling Itasca. We are circling but cannot hear you. Go ahead on 7500 either now or on the schedule time on half hour.” Her voice registered a loud S-5.
At eight o’clock Amelia acknowledged the Itasca for the first time, again at S-5 volume. “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We received your signals but unable to get a minimum [a bearing]. Please take bearing on us and answer on 3105 with voice.”
The Itasca’s answer was that it could not take a bearing on 3105 because its DF worked only up to 500 kilocycles. The operator on Howland heard her on the Navy high frequency DF at 3105 but again, her transmission was too brief to get a bearing. From 8: 07 to 8: 41 the ship’s operators transmitted and listened on all wavelengths including 7500 because it was the only one on which she had acknowledged having heard the Itasca, just before eight o’clock.
Apprehensive about the flight from the beginning, Commander Thompson now knew he faced a real emergency. Not once in her messages had Amelia given him her position, her course, her speed, or her ETA. She was past the ETA Noonan had sent from Lae, and the half-hour of gas she mentioned at 7:42 would have been exhausted. On Howland, Cipriani could not get a bearing on her because her messages were too brief and by this time he had exhausted the gun batteries on which he operated the high frequency DF.
At 8:44 Amelia’s voice—shrill and breathless, her words tumbling over one another—came in at S-5 on 3105 kilocycles. “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.”
The Itasca responded immediately, continuing to transmit by voice and key and to listen on every frequency she might use. There was no answer. Twenty-three days before her fortieth birthday Amelia Earhart’s last flight was finished. The death that she called part of her “high risk” profession must have come as she wished. “When I go,” she said, “I would like to go in my plane. Quickly.”
Over the nine years spanning her first and last transoceanic flights, Amelia Earhart became one of the most famous women in the world. The private Amelia disliked that fame intensely. But the public Amelia played on it relentlessly as a platform on which to fight for her ideals of equality for women, international peace, and a world where flying would be a commonplace, acceptable and accessible to all. She lived—and died—in dogged pursuit of her vision, and by so doing brought it ever closer to reality.
* For countries whose names have changed since 1937, current country names are designated in brackets.
† Anne Lindbergh thought the CW transmission and reception so important that by 1931 she had a license and could send and receive an acceptable seventeen words per minute.
‡ That same day Amelia’s name appeared in a story she would have liked. Equal Rights magazine’s lead editorial called her an “ardent feminist” who had set off to make aviation history circling the globe and who deserved credit for her well-articulated views on women’s rights.