The Silver Princess

CXC

“Electra at the tomb of Agamemnon” by Frederick Leighton (1869)

In Greek mythology, the Princess Electra plotted to kill her mother, Queen Clytemnestra for being unfaithful to her father, King Agamemnon.

It was an odd name for a plane. 

Amelia spent the better part of 1936 grounded, traveling widely to lecture, but more often by car or rail than by air. Her classes at Purdue had waiting lists. George was spending most of his time in Hollywood at Paramount.

  

As time progressed, Amelia noticed a very definite drop-off in her lecture attendance. People were getting used to flight as an everyday thing. They were increasingly less interested in living vicariously through people like Amelia.

While most Americans still couldn’t afford to fly, the idea of flying wasn’t the remote dream it had been when Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic nine years before.

With the advent of the China Clippers Amelia realized that her form of flying, flying for the sake of breaking records, was becoming passe. Still, as she told George, “I think I have one more good flight in me,” and she wanted it to be a circumnavigation of the world. 

It had been done before by Wiley Post in 1931. Flying at high latitudes, Post, along with Harold Gatty, had circled the world in eight days and fifteen hours, a world’s record. 

Amelia did not want to replicate Post’s flight. Instead, she told George, she wanted to make her flight an Equatorial circumnavigation that, due to the curvature of the Earth, would double the mileage flown by Post.

The circumference of the Earth at the Equator is known today to be 24,901 miles. Due to landforms, the availability of landing sites, and other factors, Amelia would have to fly some 30,000 miles. 

Amelia refused to consider using even her new Lockheed Vega to make the trip. She insisted to George that she needed a multiengine plane. So they went airplane shopping. 

Inside Amelia’s innermost circle there was a long harsh debate as to whether she should purchase a Sikorsky flying boat. The long-distance hops being successfully undertaken by the Pan Am S-42s and the Martin M-130s spoke well of the ruggedness of the aircraft in question. 

At the heart of the flying boat debate there was an issue of safety. For the long over-water hops that had to be made (just crossing the Pacific would take several hops, each of which equaled the distance of her Honolulu-to-Oakland voyage) a flying boat was clearly preferable to a landplane. Good landing sites for a landplane were also a questionable thing.

For awhile she had almost settled on a Sikorsky S-43 “Baby Clipper,” but Igor Sikorsky was not willing to lower his $110,000.00 price in exchange for free publicity.  He didn’t need to. His S-42s (which were crossing oceans) and S-43s (which Pan Am used on its Alaskan and inter-island Caribbean routes) were famous enough.  It’s likely that even if Sikorsky had lowered his price, the adaptations that Amelia needed made to the plane would have put it beyond her price range. 

   

There was another consideration. She wasn’t familiar with flying boats, and it was doubtful whether, even with intense training, she could learn enough fast enough to fly the amphibian with skill.

The S-43 “Baby Clipper”

In fact, she wasn’t even rated on multiengine planes, so George hired Paul Mantz as a technical advisor / instructor, both to teach Amelia how to fly a multiengine aircraft, and also to help plan the route. 

Paul liked Amelia. The two of them hit it off immediately. They spent so much time together in fact (George being absent in Hollywood) that Paul’s wife sued for divorce, naming Amelia as a co-respondent based upon alleged adultery. Paul and Amelia both, plus the rest of the team she was assembling, denied that any sexual improprieties could have taken place. Ultimately, Amelia was dismissed as a party, but not until after the newspapers had had a salacious field day.*

Paul was unimpressed with some of Amelia’s piloting habits. What particularly bothered him was her manner of managing a ground loop which he was convinced was a better way to have an accident than to avoid one. 

A ground loop (though the causes are different) is somewhat analogous to an automobile skid. Novice drivers often panic in a skid and step on the gas by way of trying to power out of the situation. In the same way, novice fliers will throw open the throttle, trying to overcome the physics of a ground loop. 

This reaction sometimes works if the car (or plane) is in the very early stages of the event. It is also a technique used by pilots (or drivers) as a “Hail Mary” when the only choice is between damaging the plane (or car) or injuring the passengers.  But it can cause the vehicle, whether car or plane, to go out of control.

Normally, it does not take long for a driver to learn to steer out of a skid. Likewise, a pilot quickly learns that rudder control is the key to overcoming the tendency to ground loop. It’s a technique Amelia should have mastered under the tutelage of Aneta Snook, so when Paul found that she still gunned the engine at such times he was amazed --- and concerned. And though he worked diligently to break her of the habit, Amelia seemed unfazed by the fact that she was making a dangerous error. Mantz began to wonder just how many of Amelia’s aircraft “glitches” were due to uncertain piloting. 

Paul Mantz

There would be no space for uncertain piloting on the Worldflight they were planning. 

The decision was finally made to purchase a landplane. The landplane Amelia and George decided upon (in consultation with Paul Mantz) was the Lockheed Electra Model 10.  

Introduced by Lockheed in 1935 as a “light” airliner designed to carry ten passengers and two crew members, the plane was meant to compete with the Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC-2. The civilian airlines of fourteen nations used the Lockheed Electra Model 10. Eight air forces, including the United States, used them too. Thus, it was a well-tested type of plane. 

Mantz was well-acquainted with the Electra. He had flown variants of the aircraft on mercy-mission medical and food drops to isolated areas that had suffered natural disasters and wars. It was known as a stable aircraft, and more importantly, a dependable ship. The plane (the first Lockheed to sport a multiple rudder configuration) had been designed by a wunderkind intern named Kelly Johnson.**

The Electra 10A, the first of Kelly’s Johnson’s many airplanes, and the first of a series of Electra variants, had a length overall of 38 feet 7 inches, and a wingspan of 55 feet even. Fully loaded she weighed 10,500 pounds. 

Powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior SB engines, the 10A could develop 900 horsepower in total. The Electra’s maximum speed was just over 200 miles per hour and her cruising speed was an impressively efficient 190. 

The range of the 10A was a middling 713 miles. She had a ceiling of 19,400 feet. Clearly, neither of these two statistics worked in the plane’s favor as Amelia’s choice aircraft, but the Electra, at about $35,000.00, fit into her budget (although her long-distance modifications would double the price). 

The final choice was an Electra Model 10E. Larger and more powerful than the “A”, Lockheed further modified the plane to meet Amelia’s needs.  Her one-of-a-kind plane became known as the “Model 10E Special.”

The “Special” had the largest engines Lockheed could install on an Electra, two Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp SH31 engines capable of generating 1200 horsepower combined. 

The standard “E” had a cruising speed of 194 miles per hour, slightly better than that of the “A”. To increase the range of the “E” which was not appreciably better than that of the “A”, several additional fuel tanks were added within the wings and inside the fuselage. This gave the 10E Special three fuel tanks in each wing and six inside the fuselage. 

Given the slender, art-deco profile of the Electra, this meant that crew space inside the ship was at a premium, but the additions allowed the “Special” to carry 1,150 gallons of fuel, enough for 20 hours of flight at normal cruising speed, close to trebling her range.

The aircraft’s electronics were upgraded with a state-of-the art Western Electric radio. She was also outfitted with a Bendix Radio Direction Finder. And in case of a terminal emergency, the plane also had a Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO), powered either by generator or battery that would allow for Morse code capability if all else failed.

This Electra 10E is outfitted as a replica of Earhart’s “Special”

*The question of whether Amelia Earhart had an affair with Paul Mantz is an irrelevancy only asked because she was a female. Had she been the male in the relationship the question would have been mooted long ago. Mantz had a tiresomely consistent reputation as a skilled swordsman, but his taste in women ran to petite ingenuous twentysomethings. Amelia did not meet any of these criteria. However, it was well-known in certain circles that her antenuptial agreement with George Putnam  allowed for either spouse to indulge their curiosity with others and had an option to terminate the marriage upon demand. There’s no indication that either Amelia or George exercised either of these prerogatives. Within weeks of his divorce, Paul Mantz was engaged to a younger woman. The answer to the question of whether Paul and Amelia were lovers is, “Who cares?” 

 

**Clareence “Kelly” Johnson would go on to design the double-boomed P-38 Lightning, the triple-ruddered Lockheed Constellation, and the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaisance planes for the U.S. Government, working through the highly classified “Skunk Works.” Although he did not conceive the idea of the Electra he gave it its distinctive lines and its double rudders.