CHAPTER EIGHT
By January of 1929 Amelia Earhart had become the best-known woman pilot in America. G. P. had made her famous but she never forgot that she had been nothing more than a passenger on the Friendship. Amelia wanted to fly—to go faster, higher, or farther than any woman (and if possible, any man) had ever gone before. She needed a plane designed to do it—a big powerful aircraft. Her choice was the Lockheed Vega. It took her six months to get it but a week before her thirty-second birthday she owned one.
During the first half of that year she made paid public appearances in twelve cities. Whatever her fees for these visits, she certainly earned them. For a typical one in Rochester, New York, in January her schedule included breakfast with the committee meeting the train at eight o’clock; an inspection of the airport and two airplane plants before noon; a luncheon and speech for the Advertising Club; a trip to nearby LeRoy, New York, where Donald W. Woodward who had purchased the Friendship had put the plane on display; tea with a LeRoy couple and dinner with members of the Rochester Automobile Dealers Association. Her speech at dinner was followed by an auto show at which she was cornered by a pushing, shoving crowd until she was rescued by two policemen and four association members who escorted her from the building. She returned to New York on the ten o’clock train after fourteen hours of continuous public scrutiny.
Her lectures were a great success, although her audiences were more interested in her than in what she said. Amelia was the message. If anyone came expecting a coarse or odd person, perhaps even a lesbian (what sort of woman would challenge an ocean and suggest that other women become aviators?), they were disappointed. A woman who saw her in Detroit remembered her fifty years later as “a slender figure in grey chiffon with coral beads. Her smile and her gracious femininity were unforgettable, but what she said I don’t recall.”
Although audiences were more impressed by her presence than her message, Amelia was soon expounding her beliefs in the future of aviation, including jobs for women, mechanical training for girls as well as boys, world peace, and social and economic justice for everyone.
She continued to deny she was a feminist but insisted women had been handicapped as pilots by their lack of training, which men were given in the armed forces. “Not,” she added, “that I am advocating our entrance into the army.” She resented the lack of cost-free training but her pacifist convictions were as strong as ever. Before accepting an offer to speak to the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs in April, she wrote to an NAA official asking that he check a rumor that one of the speakers was going to give an anti-pacifist address. He answered that the woman objected only to claims that the airplane was a deadly weapon, intended to incite hostilities. He also reminded Amelia that she would be speaking in support of civil aviation to the representatives of one hundred thousand women. She spoke.
Amelia’s enthusiastic advocacy brought her a job offer from transportation czar Clement M. Keyes. Keyes, who was creating a transcontinental air-mail service with the Pennsylvania and Santa Fe railroads, hired Amelia as assistant to the general traffic manager of the new line. He also hired Lindbergh as chief technical adviser and began to refer to his newly created Transcontinental Air Transport as “the Lindbergh line.” Amelia’s job was to promote flying on TAT to women who were afraid to fly and discouraged their husbands from doing so. It was ideal for her. Headquarters were in New York, travel with the line was free, and she could continue to lecture and write, using the material she gathered along the way. Lindbergh and Amelia shared the spotlight during inaugural ceremonies on July 7—he in Glendale, California, and she in New York City, where she commissioned the TAT’s flagship, the City of New York, then boarded the train with the passengers for TAT’s first flight west.
The trip, which cost as much as one on the Concorde does now, was not an easy one. Because night travel by air was still very dangerous, the travelers were taken by train from New York to Columbus, Ohio, before boarding their first plane the next morning. The aircraft stopped at Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers again took a night train, this time to Clovis, New Mexico. On the second morning of their journey, they boarded a second plane at Clovis, which stopped at Albuquerque, Winslow, and Kingman, Arizona, and finally, forty-nine hours later, at Glendale. The west-to-east flight followed this itinerary in reverse.
Lindbergh flew the first TAT plane east from Glendale as far as Winslow. At Winslow, he and his bride of six weeks, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, waited for Amelia’s plane to arrive. From there the Lindberghs accompanied Amelia back to Glendale. Anne met Amelia for the first time in Winslow. Ten years Amelia’s junior, the daughter of the ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, and the wife of the most famous man in America, Anne Lindbergh was even more reserved than Amelia and far more distressed by the relentless pursuit of newsmen and curious crowds. Anne liked Amelia. In a letter to her parents a few days later, when all three were houseguests of one of the future founders of TWA, Jack Maddux, she wrote that Amelia was “very likeable and very intelligent and nice and amusing.”
Amelia was an enthusiastic, sometimes brazen salesperson for the new line. She told the crowd that met the plane at Glendale that transcontinental travel had become “a matter of a weekend.” Four days later, she invited the mayor of Los Angeles to take an airplane ride with her. When he declined, she asked if his wife would like to ride. He replied that his wife was in bed as the result of an automobile accident. Amelia suggested that if his wife had ridden in a plane she might not have been injured. The mayor must have been annoyed but the press gave Amelia more free publicity for TAT.
Amelia’s boss, traffic manager H. B. Clement, said that her job was to advise the line on comforts for women traveling by air, a task that required “the mind of a woman.” The feminist who loathed the concept of “the mind of a woman” and who longed to see “the sex line washed out of aviation” was working for a blatantly sexist organization. Why? Too many years of near poverty? An aging mother in need of additional support? No other jobs in aviation? The chance to become a colleague of the men who financed, built, and flew the best airplanes in the world? Amelia did it for all these reasons and one more—the money to buy a battered, secondhand Lockheed Vega. The plane was in the hangar of Air Associates, Incorporated, the eastern distributors for Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. With its two-hundred-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine, the Lockheed Vega was built for speed and distance and considered a difficult plane to handle. But during the previous six months, Amelia had been preparing for this as best she could.
In February of 1929 she took lessons in a Ford trimotor at Newark Municipal Airport from Colonial Transport pilot Edward Weatherdon. On March 3 she nosed over her Avian on a muddy field in New York, but just five days later she took and passed her tests for a commercial transport license in Brownsville, Texas. At least one reporter filed a story on the accident in New York, but none noticed what she did in Brownsville. That day all eyes were on Lindbergh, who was making an inaugural flight from Mexico City through Brownsville to New York. When thirty thousand fans stormed fences and broke through police lines, Lindbergh refused to leave his plane or to permit his passengers to do so until the crowd backed off. Eventually, his face flushed with anger, he was taken from the plane to a waiting car. It was not surprising that the only notice taken of Amelia was by one reporter who wrote that “she took a few flights around the field.”
On March 27, the Aviation Bureau of the Department of Commerce wired her that her papers from the Brownsville examiner had not been received but that she had passed all tests. Her license was issued the next day. The number was 5716. Amelia became thefourth woman to hold a transport license after Phoebe Omlie, Ruth Nichols, and Lady Mary Heath.
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 LieutenantStephens 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.
* A week later Stephens was killed in a crash near Clovis, New Mexico. The thirty-eight-year-old Army man was flying a new plane he planned to use in the National Air Races at Cleveland when the vent for his cockpit blew off. While he was looking for it, he banked, went into a side-slip, and crashed.
† On display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.