From left to right: Agatha Christie, Amelia Earhart,
Aimee Semple McPherson
Amelia Earhart first came to the public’s attention in 1928 as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic; however, she did not pilot the plane herself, but was only a passenger on the flight. The promoter of the flight, George Palmer Putnam, known as “G.P.” wanted to choose a female passenger who actually had some piloting skill. He also shrewdly chose her because of her uncanny resemblance to Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy”, who had flown across the Atlantic in 1927. Amelia was dubbed “Lady Lindy”, and immediately became a sensation.
She married G.P. in 1931, and flew the Atlantic on her own in 1932. She was a tireless promoter of aviation, and an inspiring speaker on the expanding opportunities for women in modern society. She held many other records, including fastest cross-country flight by a woman, distance and speed record for a woman, and first solo flight across the Pacific. Even with all her accomplishments, her peers did not consider her the most technically proficient of flyers. Although she did have a passion for flying, her androgynous image and skillful self-promotion fueled her celebrity. She endorsed many products – including Lucky Strikes cigarettes (although not a smoker, she agreed to the deal to raise money for the crew of her first Atlantic flight.) She later promoted a collection of sportswear she designed herself, and a line of luggage that became extremely popular.
Like all celebrities known for astounding feats of bravery and skill, Amelia had to continually exceed her previous successes in order to retain her popularity. She began planning a round-the-world flight, after which she claimed she would retire. All the legs of the flight had been flown before – Amelia’s claim was that her flight would be the longest attempted so far, as she would fly as close to the equator as possible.
She planned to fly east to west, beginning with the long and difficult flights over the Pacific. But as she set off, her plane was too heavy; she crashed upon takeoff. The damage to the plane was considerable, and it looked as though the entire project would have to be abandoned. By the time repairs were done, weather conditions would have changed, making it impossible to make the flight as planned. Earhart decided to reverse direction, flying west to east. Even assuming that all the arrangements with foreign governments, airports, mechanics, and suppliers could be re-made, there was one looming obstacle: the long flight from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island, an atoll one mile wide.
Earhart did not have the navigational skill to manage this flight alone; the navigator she had originally chosen decided not to continue after her initial crash. She hired Fred Noonan as a replacement; Noonan was acknowledged to be an excellent navigator, but he was also suspected of being an alcoholic.
Because so much fuel was required, Earhart’s Lockheed Electra had to be stripped of all non-essentials. Earhart also discarded the extended radio antenna, life raft, and parachutes. She had earlier considered using a seaplane capable of water landing for the journey, but decided against it.
The flight was long and arduous. Earhart and Noonan began in Oakland, California on May 20, 1937; their first stops were in Burbank, Tucson, New Orleans, and Miami. They continued on to San Juan, and then to Brazil; they crossed the Atlantic to Africa, and from there to India and Indonesia. Although they made many necessary landings to refuel and to get what rest they could, they kept a punishing pace. They turned southward to Australia, traveling next to Lae, New Guinea.
The flight to Howland Island would be the riskiest of all – even with the most modern navigation methods, finding a mile-wide island in the vast expanse of the Pacific was a daunting task – a needle in a haystack. The slightest navigational error could result in being off-course by hundreds of miles – with no other land in range.
The Navy had sent the U.S.S. Itasca to Howland Island to provide navigational assistance; they were to stay in radio contact as Earhart neared her goal. But due to a series of miscommunications – mistakes in the contact times and frequencies that had been decided upon – the ship’s crew could hear Earhart, but she could not hear them.
On July 2, 7:42 A.M., the Itasca heard Amelia: "We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."
The ship tried to reply, but there was no response. At 8:45, they heard "We are running north and south."
Nothing more was ever heard. Amelia was just three weeks shy of her 40th birthday.
A massive search was launched, but no sign of Earhart, Noonan or the Electra was found. Conspiracy theories abounded: Earhart and Noonan were thought to have been captured by the Japanese and executed as spies; they landed on a different, remote island, where they died of exposure; one man was convinced that Earhart returned to society under an assumed name and lived out her life as a New Jersey housewife.
On July 8, 1937, Walter Lippmann published a eulogy for Amelia Earhart; this partially inspired the lyric for “When I Am the Wind."
I cannot quite remember whether Miss Earhart undertook her flight with some practical purpose in mind, say, to demonstrate something or other about aviation which will make it a little easier for commercial passengers to move more quickly around the world. There are those who seem to think that an enterprise like hers must have some such justification, that without it there was no good reason for taking such grave risks.
But in truth Miss Earhart needs no such justification. The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They help to offset the much larger number who are ready to sacrifice the ease and the security and the very lives of others in order to do what they want done. No end of synthetic heroes strut the stage, great bold men in bulletproof vests surrounded by squads of armed guards, demonstrating their courage by terrorizing the weak and the defenseless. It is somehow reassuring to think that there are also men and women who take the risks themselves, who pit themselves not against their fellow beings but against the immensity and the violence of the natural world, who are brave without cruelty to others and impassioned with an idea that dignifies all who contemplate it.
The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart's adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.
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