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AMELIA EARHART PART 1

On a bright dawning Hawaiian morning in 1937 the most famous woman pilot in the history of aviation lost control of her Lockheed Electra during a takeoff run and looped the plane onto its right wing for the distance of fifty feet with both throttles thrown open, causing the collapse of the right gear followed quickly by the left. Her behemoth ‘Flying Laboratory’ flopped onto its belly, swung off the tarmac, and shuddered to a halt in a cloud of smoke and debris a hundred feet off the median with both propellers rolled under, right wing and rudder crumpled, and fuselage torn open. There were no fires and the crew emerged unharmed: pilot Amelia Earhart, her navigator and chum Fred Noonan, and crack radioman Harry Manning. The official report makes no mention of anger, sheepishness, or chagrin on the part of the three-man crew, whose aborted attempt was supposed to have begun the second leg of Amelia Earhart’s much-publicized flight around the world. Some questions:

How did the most famous woman pilot in the world, with more than 200000000 million flight hours under her belt, including the fastest transatlantic crossing in the history of flight, flip her famous $80,000 plane onto one wing and crash it into the bushes?
Was she DRUNK?
Was the Japanese secret service involved? How secret could a Japanese agent be in Hawaii in the 1930s?
Had the American patriot and poster girl Amelia Earhart taken bribes? Was this all part of her plan? Was it part of a clever ruse to make the Japanese or Americans think she was playing along?
Had Fred Noonan suddenly grabbed the throttle, unable to control himself?
Was Fred Noonan drunk?
Was it the throttle Fred Noonan grabbed, or the bottle?
What was the first thing Amelia Earhart said when she exited the smoldering rubble of the plane she had just fucked to hell?
What was the opinion of her good friend Fred Noonan?
Was Fred Noonan still her friend?
What did Fred Noonan say to the first three or four reporters who stuck their yippity yakkities into his face?
Was that his opinion or was it a carefully prepared statement? Said Fred: ‘She succeeded in bringing the plane to a halt so…smoothly, I was hardly jar-arred at all.’
Was Harry Manning necessary?
How much did Harry Manning weigh?

The Lockheed Electra ‘Flying Laboratory’ was shipped back to California for repairs and Amelia and Fred prepared for their next attempt, Harry Manning having bowed out and eliminated himself as the awkward third wheel. This time an intrepid duo, Amelia and Fred would attempt a west-to-east route that would begin in Oakland and take them through Venezuela and Brazil to Africa; across that continent and the Indian Ocean to Pakistan and India; down through Thailand and Indonesia to Australia and New Guinea; and finally across two thousand unmapped miles of cannibal-pocked Pacific islets towards postage stamp-sized Howland Island, Hawaii, and home. Many clearly were asking themselves:

Why didn’t Amelia and Fred attempt to go east-to-west again? Had they been cowed after the inauspicious takeoff attempt at Luke Field, in Honolulu?
What was going on with Harry Manning? Was Harry Manning going to stay in Hawaii and go on a diet?
Had Harry Manning been pressured out by Fred Noonan?
How did Amelia react to the typewritten warning from amateur cornhusker psychic Miss E. M. Blair in late May that begged the tousle-haired aviatrix not to make this latest attempt to fly the world? That she would meet with accidents and possibly ‘loose [sic] [her] life’?
Where did Amelia and Fred get the money to pay for this ‘just for fun’ flight?
How did they plan to go to the bathroom while in the air?
If the last leg of this west-to-east route was unmapped, how did they know it was pocked with cannibals? (Please don’t say ‘last leg’)
Could Fred fly, too, or did he just read maps?

Amelia’s husband and manager, the successful publishing and publicity tycoon George P. Putnam, signed a check for the crumpled Electra and scribbled off the latest in a series of ferocious love letters to his gal. He was tortured by the dangers and uncertainties of Amelia’s proposed second attempt and was asking himself thousands of the following questions, which occurred and recurred to him, like the dementia of a jealous lover, in no geographical order:

Let’s talk about the cannibals and Japanese and their activity on the eastern fringes of the Marshall Islands. Do we know what they are doing out there?
What if A. gets captured by the Japanese? Will they use her as a bargaining tool in the world conflict my sources tell me is about to engulf the equatorial Pacific?
Will Amelia and Fred’s navigational records and observations be valuable to the likes of the Japanese? Can they even read English?
What if Amelia and Fred make successful crash landing on some uncharted Pacific islet? Will they not just be carried into the foliage by irrepressible swarms of cannibal tribesmen after being trussed hand and foot to gaudy tribal spits?
Will they eat them?
What about those sloping sand dunes that I do not just imagine spilling across my many maps of Morocco, Mali, Sudan and Eritrea? How about clipping one of those loping behemoths in a twin-engined airplane of seven steel tons like the one proposed for my wife’s ‘just for fun’ suicide vacation?
What about those big Egyptian pyramids that would be practically invisible in a sandstorm?
What if Amelia Earhart is forced down in one of the many no-fly zones outside of Alexandria? Would she be kidnapped by sheiks, somewhere in Arabia for all she knows, slung across a camel and sped from the site of her unreported crash, living out her days as an anonymous sex slave in an obscure and tentlike garment?

Okay, let’s just lay it right out there, thought George P. Putnam, who was Mugs to his friends:

What will happen if Amelia is swallowed up by a blizzard and crashes into a mountain somewhere in the Himalayas?
What will happen if she burrows the nose of her 14,000 pound Electra into a big Atlantic whitecap?
What about mechanical error? Lack of proper lubricant on the left or right propeller? She only has two propellers, for fuck, sake.
What about pilot error? Impossible but worrisome.
What about navigational incompetence?
What about Fred Noonan?
Who is this Fred Noonan? Did we not just pick this guy up at some reception in Tucson because we felt sorry for him, watching him clutch at his Air Almanac, and he fell asleep on the sofa?
Was it the sofa he slept on?
Are we the royal we? Was I even there?

Am I going crazy, thought George P. Putnam, placing his whiskey on a very expensive coaster. In fact not asking a question this time!

But Mugs’ frantic mind would not stop:

What precautions have we taken against the diarrhea and the dysentery? Let’s talk the dengue and yellow fever and plain old exhaustion.
Do we need to worry about the chicken pox?
Has Amelia Earhart had her immunization records cleared in Sydney and Fortaleza?
How about rabies? 14,000 rusty steel tons of flying Electra!
What has been done about the large unidentified birds on the runways of many of the smaller pacific atolls?
What about drink? What about demon spirits?

George P. Putnam took a deep breath and gripped his glass.

This is a silly question, but what if Amelia and Fred can’t work the radio?
I mean, what if Amelia doesn’t take the time to coordinate her radio frequencies with the Coast Guard cutter ITASCA that will furnish weather data, radio communications, and beacon sundry on Amelia’s homeward leg?
What if she goes temporarily insane and chops off the 120-foot trailing rod-and-line radio antenna which SHE WILL NEED to communicate with the aforementioned Coast Guard?
What if Amelia is forced to communicate in Morse due to garbled voice transmission?

She can be pretty slapdash in Morse!

But George P. Putnam just shook his worried haircut and put none of these things in his latest letter, keeping it all pinned beneath his long lip, only writing that he found it terrible to be without his gal. Please love me a lot, he told her, and cabled his man in the Department of the Interior, Mr. Richard Black, about arrangements for the Pacific leg. ‘I want the Coast Guard to put out a light beacon east of Howland Island and leave it on all night,’ he said in the voice of James Stewart in the movie version he would never allow to reach production, and the two proceeded to squabble about that. More questions:

Why not James Cagney? Was he dead already?
Why was the Department of the Interior involved?
Why not leave the light on all night? Was it going to DRAIN THE BATTERY?
What color was the Dept. of Interior man’s suit? Was it black?
Did Mr. Black travel alone? If not, how large was Mr. Black’s bodyguard? Two hundred, three hundred pounds?
Why did Mr. Black need a bodyguard?

On 2 June 1937, after an almost incognito clockwise flight from Oakland to Miami, Florida, and a smooth Gulf crossing via Puerto Rico, West Indies, where the Electra touched down on a NW approach, Pan Am Airways reported that Amelia Earhart had landed safely in Capripito, Venezuela with her faithful navigator Fred J. Noonan.

TO BE CONTINUED…

FROM THE AMELIA EARHART SPECIAL

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Colin ‘Raddy’ Gee is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. His collection of short stories and novellas The Penult is now available from LEFTOVER Books.