Lost by Rachel Hartigan

Author:Rachel Hartigan [Hartigan, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Digital
Published: 2026-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE POINT OF ALL THIS ACTIVITY was to fly. The book, the jobs with various airlines, the lectures across the country—they all made it possible for Amelia to take to the air.

To that end, while she was in England, she had purchased an Avro Avian from Lady Mary Heath. The plane was tiny: With its folding wings, it fit in a garage. It was so light Amelia could move it around herself; to start the motor, she just had to pull down on the propeller with one hand. But the two-seater biplane was mightier than it looked. Heath had flown it solo from South Africa to England. Now it was Amelia’s turn to take it on an adventure. Once she had finished the book and met with all the “editors, promoters, airline operators, and educators with propositions generous, preposterous, or inviting,” she declared “it was time to get into the air again.”

She’d wanted to fly across the country with her mother when they’d moved east from Los Angeles a few years previously but had to sell her little Airster. In 1928, she seized a chance to make the transcontinental flight. “I purchased a lovely assortment of air navigation maps and headed for California and the National Air Races there,” she wrote. She called what she was doing vagabonding.

The trip didn’t start off particularly well. On the first stop in Pittsburgh, with Putnam on board, she hit a ditch while landing and the plane “ground looped,” making an uncontrolled rotation on the ground. The landing gear, propeller, and left wing were damaged. Putnam oversaw the repairs and Amelia’s upended schedule. He arranged for another Avian to fly to Pittsburgh to sacrifice some of its parts and then, once the lengthy refitting was completed, for Amelia and the plane to reunite in Dayton, Ohio.

From there, she flew solo to Terre Haute, Indiana, St. Louis, Missouri, and Muskogee, Oklahoma. Finding her way proved to be more challenging than flying the plane. “Imagine trying to recognize a new town, the way flyers do,” she wrote later, “a hundred-mile-an-hour look at a checker-board of streets and roofs, trees and fields, with highways and railroads radiating and crisscrossing and perhaps a river or two to complicate—or simplify—the geography lesson.”

Towns had not yet become sufficiently “air-minded”—a favorite term of Amelia’s—to create signage visible to pilots. Often fliers were forced to follow railroad tracks and hope they led to their destination.

Amelia pinned maps to her clothes so the wind wouldn’t carry them away from the Avian’s open cockpit. But that didn’t always work. Flying west of Fort Worth, she hit severe turbulence. “In the strenuous moments over Texas, the pin was somehow loosened and the map blew away.”

Rather than panicking, she stayed the course and looked for a road. Soon, she saw one to the north: “So many cars must be going somewhere, and I felt I would like to go there, too. In all the vast rolling country below, those automobiles were the only signs of life except an occasional ranch house or oil derrick at intervals of many miles.

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