Heroic Flights: The First 100 Years of Aviation by John Frayn Turner

Author:John Frayn Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Aviation
ISBN: 9781783379781
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2003-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

19

AMELIA EARHART

First Woman Across the Atlantic

Tall, slender, softly-spoken and gentle-mannered, Amelia Earhart made several flights that rank among the finest flying achievements of all time.

She was the first woman ever to cross the Atlantic by air, but this was hardly one of her major deeds, since she merely sat in as a passenger helping with navigation on that memorable flight. It still had its interest, however, for the final few minutes.

Amelia had learned to fly several years earlier, though she did not take the controls on this trip, which was her first experience over the ocean.

She accompanied Commander Wilmer Stultz, the pilot, and Lew Gordon, acting as mechanic. They chose a Fokker seaplane with three 200-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engines. The machine was a monoplane with floats fitted.

They took off from Trepassey, Newfoundland, on 17 June 1928, and the Friendship, as the aeroplane was called, commenced the long flight. The details of the flight do not form part of this story. After hours of fog, the morning of 18 June brought clearer conditions.

Stultz saw a large vessel below on an approximately south–north route, which puzzled the three of them considerably.

‘Where on earth are we?’ Stultz asked.

Where, indeed, after nineteen and a half hours in the air?

Then minutes later another liner loomed over the horizon. They tried to contact her by radio without success. The mystery remained. Ships of this size did not steam on that course just off the west coast of Ireland, where the aviators reckoned they must be. But perhaps the very recent fog had literally clouded their calculations. After all they had not seen a thing until this last hour.

Then while they were still wondering where they were and what to do, they spied the dim outline of land on the easterly horizon ahead of them. They realized that it couldn’t be Ireland.

In the long fog-belt, they had flown right over Ireland – the coastline threading in and out before their eyes was Wales.

Half an hour later the seaplane slowly scored twin ski trails in the waters of Carmarthen Bay and they had done it, but better than planned in fact.

Amelia Earhart had to wait nearly four more years before she could fulfil her real ambition: to fly the Atlantic alone and so become the first woman ever to do so. She would also be only the third person to accomplish it solo after Lindbergh and Hinkler.

Amelia looked a fragile figure as she climbed into her Lockheed Vega monoplane that evening of 20 May 1932, at Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. In reality her frailness concealed capability and courage of an extraordinary order. She was now the wife of an American publisher and so really Mrs Putnam, but the world will always remember her as Amelia Earhart – gallant, graceful, the epitome of an era of flying forever gone.

Some flights seem destined to be smooth, others rough, and this was one of the latter. It was as if she had to be tested to the extremes of endurance.

Amelia revved up

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