To Make Us Wish We Could Stay

CCXXXIV

This photo, taken with a well-wisher, was snapped on July 1, 1937. Note the camera in Amelia’s hands. “Delayed another day” the caption read when it hit the wires

The four day layover that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan spent at Lae was, in most respects, unexceptional. The Electra was given a thorough going-over, yet another 40-hour maintenance check. The spark plugs were changed. The oil was changed. The filters were changed. The fluids were drained and freshly refilled. This and that and the next thing were tweaked and adjusted.

Landing at Lae. Upon arrival anywhere, A.E. always exited the cockpit first in dramatic fashion, usually in front of an adoring crowd

A.E. and Fred unpacked the plane. Every conceivable non-essential was removed from the aircraft, packed up, and shipped home, even Amelia’s jewelry. They repacked the ship, having saved some scores of pounds of weight.

In what today would be called a “photo op” Fred and Amelia pose atop the Electra. It’s hard to say whether Noonan has an arm around Amelia

The mechanics spent a frustrating day with the oft-repaired fuel analyzer and the Sperry autopilot, both of which were giving Earhart trouble again. The Radio Direction Finder was recalibrated. The radio was checked out.

The various antennae of the Electra can be seen in this photograph

Fred and Amelia had to do the obligatory rounds expected of visiting dignitaries. They did so happily enough, though in photographs Amelia looks increasingly enervated. She wasn’t feeling well, and hadn’t been feeling well since at least Bandoeng, and had been vomiting in the mornings. “It must be the petrol fumes,” she wrote home.

Engine maintenance at Lae. Note the stepladder

In truth, she was worn out. By the time she reached the vicinity of Howland Island she’d flown the equivalent of one equatorial circumnavigation of the Earth, and that in twenty days of flying with far too few rest days. Between flying, writing, dinner engagements, aircraft maintenance, and attending to all the other myriad details of the Worldflight, Amelia rarely got to bed before 1:00 A.M., and she was frequently up at 3:00 A.M. to start another long day. Then, on travel days, there were the intense strains inherent in piloting. The swift changes of scene, climate, food, water, language, and custom, all compressed into a tightly-packed month, would have exhausted even the most robust constitution, and Amelia, though known for her grit, was not known for her stamina. People who saw her at Bandoeng and Lae came away with the same impression Neta Snook had formed of her student years earlier, that she substituted exuberance for her lack of inherent talents. Amelia would gladly turn a wrench or get her hands dirty helping the mechanics, but she seemed to have only a limited idea of how the plane interacted with itself mechanically. After owning it nearly a full year, she had only recently learned how to change a fuse in her beloved airplane, and she still struggled with the radio settings. For Amelia Earhart, it was never really about the voyage, it was about reaching the destination.  

Fred Noonan adjusting the prop hub

And if she was tired, the plane was also tired. For all the hoopla surrounding the “Flying Laboratory” with its distinctive Flash Gordon-like RDF loop atop the fuselage, the Electra 10E Special was essentially a stock mid-range airliner. Built to compete with the DC-2, it wasn’t even cutting edge anymore since the DC-3 had taken over the airliner market. Its larger engines were a factory-available option, not unique to Amelia Earhart’s plane alone. Designed for route operations, the plane just hadn’t been designed as a globetrotter. This isn’t to say that Electras weren’t and aren’t rugged. A few still operate, their 80 year old airframes still giving topnotch service. But even in its day, the average Electra wasn’t asked to fly from temperate climates to jungle latitudes, across sandstorming deserts, above mountain ranges, and through monsoon rains all in a matter of days. Not to mention having to cross the vastest sea on the planet with its fickle winds.  Things had started to go wrong. The repetitive failures of the gauges, the autopilot, and even the RDF spoke not of the low quality of the parts but of a more deep-rooted problem that no mechanic had been able to tease out. Perhaps the insulation on some piece of wiring had become worn (and there were miles of wiring aboard) causing a sneak circuit that underlay the malfunctions. The only way to know would be to take the plane apart and inspect its innards, something A.E. had no time or inclination (or apparently money) to do while en route. Then too, the Electra had been serviced not by a crew chief familiar with her, but by an army of mechanics across twenty time zones speaking at least five European languages and any number of native tongues. Mistakes were inevitably made along the way. Unquestionably, the aircraft was airworthy. But was she up to flying the South Pacific far from help?

Running up the engines. Amelia can barely be seen in the cockpit

The Lae layover was unusual in several respects, one of which is the surprising number of photographs taken of Amelia, Fred, and the plane during its four day stopover. There is even film of Amelia’s final liftoff. Another oddity was the number of cables and contacts --- even a telephone call --- that Amelia exchanged with George and others in that relatively short time.

Someone took a picture of Amelia taking a picture. Her camera is a Kodak

Everyone has been as helpful and cooperative as possible --- food, hot baths, mechanical service, radio and weather reports, advice from veteran pilots here --- all combine to make us wish we could stay.  

Local Aussies, mostly airport and airline officers and their wives, pose with A.E. and Fred Noonan at Lae

And stay they did, at least for an extra day at Amelia’s own behest. The reason was never explained, but it is important to remember that she had done the same thing in Hawaii back in March just before her groundlooped take-off attempt at Luke Field, delayed her departure by 24 full hours during which she mostly slept. Perhaps she did the same at Lae on the 30^th of June. She mistrusted the Pacific Ocean, and had done so ever since her solo flight from Honolulu to Oakland in the big Vega, after which she swore she would never take a transoceanic hop in a single-engine plane again. At Lae she wrote:

In this blurry image, a frame from the last liftoff video, Fred assists Amelia as she dashes up the wing toward the cabin hatchway. Note that they are both wearing dark clothing

In these fast-moving days . . .  the whole width of the world . . . passed behind us --- except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.

Another fuzzy frame of the final liftoff video shows the Electra, tail in the air, trying to leave the ground

They stayed at Lae on July 1^st also:

Clouds and winds blowing the wrong way conspired to keep [us] on the ground again.

An obviously weary flight crew at Lae

It sounds like a convenient excuse, but Earhart and Noonan were trying to avoid headwinds which would cut into their precious fuel supply over the water. A tailwind to push them along would have been a gift from the gods. On this leg of the voyage every drop of gas was worth its weight not in gold but in life itself.

The flight plan as worked out in Oakland in May. Amelia had a tendency to depart from her flight plans. In this situation it is surmised from her radio messages that she overflew Nauru, which would have put her well to the north of her planned route. Her last message stated that she had reached the Line of Position (LOP) 157-337 at 2014 GMT. If so, she may have been as far as 5 degrees north of Howland. Her habit of not giving precise positions by radio cost her her life --- and Fred Noonan’s

Just, and perhaps more, important, atmospheric conditions caused the daily time check radioed from Greenwich to be garbled. Fred was unable to set his chronometers, and on this leg more than any other, precise time meant precise navigating. Flying from Lae to Howland Island required pinpoint navigating, a task that was complicated by the fact that the Flying Laboratory would be crossing two time zones and the International Date Line before finding land again.  Most of the tiny islands --- and they were few and far between --- along the route used sun time or local time, and the USCGC Itasca, standing off Howland to bring Amelia in, used U.S. Navy Time.* If they were to survive to reach Howland Island, a precise Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was an absolute necessity.

 

The AN 5740 Master Chronometer set to GMT became standard issue for the U.S. military in World War II

Howland is such a small spot in the Pacific that every aid to locating it must be available.

 

A satellite view of utterly nondescript Howland Island

This raises the question about what Fred Noonan was doing during the Lae layover. No one seems to know. The rumor is that he went on a bender the evening of the day they arrived, and that this bender ultimately contributed to their deaths, but there’s no solid evidence to back up either claim.** In photos, Fred and Amelia seem to be getting along famously, and she certainly didn’t complain of Fred’s behavior to George when they spoke.***

Howland Island from an overflying aircraft looks essentially identical today to how Amelia Earhart would have seen it eighty years ago

If anything, Amelia seemed more reliant than usual on her compatriot. Wanting to standardize the welter of confusing time settings it was he and not she who set the time for their departure, making certain that the Elapsed Time of the flight coincided with his carefully worked-out computations. Liftoff was set for 00:00 GMT, or 10:00 A.M. local time, July 2, 1937. 

The Final Takeoff

*The U.S. Navy had also dispatched the U.S.S. Ontario and the U.S.S. Myrtle Beach of the Asiatic Fleet as guard ships along the route. Both were antiquated Spanish-American War-era vessels with inefficient radios and took no real part in the events of July 2-3, 1937.

** It is fairly certain that Fred Noonan had fallen off the wagon in Bandoeng or before and it’s unlikely he put the bottle down at Lae. However, there is no evidence that he was drunk either the day before liftoff or at liftoff. Fred was a prideful pedant who rechecked his work incessantly, and was a better navigator stone-blind drunk than most men were stone-cold sober. The idea that he would have made a navigation error and not caught it in a timely fashion is just too fantastical to contemplate.

*** Or George never made it public.