Last Flight Of Amelia Earhart

     By the time aerial navigator Fred Noonan made an alleged drunken stupor pass at Amelia Earhart in the new movie “Amelia”, I felt like standing up and cheering that finally this milque toast biopic would get down to something we didn’t already know about that 1937 flight.
     Sorry to report 72 years later the last flight of Amelia Earhart is still shrouded in mystery because in the next scene just before the duo took off for Howland Island and never came back -Noonan showed up at the boarding sheepish and apologetic.
     The exploits of Amelia Earhart, first lady of the air are now the stuff of a major Hollywood motion picture just released in the USA last week titled simply “Amelia” starring Hilary Swank and directed by Mira Nair.
     The movie unfortunately lands at about one star in the ratings with a story on autopilot although “Amelia” is quite something to look at, filmed in glorious color with sumptuous locations and costumes and as many stirring shots of a Lockheed 10 “Electra” on the ground and flying around international orange painted on the top of its wings, as can be imagined.
     Everything else unfortunately, is dead on arrival.
     The thing most people today know about Amelia is that she is a kind of black and white remote female aviation figure from a long time ago.
     Unfortunately this new movie does nothing much to color that notion.
     “Amelia” is wooden and uninteresting to the point of boredom.
     Hilary Swank who manages to look like Amelia—seems at times detached—as in just going through the motions to get the AE accent right during this two-hour movie.
     Compared to DeCaprio’s Howard Hughes & Cate Blanchett’s Katherine Hepburn or even Alec Baldwin’s wonderful cameo of Juan Trippe, all in “The Aviator”- Hilary Swank’s Amelia is at times spunky enough but minus much passion.
     But there may be an upside.
     I have always thought Amelia looked a lot like Lindbergh and that resemblance added to her early 1930’s appeal.
Swank, who looks like both Amelia and Lindbergh might consider playing Lindbergh in a biopic.
     After all Hillary gained her fame and won an Academy Award playing a male in the movie titled “Boys Don’t Cry”.
     But if she plays Lucky Lindy, Hilary should get a better script.

Separated At Birth? Charles Lindbergh, Hilary Swank and Amelia Earhart.

     In June 1976 as the 40th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific Ocean approached, a great and today almost completely unknown aviation writer named Arthur A. Riley created an in depth article about Amelia Earhart for our monthly newspaper Air Cargo News that had started publication in New York in March 1975, and just like the Flying Typers that you are reading today, occasionally cast a view around aviation to feature articles of unique common interest including aviation history.
     Art had spent a great deal of time researching and documenting the mystery of Amelia’s 1937 disappearance and had finally come to the conclusion that she and her navigator Fred Noonan (he had pioneered many first survey flights as navigator for Pan Am Airways) were either just lost at sea or crashed and were taken prisoner by the Japanese.
     Art Riley was a former President of The Aviation & Space Writers Association.
Riley was also a correspondent in Germany in 1948 where he filed numerous stories picked up by hundreds of newspapers worldwide telling of the great air cargo pioneering adventure The Berlin Airlift.
     But before we get to Art’s piece here are some other thoughts.
     You’ll note pictures here all in black in white include AE wearing a windowpane blouse, the last outfit she was photographed in.
     The new movie “Amelia” finally reveals the true colors of that garment.

To view video and hear song click here

     But there is also a nagging feeling that this film, while side-stepping anything juicy or provocative about AE, actually goes out of its way to protect and even enhance her reputation.
     Amelia Earhart had an affair with Gene Vidal (Gore Vidal’s Dad) but “Amelia” notes that they also collaborated in an airline.
     “Amelia” seems to imply that AE founded a first air shuttle and that is just plain wrong.
     The first successful air shuttle in USA was Ludington Airlines from Newark to Philadelphia that actually took off in 1930 before B&M (Amelia’s project) was even in business.
     Ludington utilized Stinsons that made hourly flights.
     Later Eastern Airlines with an airmail contract took over Ludington in 1931 and The Eastern Air Shuttle that dominated The New York/Boston/Washington market until Donald Trump bought it (and renamed it Trump Shuttle) in 1988, was born.
     AE, for the record, lent her name and image to many projects including a clothing line during her ride to fame and even years after she was gone, Amelia Earhart Luggage was still a strong brand.
     Hollywood is what it is.
     But particularly egregious at the end of this film were some final images of Fred Noonan, head in hands at the navigator’s station back of the plane as it headed for its certain watery grave.
     What absolute crap.
     Perhaps one of aviation’s greatest celestial navigators was lost off of foggy Howland Island in July of 1937 but this made up smoke screen to history is unhelpful and unwilling to expand our understanding of those final moments.
     Here were these two adventurers flying off to eternity together after having almost circumnavigated the world—but all the movie audience gets in the payoff scenes are separate individual reactions inside that microscopically tiny airplane.
     My guess is that Earhart & Noonan held hands as they went down together!
     Anyway “Amelia” in style was patterned after an old fashioned movie—so why didn’t Mira Nair, the director go all the way?
     “Amelia” should have delivered adventure, and romance and inside stuff of what was an inspirational and truly heroic life instead of playing it safe and failing to deliver anything new.
     Just before final credits rolled—up on the screen in flinty black and white were some pictures and newsreels of the real Amelia Earhart—in front of us once again, big as life.
     “Amelia” at least saved the best for last.
Geoffrey

Earhart Search Narrows

     Alcohol may have been a major contributing factor in the disappearance of famed aviatrix, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan on the most perilous leg of their globe-girdling flight from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island on July 2. 1937.
     During the long intervening years following the U.S. Navy’s greatest search the sweeping of 150,000 square miles of Pacific waters—a veritable Niagara of stories have been written, investigations of former, Japanese-mandated islands made, even remains in graves exhumed. But in the nearly four decades since, not a shred of basic evidence has been revealed. The disappearance remains shrouded in mystery.
     From a practical flight point of view, it is known that the Electra aircraft was loaded to capacity with fuel 1,150 gallons of gasoline (enough for 4,000 miles), for the 2556-mile hop to the central Pacific island destination.
     Here are the events of that last flight:
     At 10:30 a.m., the sleek craft roared down the 3,000-foot strip that had been hacked out of the jungle, ascended easily with 150 feet of runway to spare. The runway terminated at a high cliff overlooking the sea.
     Expert navigation was a vital factor for successfully traversing this dangerous leg of the journey. Both were keenly aware of this fact. Noonan was highly conscious that disaster could be lurking if an error of one minute existed in his chronometers. An error of one minute would put the craft four miles off course. It is known that he was having instrument trouble trying to calibrate his chronometers with the Electra’s malfunctioning, 50-watt radio. More too a lack of knowledge regarding the true functioning of the chronometers would also defeat the accuracy of celestial navigation.
     In that era of pioneering of long distance flight coupled with the lack of today’s navigational aids—Howland, an island approximately 2 miles long and a half mile wide would require efficiently functioning instrumentation, nigh perfect dead reckoning plus downright luck to hit this mere spate of land in the vastness of the central Pacific.
     It was also known that the Electra, 500 miles out of Lae, was out of reach of radio signals. As a result, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was stationed at Howland for the aircraft to home in on its radio signals.
     But the surface craft became a base of radio confusion as the hands of the clock inched toward the estimated tme of arrival. Earhart and Noonan were expected to arrive in the Howland area around dawn. But the Electra had a serious shorcoming. Its radio equipment worked quite well for voice communication but was not sufficiently powerful for land stations or ships to pick up its signals.
     Shortly after midnight, the Itasca began sending out the prearranged signals, but no response was heard until 2:15 a.m. when the first fragmentary voice contact came through from the Electra. Amelia’s voice weakened by the heavy static reported that the weather was cloudy. At 3:30 a.m. her voice was heard in response to the cutter’s request to give her position and estimated time of arrival on here next scheduled transmission at 3:45 a.m. Her voice was heard on schedule: “Itasca from Earhart . . . overcast …. Will listen hour and half hour on 3105 (her designated frequency) At 6:15 a.m the cutter picked up Amelia’s voice asking for a bearing on 3105 kilocycles on the hour and would whistle into the microphone so the the Itasca’s direction finder could get a fix on her position. She reported that the airplane was then about 200 miles out with no landfall in sight. It was estimated at the time the craft had sufficient fuel for about four more hours of flight. Meanwhile the Itasca kept sending out a stream of messages requesting that she reply on the designated frequency.
     At 7:42 a.m she called in two minutes ahead of scheduled time. The operators and observers clustered in the radio shack of the Itasca noted that her voice carried a distinct note of alarm.
     She said: “We must be on you but cannot see you, been unable to reach you by radio, gas is running low. We are flying at an altitude of one thousand feet.”
     This was considered low for an aircraft flying in the vicinity of Howland where the weather was considered good but the clouds were towering up to 18,000 feet.
     From 7:58 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. nothing was heard from the Electra despite the constant crackling of radio homing signals from the vessel’s antenna.
     Fom the 7:58 tranmission it was assumed that the fliers were in the vicinity of Howland. The final transmission at 8:45 a.m. was cause for concern. Amelia’s voice was strained with anxiety. “We are on a line of position 157 degrees-337 degrees. Will repeat this message on 6210 kiloocycles.
     The Itasca replied immediately, “we heard you ok on 3105 kilcycles. Please stay on 3105. Do not hear you on 6210 kilocycles.”

     From this point onward until 10:00 am., the cutter’s radio antenna kept broadcasting urgent messages for Amelia to come in on her assigned frequency, to give her position and to try and maintain contact. As the hands of the clock passed the hour of ten—the time estimated that the aircraft would be running out of fuel, hope for the safe arrival of the global fliers began to fade in the minds of those aboard the Itasca. Yet, a few held the opinion that there might be enough flying time left to carry through the noon-day hour. But gloom gathered on the majority of faces in the Itasca’s radio room. It was a silent expression that the pair that manned the ill-starred flight were down somewhere in the vast Pacific, doomed.
     Much has been written about the mystery, however the best practical solution from an aviation point of view places the disappearance due to weather or navigational error. This stems from the result of a duplication flight made by Miss Ann Pellegrini a school teacher and part time pilot flying a plane similar to the Electra. She adhered to the Earhart flight as closely as possible. The most remarkable result of the flight was her experience in trying to find Howland Island.      Approaching the tiny dot of land in the vast Pacific, she encountered impenetrable fog and only because her aircraft had been equipped with the most modern navigational gear and scientific instrumentation did she make it.
     But the story of alcohol and its possible effect on the flight long had been held by one of Amelia Earhart’s closest friends and business associates, the late Paul Collins. They had served together in the early days of the then struggling air transport industry. Later they were cofounders of the one time BM Airways, later Northeast Airlines of which Collins was President, the carrier is now known as Delta Airlines.
     Paul Collins had followed the Amelia flight from the start. He recounted receiving continous progress reports from Amelia, one of which referred to her having “personnel problems.” Collins interpreted this to mean that navigator Noonan was hitting the bottle.
     Noonan was talented and extremely able as a navigator but had an unfortunate record of drinking.
     Noonan planned Pan American World Airways Pacific routes and served as navigator on the China Clipper when that carrier inaugurated commercial travel across the Pacific in November 1935. But his addiction forced Pan Am to release him.
     In March of 1937 Noonan had been assistant navigator when an earlier attempt of the global Earhart flight was aborted at take off in Honolulu. Amelia asked Noonan if he would like to go along as the sole navigator. Noonan replied, “I do, I need this flight.” “All the way,” she inquired. “Do you trust me?” was the answer. Amelia replied, “I believe in you.”
     Following the aborted flight, Amelia and Fred stood at the rail of the liner taking them back to the West Coast. The conversation turned to Noonan’s upcoming marriage. He admitted to Amelia that his major problem was drink.. “Does she know about your battle with bottle?” Amelia asked. Noonan replied, “Yes, but I think I can win with her.”
     Amelia was clearly influenced by her past experiences with her lawyer father, an alcoholic, her contacts with alcoholics when she worked at a Boston social settlement house. She was a gentle person, an idealistic soul, a believer in human rehabilitation and redemption and did not heed the warnings.
     Dame Fortune may have decreed the Electra’s fate. Having overshot tiny Howland, Noonan probably became confused and his navigational efforts may have gone awry. With gas running low, the craft lost, no doubt panic ensued as evidenced by the alarm detected in Amelia’s voice in her last transmission to the Itasca. This theory was supported by the Pellegrini duplication flight which encountered impenetrable fog in the area and but for modern scientific and navigational aids may have met a similar fate.
     The Earhart-Noonan flight disappearance remains one of the great mysteries of the air world. Possibly Amelia had a foreboding. In one of her last writings, she said: “I shall be glad when we the have last of its (Pacific) navigation behind us.”
     From the log of the Itasca, it would appear that the Electra reached the vicinity of Howland island possibly around 8:00 a.m. Due to cloudy or even storm conditions some observers hold that the plane couldn’t fly high enough to shoot star sights for obtaining a fix on the craft’s position thereby losing course and missing the island. Up to the time of the late transmissions it appeared that the navigation was fairly accurate.
Arthur A. Riley

Reproduced from Air Cargo News June 1976

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October 29:   IATA September Song is that pax demand unchanged + 0.3% YOY. Demand for int’l cargo was 5.4% below 09/08 levels.Load factors for pax & cargo were 77.1% and 50.8%.

October 29:   Go figure. In USA United Airlines ex-bankrupt but still loses money—retires its last B737. Southwest almost always profitable—flies more than 530 B737s.

October 29:    That USD$35bn deal to Northrop/EADS for tankers still up in air. Boeing pitching B767 & B777. Court ‘probable cause’ USAF revealed prices. Meantime Boeing artist Chuck Schroeder created some smashing views of proposed tankers (above).

October 29:   AMS Cargo Checkpoint partners Schiphol Airport- KL/AF & Dutch Customs & checks containers via "scan street'' as trailers glide by at 10 km.

October 29:   Sukhoi Aircraft (Russia) sold ten Superjet 100s to ItAli Airlines, a Pescara, Italy regional airline. Deliveries begin in 2011.

October 29:   Continental joins Star Alliance with immediate effect as codeshare with Lufthansa offers 94 flights between and in the USA and Europe – CO at Terminal 1 FRA.

October 28:   Saudi Arabian Airlines took deliver of its first A320 this week in France. Saudia's A320 fleet grows to 50 (22 purchased and 28 leased).

October 28:   Asian bank helps Afghanistan to build rail link from Uzbekistan’s border to Mazar-e-Sharif, import hub. Bandits make road cargo untenable.

October 28:   Revenue enhancement or law & order? Although EU & U.S. has slowed fuel & security price fix witch hunts—Australian prosecutors continue to jump ugly. Latest in cross hairs down under is Thai Cargo. Hearing planned Nov.26.

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