Behind Schedule

CCV

Most historical sources footnote the fact that by the time Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan left Paramaribo they were “behind schedule” but there’s precious little said about the “schedule” itself. It seems an odd remark, considering that the Electra was carrying neither mail nor cargo, and that it had no perishables aboard, other than Noonan and Earhart themselves.

Earhart certainly behaved as if she was behind schedule even this early in the Worldflight. The weather delay at Caripito upset her a great deal, and when she arrived at Paramaribo her first impulse was to “gas and go” on to Fortaleza, Brazil with barely a bathroom break. As things transpired, she and Noonan overnighted at Paramaribo, but whether this was due to a technical issue with the plane, a diplomatic concern about offending their Dutch hosts, or a safety concern that led airport officials to not issue her a departure permit without adequate rest, is unknown at this remove in time. 

What is known is that Earhart ignored the advice of those Pan American Airways pilots who regularly flew “The Lindbergh Circle,” the coast-hugging route that carried passengers around the Caribbean in favor of an overland route that flew the Electra above miles of unexplored Amazon jungle. The overland route shaved miles and time off the transit to Fortaleza, but it did so at a very increased risk. Most of the region had never been mapped --- most of it, in fact, had never been seen by European eyes and nothing was known of most of the natives who probably lived there --- it was not even certain that the land was populated. 

There were no open areas that might serve as emergency landing fields, no infrastructure, nothing --- nothing except miles of trackless forest canopy. If the Electra suffered a crisis in flight there was no place to put down. Earhart and Noonan would simply tumble from the sky to be swallowed up by the greenery much as by any bluewater ocean, vanished, gone, unfindable.  

     

Amelia seemed dismissive of the Ocean of Trees until she came upon it. Her shock at the vastness of it and at the utter lack of discernable landmarks and waypoints is reflected in her posthumously-published memoirs:

. . . We took off to skim the tree-tops and then pull up. Speaking of trees, we had plenty of them on this jump to Fortaleza in Brazil --- trees and water. During the day we flew over 960 miles of jungle, added to hops . . . over open sea . . . a trifle more than half the transcontinental distance between New York and Los Angeles. . . After about ten hours’ flying I was glad to see Fortaleza sitting just where it should be . . . 

Even after making this impressive hop over uncharted territory, Amelia still had the idea to “gas and go” down to Natal and then to cross the Atlantic narrows all in one day. It was an ambitious plan, but very likely a suicidal one.

What was driving her? Certainly, George had scheduled a series of high-visibility publicity rounds when she got home, but nothing was set in stone with just about a month still left to fly. Time was built in to the schedule to allow for weather delays, repairs, and layovers for rest stops.

The only rational answer seems to be that Amelia was motivated to press on relentlessly by the expense of her expedition. For each delayed hour the deeply-indebted Putnams had to maintain ground crews and caches of fuel and parts in the most remote corners of the world. The faster Amelia completed her planned flight the less onerous would be the final bill. And the quicker the fees from book sales and appearances would flow in.

Feeding her anxiety was her own exhaustion. In the months leading up to the Worldflight Amelia had done everything but look after herself properly. She had maintained a full schedule of classes at Purdue and a full schedule of public appearances in addition to her preparations for the Worldflight. After months of sleeping four hours a night she probably had no clue how truly spent she was. Undoubtedly, her judgement was impaired, and her mental state was not improved by her insistence on taking on one grueling leg of the flight after another. 

Who convinced her, time and again, to lay over, to sleep, to eat well at the Pan Am hotels en route? Was it Fred Noonan? Perhaps. More than anyone, he had the most to lose if Amelia fell prey to her own compulsions.