"The heaviest rains I ever saw."

CCVII

Fred Noonan’s Nav Chart for Dakar (now NGA 104)

The light rain that had spattered the windscreens when the Electra lifted off from Natal turned into a driving rainstorm that lay squarely between the two continents of South America and Africa. Amelia tried everything to fly out of the blinding sheets of rain, but the cloud bottoms lay uncomfortably close to the sea and the cloud tops lay above the Electra’s ceiling. Fortunately, there was nothing to hit in midair, but the feeling of being inside with no outside was disorienting.  

Correction --- there wasn’t much to hit. The Hindenburg had exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey just the month before and so the Graf Zeppelin, which would otherwise be transiting the route to Recife, was grounded (it would fly to South America again, but only a few times; because the public felt endangered on airships the route would never again be profitable for lighter-than-air-craft). But there were still the plodding Air France Latecoere flying boats making the crossing loaded with mail but without passengers. Earhart actually managed to sight the Late in the distance at one point, but could not raise the plane by radio. She put it down to the bad weather, although in retrospect, the failure to reach the pilot of the Late might have been a cause for greater concern since this was the first attempt she’d made to reach anyone on any wavelength other than the usual Pan American Airways radio frequencies.  There is no record that the Late heard her.* 

The weather also made it impossible for Fred to take any celestial sights and he had to rely on his impressive dead reckoning skills. 

For some reason that was never explained afterward, Earhart chose to ignore Noonan’s calculations and follow her instinct across the Narrows. Whether this was her way of testing Noonan’s abilities under pressure or whether she was just being contrary, she insisted that the plane was off course for Dakar, and adjusted her flight path according to her own instincts. 

Noonan apparently didn’t argue. He merely told her that she would be 163 miles north of Dakar when she crossed the coast and would make landfall at the little town of St-Louis. 

And it was so. They landed at St-Louis precisely as predicted to find that they had made the crossing in thirteen hours and twelve minutes, a new world’s record, and this, she said, “in the heaviest rains I ever saw.” She was gracious enough, when cabling home of her arrival in Africa, to admit that she had erred by not following Noonan’s navigational instructions, but as to what gripped her to do so no one now will ever know.  It was a bad augury for what eventually transpired, the disappearance of them both.

Her former navigator, Captain Harry Manning perhaps had it right when he characterized her sharply as “a bit of a prima donna.”

*In her posthumous memoir of the Worldflight, Amelia Earhart: The Last Flight she averred that communications with the Air France mail plane were impossible because the Latecoeres only had telegraph keys; when writing this she seemed to have forgotten that the Electra had a telegraphy system as well as signal and voice radio capabilities.