Her Pax Pacifica

CLXXXIX

The problem with being a heroine, Amelia realized, was that people expected heroics. After the shouting about her solo transatlantic flight died down she needed to find another gig. Unbelievably enough, she needed the money. The Putnams’ Rye, New York, mansion had caught fire, destroying many of the awards Amelia had won over the years, consuming the files she had been assembling for her memoirs, and melting the old family silver into rivulets. Repairing the house would take a serious bite out of the family bank account (George’s collection of G.P. Putnam’s Sons' signed first editions dating back a century, was spared). George’s Wall Street investments were still crippled by the Depression. Amelia was also quietly supporting her mother and a financially-strapped Pidge. The planes were costly to warehouse and maintain; and so on . . . 

Amelia, lifting off in the new Vega, January 11, 1935

She was hardly broke, especially compared to most Americans in 1935, but she and George had little liquidity and no place to dispose of assets like the old property in Bend or the ranch they owned in Wyoming.  To raise cash quickly, they got jobs. Of course, George wasn’t delivering milk. He became Head of Development at Paramount Studios. Amelia became the first Professor of Women’s Studies (a revolutionary new curriculum) at Purdue. They became a commuter couple. 

“Amelia Earhart Lookout” near Diamond Head on Oahu is dedicated to the memory of the aviatrix

 

George brought home flowers during a holiday weekend at Rye. He found Amelia sitting cross-legged in the library with Atlases, maps, and navigation tools scattered across the rugs. 

“I think I want to fly the Pacific.”

“Out to Honolulu?”

“From Hawaii to California. It’s harder to miss a continent than to miss an island.”

“Good point.”

Near journey’s end: Amelia, over Burbank, California, on January 12, 1935. Few laypeople realized that the plane Amelia flew from Hawaii wasn’t the same one she flew to Ireland. The new Vega was larger, but it was also red. The landing gear was the giveaway

They sold the “Little Red Bus” and bought a larger, newer Vega from Elinor Smith. She had intended to transit the Atlantic in it, and it must have been bittersweet to sell it to Amelia. The new plane was modified with additional fuel tanks, the 500 hp engine she’d used for the Atlantic hop, and with a radiotelephone, a bulky overweight item jammed full of vacuum tubes, that would allow Amelia to talk to people as she crossed the Pacific.  

The new Vega being offloaded from the S.S Lurline on December 27, 1934

Around Christmas 1934, she took the sturdy S.S. Lurline to Honolulu with the new Vega in the hold. After several days of testing and other preparation, she lifted off from Wheeler Field at Pearl Harbor on January 11, 1935 headed for Oakland.

It was a potentially deadly flight. A dozen men had died in 1934 alone trying to make the hop from California to Hawaii. Like them, Amelia had no Radio Direction Finder equipment (Hugo Leuteritz was still perfecting it for the China Clipper). She did, however, have a radio, and she could judge her flight path by signal strength (she was amused when the deejay in Honolulu called after her, “Miss Earhart, please boost your signal! Your husband is having a hard time hearing you on the radiotelephone!”) And she had reduced the risk somewhat by aiming from the islands to the continent, and not the other way around. But still . . .

Arrival at Oakland

Unlike her Atlantic crossing, the Pacific crossing went smoothly, taking only a little longer than the 2,026-mile solo Atlantic flight. She became the first American to make the Pacific hop solo.

Atlantic Crossing

But something troubled Amelia about the Pacific Ocean. Despite the Pax Pacifica she'd experienced, after the 2,402–mile flight she muttered uneasily to George that she would never make an extended water crossing in a single-engine plane again.

 

Pacific crossing

Four months later, armed with RDF, Ed Musick and the crew of the Pan American Clipper flew from California to Hawaii and back again. The dawn of regularly-scheduled air transport was upon the world.

The crew of the Pan American Clipper in April 1935. Just for months after Amelia’s solo hop in the other direction, their arrival in Honolulu via S-42B marked the effective beginning of regularly-scheduled cargo and passenger service across the American Pacific. An unsmiling Ed Musick is third from the right