Jr. Paul L. Briand

“ For Amelia, it was now a grim, dogged, and stubborn refusal to be overcome. As long as the Wasp engine kept firing, she would fly her plane. The last hours became the worst of the flight.
Toward dawn the exhaust manifold began to vibrate badly. Then the stinging odor of gasoline filled the cockpit. The gasoline gauges of the reserve wing tanks leaked drops of fuel on the floor by her feet. Her eyes and nostrils smarted from the strong smell. From about her neck Amelia brought her kerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears. ”

“ Then more clouds grew and thickened about the plane. The Vega started to buffet, then to buck like an unbroken horse. Rain pinged and splattered against the metal wings and fuselage, hit and spread like gravel against the windshield, and streamed across the width and off the trailing edges of the wings. Whips of lightning cracked across the nose of the plane.
Amelia set her jaw hard and flew the plane by the needle and ball. She hoped the driving downdrafts of the storm were not nosing her too far down to the water. She could only trust to luck. For an hour she fought the plane through. ”

“ During the voyage Wilmer Stultz behaved erratically. Although the flight was accomplished through his skill as a pilot, and he was $20,000 richer because of it, he nevertheless sank into deep melancholy. To deaden the long days of the ocean trip, he had brought a case of brandy with him aboard the ship. With the liquor he found what he craved: an escape from mundane realities; in neat water tumblerfuls he finished off one bottle after another. ”

“ Every woman’s goal at the time was the slender, boyish figure, the flattened breasts, the close-cropped boyish bob, the long, youthful waist. In Amelia every woman found her image, cleanly liberated in the speed of solo record-breaking flight. ”

“ Fred had crawled over the catwalk back to the navigation room.
Amelia locked in the Sperry automatic pilot, then from a brief case took out her logbook—a secretary’s dictation pad. She jotted down fleeting impressions: “... little rocks and reefs just poke their heads above the water. So few lighthouses in this mess ... trees in black silhouette against the burnished sun path.... The shadows of clouds (white clouds in the blue sky) are like giant flowers, dark on the green sea ... curtains of rain clouds aloft....”
Layers of cumulus clouds built up and sandwiched the Electra between them. ”

“ After her solo flight, Amelia could count enough awards and decorations to fill a display cabinet, but she cherished one above all. In tribute to her accomplishment the Congress of the United States presented her with the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Not content to rest on her Atlantic laurels, AE now turned to more challenges, some in the air and some on the ground. The Pacific Ocean, Mexico and its gulf, the transcontinental speed record: each in turn presented the unexpected in life that could indeed become the inevitable. ”

“ Cars began to gather almost at once; men and women came running to the scene of her emergency landing. The men, Amelia felt, she could handle in such a situation; but the women, with their shaking heads and fluttering moments of undue concern, she dreaded.
The plane had to be towed back to Pecos, where new engine parts could be ordered from El Paso. Slowly, at a mere ten miles an hour, the Avro retraced its course, cruelly on the ground, back to the Texas city of its morning take-off. It was late and dark that night before the plane was parked behind a garage, there to await repairs. ”

“ Over Central India aids to contact flying became a surfeit of plenty: well-mapped railroads, rivers, and mountains were easily identified. By such landmarks her way was made easy.
But it was not so in the air. Large black eagles dived out of181 the sky toward the Electra. They soared and swung and spun about the plane, giving Amelia many moments of fretful anxiety. If they flew into the propellers, they would be chopped into bird-and-feather burger which could choke off the Wasp engines. That she missed them was a miracle of purblind fate and wide-eyed flying. ”

“ Amelia fixed her good right eye on a patch of the pasture, swung a wing up in a steep turn, and eased the plane into the final approach. Reducing the throttle, she brought the stick back slowly, held the nose up, and dropped the tail skid then the wheels onto the ground. The plane clattered to a stop.
Cowboys and villagers sprang up as if out of nowhere and rushed to the plane. They were not at all surprised at seeing a woman pilot, at this time of the night, at such an unlikely place. ”

“ Soon after the Friendship flight AE realized that she needed a man to protect her, to help her continue as the symbol that she was. GP was the man to clear the way for her, to find the money, to stand beside her in the press of circumstance, to support her in every venture. Although many men could fill such requirements in a husband, Amelia felt that she could find happiness, if it were possible to find it with anybody, only with George Putnam. ”

“ During the take-off run she had forced the Vega to stay on the mud flats until it developed a speed well over a hundred miles an hour; then it flew into the air by itself.
Amelia watched the altimeter until it indicated 10 on the dial, then she leveled off. She skimmed over the mountains surrounding the valley in which Mexico City lay. Together valley and mountains formed a large saucer and rim. Behind her Popocatepetl and Ixracihuatl mountains loomed; they seemed mighty, proud, majestic with their white-peaked crowns of snow. The rising sun flung its warmth over the dappled earth. ”

“ South America, the second of five continents to be flown over, was a complex of densely timbered mountains, valleys of open plains, and thickly tangled jungle. Amelia, looking at her first jungle, shuddered at the thought of the Electra having to make a forced landing—“the getting away would be worse than the getting down.”
Fortunately, Fred had flown the region many times before. He would get them through. Such were the advantages of flying the Pan American route with a former Pan American navigator. ”

“ The thirteenth of June, like any other day on the schedule, was marked for a flight, this one into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Khartoum.
The land flown over was for Amelia the bleakest and most desolate in all of Africa. There were no rivers, no native villages, not even one identifying contour line on the map. As far as Amelia could stretch her hand over the course line there was blank space beneath.
Unable to fly by contact, she locked in the auto pilot and studied the romantic-sounding names on the map. ”

“ She looked down from 300 feet. Trees and ground were speeding by; everything was getting smaller as the plane climbed into the sky. The automobiles on Wilshire Boulevard looked like black bugs, the houses like toys.
The plane leveled off. “Two thousand feet,” Hawks shouted from the back seat. Amelia looked over the side of the cockpit. The oil derricks on the edge of the city were directly below; farther out, the Hollywood hills and the ocean.
Hawks nosed the plane into a steep glide, then tipped up the wing into a turn. The wind whistled over the wings and through the struts and cross wires. ”

“ Not unlike an anxious woman who has been left behind, George waited for Amelia to finish her new adventure in the air. He worried about her. She had already sustained one accident in Texas, and had complained about the accounts of it in the press as much as any righteously indignant male.
“A fatal accident to a woman pilot,” she wrote, “is not a greater disaster than one to a man of equal worth. ”

“ Frequently passengers were grounded by the weather and had to be turned over to the railroads.
Amelia soon fidgeted with an unrest to try something else. The right to fly at no cost on the air line was too expensive for her energies when she had to pay for the privilege with so many irritations on the ground. If she could fly and earn money at the same time, she could then build up her hours in the air and yet realize enough funds, finally, to back her contemplated solo across the Atlantic. The dual opportunity came in the form of the newest experiment in aviation, the autogiro. ”

“ The cockpit became hot and stuffy, and Amelia opened the windshield for a breath of outside air.
According to the pattern of early take-offs and landings for the African hops, it was just before noon when they approached Fort-Lamy for a stopover. The sun was high; its rays direct and glaring. As she came in on a long glide for the touchdown, Amelia held the throttles more forward than was usual: she needed a faster landing speed to compensate for the thin, hot air with its weak lifting power on the wings. ”

“ A man came running out from the cottage. When he reached the plane, breathless, Amelia said to him, “I’m from America.”
It took awhile for the farmer to understand: a woman, from America, flying the Atlantic, all alone? He shook his head in disbelief.
As they walked to his cottage, Amelia learned that she had landed in Culmore, Ulster, near Londonderry, the city she had circled. There was no mistaking that she was in Ireland: the accent of the farmer, and his name, Patrick Gallagher, were sufficient proof. Amelia asked to be taken to the nearest telephone. ”

“ For millions of people in America, however, Amelia’s solo flight across the Atlantic was not a display of “useless courage,” nor was it a “tremendous trifle.” Here was a feminine successor to the long list of heroes whom Americans had idolized and adored. Amelia took her place with Lindbergh in aviation, in the glittering gallery that included Bobby Jones in golf, Babe Ruth in baseball, Bill Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing. In an age of heroes, a heroine was most welcome. ”

“ On Sunday morning, June 27, Amelia and Fred left Bandung, hoping again to reach Australia. But what had been the conspiracy of instruments now became the conspiracy of time. For every fifteen degrees of longitude crossed, they would lose one hour; and the day would grow shorter the longer and farther they flew east.
For this reason they had to land, after only five hours of flying, at Koepang, on the island of Timor. The flight from Java to Timor had been for Amelia an experience in extremes, as the lush tropics became arid wastes—and rich abundance, monastic sparsity. ”

“ The Electra rolled swiftly over the ground. Gently Amelia touched the brakes until her plane came to a stop. Hoping for cooler air, she slid back the cockpit hatch. The inside of the plane was like an oven turned up to broil, but the hot outside air only added more heat to it. Quickly she taxied the plane and parked it. The bright metal wings sizzled in the sun; AE climbed out of the cockpit, skipped on tiptoe over the hot metal, and jumped to the ground. Fred swung open the door of the fuselage and climbed out. ”

“ Amelia said, “may add immeasurably to the happiness of those concerned. The individual independence of dollars and cents tends to keep a healthy balance of power in the kingdom of the home. If one’s time is worth more at specialized tasks—writing, flying, interior decorating, what have you—it is good sense to put in one’s hours at such work rather than cooking, cleaning, and mending. Assistants more skilled than myself can be employed to substitute in the housewife role without robbing a marriage of its essence. ”

“ She spent the rest of the day with Lady Astor discussing Denison House in Boston and its model in London, Toynbee Hall.
Inevitably, like all visitors to London, Amelia watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; then, later, she saw a Tattoo at Aldershot, where RAF fliers performed in the air while the soldiers went through their maneuvers on the ground. Amelia wished she were in one of the planes, with the men in the sky. At a flying exhibition she would much rather be a performer than a spectator. ”

“ Her destiny, she knew, lay in the air; but she would have to continue getting more and more flying time before she could finally break the ties with mundane pursuits. Working for an air line at least offered chances to fly, even if it meant paying for the privilege by trying to sell aviation to stubborn women.
Mothers and wives, Amelia was to complain later, were the great stumbling blocks in her attempt to convince the American public that flying was safe. It seemed that sons and daughters and husbands were willing to take to the air, but a matriarchal opposition barred the way. ”

“ If the pilot had been a man, nothing would have been said about it, especially if he had walked away from his plane unharmed. Amelia folded the paper and slapped it against her leg. Why couldn’t they leave her alone? All this emotionalism about women fliers, as if a female neck were more important than a male neck.
Amelia went to the phone and called New York. Another plane, twin sister to the Avian, would be ferried in, so that parts from it could be used to repair her plane. The following day four mechanics worked around the clock for a day and a half until the Avian was repaired. ”

“ Flying at an altitude of 8,000 feet, she could see the blue of the Arabian Sea and the abomination of desolation which was the shore. Beyond the coastal mountains stretched the bare and endless sands of the desert. Of all places to make an emergency landing, Amelia thought, this was the worst. She reached into the cubbyhole to the right and behind her, and pulled out her Arabian credentials. “To Whom It May Concern” they began. Amelia hoped they would never have to concern anyone, because among other things the credentials begged for clemency for the fliers in the event they went down. ”