"Two hours and six minutes of going nowhere."

CCXX

Earhart and Noonan slept that night in the terminal at Dum Dum Airport hoping to make a quick pre-dawn getaway. They fell asleep uneasily, listening to rain pound on the roof. They were awakened around 3:30 A.M. by the airport’s meteorologist, who had both good news and bad news for them.* 

The good news was that the rain had stopped, at least temporarily, affording them a window of opportunity to leave Calcutta. The bad news was that the rain was sure to start again, and might at any time. “If it does, I’m not sure that you will be able to lift off due to field conditions. I wouldn’t even take time to refuel. You can get fuel at Akyab, in Burma. That’s only 336 miles by air. But leave now.”

Earhart and Noonan after their second landing in Akyab, Burma

Bleary-eyed, they hiked out to the hardstand where the Electra stood waiting. As they crossed the field, both grimaced at each other. The ground had turned into a gooey brown goop that stuck to everything and coated their flying boots and pants-cuffs. Every time they took a step it was accompanied by a slorping sound. 

“We’ll be damned lucky if we can lift off in this shit,” Noonan muttered. Amelia said nothing. She was trying to imagine how she would lift off. 

Wearily, they climbed into the Electra and started her up. The engines missed, roared, caught finally. “Everything is soaked,” Amelia shook her head. “That runway looks terrible. I hope we can get off.”

Noonan was more confident inside the plane with his maps and charts and the engines running. “We’ll get off.”

A.E. began to taxi. The Electra sagged and dragged as if it was mired up to its wheel axles in glue. She hoped that wasn’t the case. The plane moved sluggishly onto the runway proper. 

Amelia switched tanks, as she always did on liftoff, to the military-grade fuel reserve. Its higher octane delivered more power. She decided to firewall the throttles, anticipating that she would need most of the runway this morning. Releasing the brakes, the Electra moved forward --- but it didn’t surge. 

“Uh oh,” she said to herself. 

The plane rolled forward, gaining momentum, but battling with the mud. Amelia peered through the windscreen at the end of the runway, suddenly becoming aware that the dark mass she saw there was not a trick of her eyes in the uncertain night, but a stand of low trees.

The plane kept moving forward, faster, but not really fast enough. She felt no lift under the wings, but still the Electra was beginning to eat up the runway. Finally, with only a few lengths left to go, the Flying Laboratory broke free of the muck. Amelia put the ship into a steep climb --- and still barely missed the trees. For a moment she feared that the unretracted landing gear would snag on the trees, but it didn’t --- according to witnesses on the ground, by a matter of inches.

In true Midwestern fashion, Amelia let out a long breath but otherwise stayed cool and said nothing. 

She later wrote,

That take-off was precarious, perhaps as risky as any we had. The plane clung for what seemed like ages to the heavy sticky soil before the wheels finally lifted, and we cleared with nothing at all to spare the fringe of trees at the airdrome’s edge. 

Their troubles weren’t over for the day. Once in the air, they discovered that they were flying straight into the teeth of the monsoon. Their ground speed dropped to nothing. 

She remembered, 

For a time we flew through gray skies crowded with clouds as we passed over the many mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Much of the way from Calcutta to Akyab we flew very low over endless paddies.

They finally made Akyab, where they refueled and decided to push on. Not long after leaving Akyab, however, Amelia was unhappy to see the first spatterings of raindrops on the Electra’s windscreens. The air soon filled with so much rain that they might as well have been flying a submarine:

Once in the air the elements grew progressively hostile. The wind, dead ahead, began to whip furiously. Relentless rain pelted us. Everything was obliterated in the deluge, so savage that it beat off patches of paint along the leading edge of my plane’s wings.

She turned south toward the Bay of Bengal, hoping to fly out of the weather, but with no luck. Over the water, she dropped down to the deck, hoping for calmer air at a low altitude, but without success, and was horrified when the Electra unexpectedly raised the Sunderban Islands by nearly running into them in the rain.

When it’s impossible to see a few hundred yards ahead through the driving moisture the prospect of suddenly encountering hilltops is not a pleasant one.

“That’s it. We’re turning back,” Amelia sent a message to Fred via their clothesline telegraph. 

By uncanny powers, Fred Noonan managed to navigate us back to the airport, without being able to see anything but the waves beneath our plane. His comment was, ‘Two hours and six minutes of going nowhere.’

*The dialogue in this post is imagined. Akyab, Burma is today’s Sittwe, Myanmar. In 1937, Burma was a dependency of the British Empire of India.