Amelia Earhart, From Sea to Shining Sea
In the capsule biographies of Amelia Earhart, one brilliant highlight bleaches out the rest of 1932, her solo flight across the Atlantic in May. But on August 24, 1932, she completed an even longer trip, the fulfillment of a dream she had had for nearly a decade. Seventy-four years ago today, armed with a can of tomato juice, a couple hard-boiled eggs, and a bright-red Lockheed Vega monoplane, Earhart flew nonstop from coast to coast across the United States.
She had seen her first plane 25 years earlier, as a 10-year-old tomboy growing up in Kansas. “It was a thing of rusty wire and wood and looked not at all interesting,” she remembered. It wasn’t until she volunteered as a nurse at Spadina Military Convalescent Hospital in Toronto during World War I that she became intrigued by the aerial exercises of Canadian fliers all around that city. At the time planes were for her just something fun to watch, but the image of soaring wings against clouds would nag from the back of her mind for years to come.
Inspired by her medical work, she enrolled at Columbia University in the fall of 1919, but not in the nursing program. She wanted to be a doctor. At a time when women made up less than 5 percent of the nation’s physicians—they weren’t even allowed to vote yet—she hurled herself toward the first of what would have been a long series of hurdles. Knowing her, she might have leapt them all. But at the end of the year, with a B-plus average, she quit. Her parents had recently moved to Los Angeles and wanted her to join them, and in an era when unmarried women did what their parents demanded, she complied. She fully intended to enroll in a medical program out West, but come fall she didn’t. She had attended her first air show, and, in her words, ”aviation caught me.”
In December she persuaded the pilot Frank Hawks to take her for a ride in his plane. “As soon as we left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly,” she wrote. “Miles away I saw the ocean, and the Hollywood hills seemed to peep over the edge of the cockpit, as if they were already friends. ‘I think I’d like to fly,’ I told the family casually that evening, knowing full well I’d die if I didn’t.” Six days later, she took her first flying lesson, paying her tuition with a job at the phone company.
After months of instruction from the aviatrix Anita “Net” Snook and the ex-army pilot John Montijo, she earned her U.S. flying license in December 1921. Her lifelong blizzard of records and firsts set in almost immediately. She bought her first plane, a two-seat, yellow Kinner Airster she named the Canary, in 1921, and set a women’s altitude record the next year. In 1923 she became only the sixteenth woman to earn an international pilot’s license.
When her parents’ always stormy marriage finally foundered, she hoped to return east, this time by plane—which would make her the first woman to fly across the country. Once again, though, family obligations derailed her plans. Her mother, devastated by the divorce, wanted to move to Boston. So Earhart sold the Canary in the spring of 1924, bought a car, and drove her mother to Massachusetts. After a brief return to Columbia, cut short for want of tuition money, Earhart moved in with her sister in Boston and got a job as a social worker. But the pull of the continent’s expanse of airspace now to her west never weakened.
The sky to the east, however, called first. She received a invitation in April 1928 to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic—but only as a passenger. “The idea of just going as ‘extra weight’ did not appeal to me at all,” she later wrote, but “the privilege in being included in the expedition” won out; besides, “the weather encountered necessitated instrument flying, a type of specialized flying in which I had not had any experience.”
On June 18, 1928, after 21 hours of flight, the Fokker F7 Friendship, piloted by Wilmer “Bill” Stultz and Louis “Slim” Gordon, touched down at Burry Port, South Wales. Earhart had boarded the plane a relative unknown, but she climbed out into international stardom. As the first woman to fly the Atlantic (and a dead ringer for Lindbergh, which earned her the nickname “Lady Lindy”), she captured the media’s imagination, at the expense of her male co-expeditioners. She resented every moment. She did not consider the flight her achievement; she had merely been along for the ride. But when she reminded reporters that Stultz and Gordon had done all the navigation and piloting, the next day’s stories lauded her restraint in not taking over when she wasn’t qualified.
The acclaim—the receptions, the ticker-tape parades, the press tour of the Midwest—had certain rewards. As much as she privately hated her new fame, disliking the press and squirming at being touched by strangers, she used her position to advocate for the two issues closest to her heart, the advancement of aviation and equality for women. “Women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action. Some such consideration was a contributing reason for my wanting to do what I so much wanted to do,” she wrote in the 1930s. On another occasion she added, “My ambition is to have this wonderful gift produce practical results for the future of commercial flying and for the women who may want to fly tomorrow’s planes.”
Fame came with personal bonuses too. The London Times and The New York Times paid her $10,000 for musings on the flight; Putnam’s, headed by George Putnam, the Friendship flight’s publicist, published her account in the fall; and Cosmopolitan hired her to write an aviation column. The steady paychecks allowed her to buy her own plane and dedicate herself to dive-bombing some more records and barriers. Little more than a month after returning to the United States, she set about fulfilling her longtime goal of flying coast to coast.
She took off from the polo grounds of the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, in her open-cockpit Avro Avian on August 31. She took two weeks to travel to Los Angeles and two weeks to return, landing in airfields and plowed farmland along the way, wheedling meals and lodging from locals when she tired of hotels. The trip—her first long-distance flight, and the first transcontinental flight by a woman—was an education in navigation. Airports were few and far between, maps were inaccurate, and a scarcity of landmarks in the Southwest forced her to learn dead reckoning: “Imagine automobiling without signs! Imagine trying to recognize a new town, the way flyers do—a hundred-mile-an-hour look at a checkerboard 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.”
Over the next four years she repeated the trip several times, as well as setting the women’s speed and autogiro altitude records and organizing the first woman pilots’ association. She also married George Putnam, whose publicity skills kept her name in the headlines and etched in the public memory, where they remain to this day. In secret the two plotted her biggest stunt yet, a solo flight across the Atlantic.
On May 20, 1932, five years to the day after Lindbergh’s solo crossing, she flew from Newfoundland to Ireland in her Lockheed Vega and exorcised the demons of the Friendship: Lady Lindy showed she was more than just celebrated dead weight. She was now one of only two pilots to have braved the Atlantic skies alone. She earned the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress and a medal from the National Geographic Society, presented by President Herbert Hoover. She hoped the flight proved that women could equal men in “jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness and willpower.”
Beyond that, in her 14 hours and 54 minutes in the air she had proved something to herself, that she possessed an uncanny resistance to fatigue that made her a natural for nonstop long-distance flying. A whole new category of records begged to be broken. She remembered her old dream of flying across America and turned it into a bigger challenge. She would attempt it nonstop.
In July, less than three weeks after she got back from her Atlantic flight, she took off from Los Angeles for Newark, hoping to best the record of 17 hours, 38 minutes set by Frank Hawks, the man who had taken her on her first flight. She didn’t. Mechanical problems forced her to land in Columbus, Ohio. After repairing a faulty fuel line, she continued on to Newark. Although she set a new women’s speed record for a transcontinental flight—17 hours, 59 minutes in the air and 19 hours, 14 minutes total—she exceeded Hawks’s time. “I wasn’t trying for a record,” she explained to a reporter. “This flight was merely for practice in navigation.” She admitted to being much more tired than after her transatlantic flight, largely because she had had to sit on her parachute.
Nevertheless, after journeying back to Los Angeles to watch the Olympics, she prepared for one more crack at the record. At 12:26 p.m. on August 24, after a quick bowl of soup at the Los Angeles municipal airport, she took to the sky. This time, the Vega made it all the way. “Perfect flight, no stops,” she said to the mechanic who climbed up to greet her in Newark. But hunger, exhaustion, and nausea from gas fumes corroded her cheerful composure moments later. When a crowd of reporters and fans rushed her as she emerged from the cockpit, she recoiled. “Don’t come near me!” she said. “You know what I feel like.” After a short rest and a call to her husband, though, she was ready to face reporters with her usual smile.
With a time of 19 hours, 5 minutes for 2,447 miles, she set a new women’s distance record and became the first woman to fly across the country nonstop, but again she fell short of Hawks’s feat. Thunderstorms and opposing winds had slowed her down. “If I’d had as good weather as I had before, I’d have broken all the records,” she said. But “I have no desire to treat my plane roughly. It is the family carryall.”
For Earhart, the quest for this record was over. Having spent most of the year flying, she was running low on money, so she left stunt flying behind for the lecture circuit. Four days after her nonstop flight, Jimmy Haizlip flew from Los Angeles to Brooklyn in little more than 10 hours. The next year, she shaved two hours off her transcontinental time, but she knew her Vega would never stand up to the new record speeds. In the last five years of her life, the number of hurdles left to jump dwindled. In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific and the first to fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City. All that remained, it seemed, was to fly around the world.
—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.