The Lost Flight of Amelia Earhart: A Novel Based on Historical Evidence

By Carol Linn Dow

“Lost Flight” will take you there...
to a very small island in the Pacific... to a lost
airplane floundering over open waters... to a
story that has never been told on the silver screen
or in book form. For those who want the story
behind the story with supporting details and
evidence that only a published work can provide,
this book is a definitive must read on the life and
loss of Amelia Earhart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483533209

Book preview

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Chapter 1

The year is 1937. The day is July 2nd. Lockheed Electra tail number NR 16020 fights its way through towering cumulus in the Central Pacific. Over open water, the oceans are alive with weather pouring in from all directions. It is almost as if a spigot had been released containing tropical rain showers, squalls, and gigantic thunderheads all colliding in the same amount of space along a line tracking through the Pacific.

The airspace the airplane is flying through is called the tropical convergence zone, and it is hot and humid the way it is hot and humid on the Texas Gulf Coast in the summer months with the temperature in the 100’s. Clothing sticks to your skin like glue. At 8,000 feet there is some relief from the elements, but the heat and the humidity is still there only waiting for the moment of descent when the weather gremlins will play their irritating tune once again. It’s always a hot summer day on the equator where the hemispheres divide. Explorers have discovered that at the exact point of the equator, water doesn’t go down a drain circulating clockwise or counter clockwise, it goes straight down. If you move only a few yards to the north or a few yards to the south of that imaginary line, the rotation will begin again.

Earlier the previous day at 10:00 in the morning, 0000 Greenwich Control Time, 0000 Greenwich, England, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed L-10 barely missed a disaster from an overloaded takeoff from Lae, New Guinea. It was a hair raising one mile climb from the end of the runway. Both propellers of the engines kicked up ocean spray the entire distance. Slowly, very slowly, the airplane began to gain altitude as onlookers from the shore gasped a sigh of relief. At the controls, in the left seat, is Amelia Earhart.

After flying all day and late into the night it is now 4:00 A.M. Howland time the next morning, the second day, and sixteen hours into the flight. Earhart is tired and on edge. The roar of the engines in her ears is deafening. The interior of the cabin and its walls contain no sound proofing, no means of relief from the pounding of the two 550 horsepower radial engines. Both Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are partially deaf from the constant vibration and the roar of the Pratt and Whitneys. The two fliers talk to each other by written messages attached to a broomstick from the navigator’s station in the rear of the cabin.

Amelia’s life has been a life of struggle for fame and for fortune. Now, she had almost everything that she had been striving for… a husband, wealth, and the title of being one of the most famous women in the world. With an airplane flying in the palms of her hands, Amelia Earhart is in her glory. To say that she was fearless would be an understatement. Fear was something she ruled out of her life. She had what aviators call guts. In the early 1930s it took intestinal fortitude to fly an autogyro (the predecessor to the helicopter) to a world alititude record. On April 8, 1931, Amelia Earhart climbed to 18,415 feet in a Pitcarin Autogyro. Autogyros in the early days did not have the inherent stability of an airplane. If an autogyro stalled or fell off to one side, it could go straight into the ground and never recover. They were very dangerous machines to fly, but that didn’t stop Amelia Earhart. She never thought of having children or raising a family. If she did, the thoughts never emerged in her conversations with her sister, Muriel, or with her mother Amy, or with her friends. Seemingly, she had more important things to do, and the important things were flying airplanes. It was her whole life. It consumed her morning, noon, and night. A trip to a wind blown grass covered airfield inhabited by biplanes held together with bailing wire and rusted bolts were things of absolute fascination to this girl. When it came time to disassemble an airplane engine, complete with the grease and oil and the dirt it produced, Amelia was right there with her hands in the midst of all the activities. It was truly amazing that a delicate young woman, a thin slip of a girl, would engage in such a grease monkey like occupation. On the other hand, she loved it, especially airplane engines, the part that made the airplane go. Maybe she had gasoline and propellers in her head. But whatever she had, it was there, and this is what she loved to do.

To say that Amelia Earhart was thin would be an understatement. Her pilot’s license listed her as 118 pounds, 5’8’’ tall, gray eyes, and blonde hair. As a matter of fact the whole family was thin. Her mother was thin, her sister was thin, her sister’s daughter was thin, and her father was thin. All of the Earhart’s were thin. It seemed to be a family tradition. Even in later life that thinness still seemed to prevail. It never left the Earhart household.

Edwin and Amy Otis Earhart began their lives together in a small Kansas railroad town on the banks of the Missouri River. Atchison, Kansas, was the very root and the start of the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe Railroad. Edwin Earhart, Amelia’s father became an attorney for the Rock Island railroad, the competitor to the Santa Fe who also had a presence in the city of Atchison. In the early years there were paddle wheel steamboats of every size and description prowling up and down the Missouri. The area surrounding Atchison is farmland with neat white picket fences marking off their territories over the undulating hills of the countryside. To see it is almost like seeing a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Corn and maize and spinach grow in abundance in this part of Kansas. To the west there are sprawling wheat farms and pasture where cattle are fattened before they are taken to the beef packinghouses in Kansas City and Emporia.

Life for the Earhart family in the early days was ideal. The two girls, Amelia and Muriel, grew up in the stately home of Alfred Otis. In the early days of their marriage Edwin Earhart’s law practice for the Rock Island earned him high marks from the home offices in Chicago. However a problem began to arise in their daily lives. Edwin Earhart came home one night in a drunken stupor. One little drink at a bar with the boys after long hours in the office had turned into more than one little drink. Amy’s father became an alcoholic. It wrecked havoc with the Otis family, and Edwin Earhart was forced to leave his life in Atchison in search of employment elsewhere. At first it appeared as if Amelia’s father had taken the cure, and he could return to the Rock Island claims office. Then, he started drinking again, and the word of his demeanor began circulating through the ranks. Even so, he kept trying.

The first move was Des Moines, Iowa. Then came a job as a minor clerk in the offices of the Great Northen Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was given another chance at his old job as a claims attorney, but one day he stumbled around the premises in the midst of an investigation and became disoriented in the process of representing the railroad’s claims. It was costly to the Great Northern having an incompetent attorney settling claims. The next move was to a small office in Springfield, Missouri, for the Burlington railroad; however, it turned out to be a grave mistake as it never came about. On arriving in Springfield with his family, he discovered the man he was replacing had decided not to retire.

Life became a constant series of moves for the Earharts. After Springfield came Chicago. It was hard on the family, and it may have caused Amelia’s mother, Amy, to come close to a nervous breakdown. Her husband had become a drunk, and the family funds were dwindling rapidly. With all this turmoil, a divorce was becoming a reality. It was in Chicago that Amelia found solace in the school library where she sat for hours and hours reading poetry and books and dreaming of far away lands. At Hyde Park High School she had become detached from her classmates so much so that the high school yearbook labeled her as the girl in brown who walks alone. Amelia spent most of her time in the school library on reading assignments. She was avoided by the other students. It was, perhaps, a glimpse of what was coming… a globe circling long range aviator who could station herself at the controls of an airplane for hours and hours at a time content with the isolation, the claustrophobia, and the stress of navigating an airplane.

After Chicago came Kansas City for the second time and a lawsuit over the Otis funds that were left to Amelia’s mother. It was at this point, on obtaining the Otis family funds from an irresponsible Uncle, that Amelia was sent to Rydal, Pennsylvania, the Ogontz school, where she started a campaign to democratize the sorority system in the interest of intellectual freedom and the camaraderie of friendship. Her sister, Muriel, believed that the campaign she waged with the headmistress came from her Hyde Park days. She knew what it was like to face rejection and isolation.

Amelia’s religious beliefs came to the forefront when she attended a lecture in Philadelphia given by Sir Rabindranath Tagore, a Hindu poet and mystic. After the lecture she stoutly stated, I do believe in God, but not in many of the tenets in the catechism I had to learn when I was little. God to me is a power that helps me to do good, and that is what I think Tagaore means when he says he believes in an all enveloping God. The way we worship isn’t important a bit. There’s certainly no reason for Tagore to become a Christian, and I don’t think anybody should try to make him [one].¹³ Amelia was in accord with the oriental way of life and death even though she was a confirmed member of the Episcopalian Church. She was unemotional to tragic sorrowing. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam suited her visions almost perfectly. Poetry gave her an outlet for her innermost thoughts. She studied the works of Dante, Gabriel Rossetti, and Carl Sandburg to name only a few. She believed in living every day to the utmost, and with the exception of her days at Hyde Park High she displayed leadership in nearly everything she did.

After the Ogontz School, life begin to change rapidly for Amelia. Her sister Muriel had graduated Westport High school in Kansas City and was attending St. Margaret’s College in Toronto. Amelia shortly thereafter joined her sister in Canada. As World War I broke out across Europe and enveloped America the aftermath of the war’s affects in Toronto were highly visible. Wounded veterans were pacing the streets with missing arms and legs never to walk again in the nearby parks or play tennis or golf or dance the waltz at a wedding. It was a depressing sight for the two girls. The number of casualties from the British stand in the trenches of France had taken its toll, and the military hospitals of Toronto were overflowing with the wounded and the maimed. By comparison, because of its late entry, the war had only begin to touch the lives and the street scenes of America.

It was at this point that Amelia took a comprehensive course in Red Cross first aid and enrolled in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. Thereafter, she was assigned to Canada’s Spadina Military Hospital. It was at Spadina where she was exposed to an overdose of the horrors of war and the pain and the suffering that followed in its aftermath. For the first time she witnessed broken bodies and broken minds. Even the slightest provocation could set off screaming and crying from shell shocked patients. There were constant threats of suicide from the casualties of war trying to end their lives and their suffering. A few months later, a confirmed pacifist, her interest in medicine led her to enroll as a premedical student at Columbia University. Muriel, on the other hand, entered Smith College and studied English. Amelia was a top notch medical student and she grasped the details of a laboratory experiment almost before her professors were finished with their lecture. She would have made a research scientist except there was one thing that stood in the way. Amelia Earhart loved airplanes. Her room at college was filled with books about airplanes. She had taken courses on the care and maintenance of automobile engines. In addition, she had leadership qualities that sprung forth after the unhappy days at Hyde Park High School. Amelia was something of a bookworm and a workaholic. She launched herself into her studies at Columbia and Barnard College with a reckless abandon so much so that it was a nearly an unbearable workload. If her mother had known how many classes she was taking she would have undoubtedly put a stop to it, but Amelia was having fun. Between French poetry and testing the nutritional value of proteins in a laboratory she developed a life long friendship with a classmate, Louise de Schweintz. Louise de Schweintz went on to John Hopkins and became the acting director of Pediatrics at the Children’s Rehabilitation Unit of the Kansas University Medical Center, 39th and Rainbow on the Kansas side of Kansas City.

Within the darkness of the night there are lightening flashes off the left wing that reveal towering moisture laden cumulus and cumulonimbus thunderstorms that can spell disaster. A large thunderstorm can tear the wings off an airplane, and Earhart’s Electra is no exception. The up and down currents can over stress the superstructure of the wings and rip them apart. Earhart, the veteran pilot, knows this all too well. Sweat grasps her hands and her forehead. She wipes away the salty residue with her hand and stares into the darkness.

The automatic pilot steers the airplane as the controls move left, then to the right, then up, and then down. The airplane bounces on its appointed course. Earhart shakes her head from a severe jolt in the rough air. She mutters to herself downdraft. Then, as fast as the airplane sinks, it recovers and suddenly zooms upward. The uptake leaves Earhart breathless. Suddenly, lightening illuminates the sky. It crackles from every conceivable direction. Undaunted, the Electra shudders and struggles through the onslaught. Then, across the instrument panel and the wings, a blue electrical fire seems to erupt. But it isn’t fire, it is static electricity, the blue flames of St. Elmo’s fire.

Helpless, Earhart stares at the controls and the instrument panel. She has seen this before. It may last for a few minutes. There is no way of telling. Slowly, the dancing blue electricity begins to diminish. It disappears. Darkness returns to the cockpit. Earhart takes out her flashlight and begins an inspection of the instrument panel and the radios. Everything seems to be returning to normal. The lights on the panel and the radios return to their low light status. Over the roar of the engines, Amelia turns and shouts at the top of her voice to Fred Noonan in the rear of the airplane.

What have you got? Any damage? Noonan stares back, shrugs his shoulders, and shakes his head. He gestures with his hands up in the air as if to say he doesn’t know. Amelia turns towards the front of the airplane and takes out her maps. With a flashlight she inspects the route of the Electra as it drones on through the threatening skies. Lightening arches to the left of the airplane again. Amelia watches as it light s up the sky.

On her right arm, Amelia feels the rubbing of the message pole. She turns and grabs at a piece of paper clipped to the end of a broomstick.

The message reads:

Flying through tropical convergence zone. Expect thunderstorms. We are well passed the Gilbert Islands. Change heading to 065 magnetic. Sunrise in about two hours. Suggest slow descent into Howland to avoid weather.

After reading the note, Amelia’s heart pounds in her chest. She is excited. The most dangerous part of this flight would soon be over. There, before her, was the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca and Howland Island with a treasure load of aviation gasoline. It was working. They were going to make it. She had Fred Noonan at the navigator’s station. There was nothing to worry about.

Amelia’s first lessons at flying an airplane came at the hands of Neta Snook. Snooky, as everyone called her, was quite a character. Her face was covered with smudges of dirt and grease. She had wind blown hair, and she talked like a man and dressed like a man. In fact, she could do everything to an airplane the men could do. In those days, the barnstorming pilots offered airplane rides for ten minutes for one dollar. When airplanes took off into the sky, they were followed by a cloud of dust as there were no paved runways in 1924. Instead of metal, they were covered in canvas with a heavy coating of shellac. The pilots usually sat waiting for prospective riders in the shaded heat alongside a tin shed where the temperature often reached over 100 degrees. There were no airplane hangars. The airplanes sat outside in the elements. If a hail storm came along, it could punch holes in the fabric of the airplanes making them unflyable. Once Amelia was in the air she didn’t want to come down. The view was spectacular. It edged her on and on until she bought her first airplane, a Kinner Airster. It was in the Kinner at an airshow with her sister and her father watching that she set a world altitude record for women at 14,000 feet. It was a daring feat in those days. The world record of 18,415 feet in a Pitcarin Autogyro followed several years later.

By 1921 Edwin Earhart had moved to Los Angeles, and he had talked the Earhart women into joining him. However, the happy family didn’t last, and Edwin sued for divorce. The divorce was uncontested. The final separation was a long time in the making. Edwin Earhart and his bottles had driven the final nail in the Earhart marriage. Amelia sold her Kinner biplane and with her mother and her sister drove back to the Boston area in a yellow Kisser sportscar. They settled in Medford, Massachusetts, where Muriel became an English teacher in a junior high school, a subject she dearly loved. Amelia followed after her sister and, after a few attempts, found a job teaching English to Syrian and Chinese students at Dennison House in Boston’s low rent district. In the process she became a social worker. For Amelia, it became a labor of love teaching the downtrodden and the dispossessed. Many a day passed when Amelia drove ten or twelve children around the block in her yellow Kissel convertible with the children standing on the running boards or anywhere they could manage to hang on. Many of them had never been in an automobile before. This was a time in Amelia’s life that she thoroughly enjoyed, and it seemed as if she would settle down to life as a social worker. However, all of that was about to change and change rapidly.

Towards the rear of the Lockheed Electra there are only two windows along the left side of the fuselage. The right side of the airplane by the navigator’s station only has one window. In addition to the rear door to the cabin, there is an outside escape hatch over the left pilot’s seat. The interior of the fuselage is packed with long range fuel tanks. Originally designed as an aircraft transport the passenger windows have been sealed at the factory to give additional strength to the fuselage. The navigator’s desk has a seat and a spotlight next to a small flat working area. Over the desk are pigeon holes for navigational charts.

Noonan, the veteran Pan Am navigator, peers over his maps. He has a pair of architectural dividers in his hand. A chronometer and a magnetic compass are anchored to his desk. A sextant, in its case, sits on the floor next to his feet. An aeronautical plotter and rulers litter the top of a stack of charts. Mounted over his work desk is a magnetic compass, an altimeter, and an airspeed indicator. Looking out of the left rear windows through flashes of lightening, Noonan blinks his eyes at the strong line of thunderstorms. After flying all night through rough air he is tired. He holds his hands over his face and massages his face.

Fred Noonan, age 44, left school and started his career as an ordinary seaman. He shipped out of Seattle at the age of 17 and rose through the ranks working on ships attaining the status of quartermaster. From there he rose to bosun’s mate and became a Merchant Marine officer in World War I serving on munition ships. During the conflict three ships he manned were torpedoed by German U-Boats. In 1930 he obtained a limited commercial pilot’s license and pursued a career as a navigator with Pan American World Airways. Before he gave up his naval career he had obtained the license of a Class Master, any ocean, which gave him the rating of a sea captain in command of a ship. He was tall, very thin, had dark brown hair and blue eyes. Fred Noonan had the reputation of being an expert navigator. He worked for Pan Am as a navigation instructor. However, he began flying in earnest when Pan Am opened its Pacific routes. He was subsequently responsible for mapping Pan Am’s clipper service across the Pacific from Hong Kong to Honolulu via Wake, Midway, Guam, and the Philippines. The Caribbean, however, was that part of the globe with which he was the most familiar. In the early stages of his career with Pan Am, he started out as an airport manager in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, eventually assuming the duties of inspector for all of the company’s airports. However, Fred Noonan had a problem, and his problem was alcohol. It was surprising the Amelia Earhart would become involved with the same problems that nearly ruined her early childhood, but she did. As Noonan had risen through the ranks of Pan Am, it was rumored that he was undependable and that he had a two bottle-a-day habit.¹⁴ Evidently he was able to perform his duties, but he was considered a bad risk, and they let him go. Later he claimed that he had resigned. Nonetheless, Amelia believed he had his drinking under control, and she decided to take a chance with him. With the knowledge he had of world wide routes, especially across the Caribbean and the Pacific, he could prove to be a valuable asset. The truth of the matter is, he was, and it wasn’t Fred Noonan’s decisions that doomed the world flight… it was Amelia