CCIII
During
the early stages of the second Worldflight Amelia and Fred followed the
well-worn path in the Caribbean skies first blazed by Pan American. Earhart
also maintained contact with the world via Pan Am’s standard radio frequencies.
All in all, her transit of “The Lindbergh Circle” was entirely unexceptional
except for a bumpy landing at Caripito, Venezuela, a secondary airfield
maintained by Pan Am and Esso.
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June 2, 1937: Amelia Earhart bumps down on the
unpaved field at Caripito, Venezuela, complaining that she “really banged that
one up.” Neither Fred Noonan nor anyone on the ground saw anything unusual in
the landing. After refueling and restocking, Earhart was impatient to leave,
but she was grounded for the day by torrential tropical rains and strong
headwinds
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Amelia
ignored the mud and the rather rough conditions in her reminiscence of the
place, published posthumously:
I rolled out of bed at a
quarter of four in the morning, hoping to make a dawn take-off from San Juan,
but actually the Electra did not lift her wheels from the runway until nearly
seven o’clock, with the sun well above the horizon . . . I flew at 8,000 feet
most of the way, bucking head winds of probably thirty miles an hour . . . The
coast of Venezuela in the hazy distance was my first glimpse of South America.
As we drew near I saw densely wooded mountains and between them wide valleys of
open plains and jungle. I had never seen a jungle before . . . close-knit tropic jungles are in a pilot’s
eyes about the least desirable of all possible landing places . . . A muddy river wound through the
mountain pass we followed, a reddish-brown snake crawling among tight-packed
greenery. A few miles inland lay the red-roofed town of Caripito, with squat
oil tanks on the outskirts. There was a splendid airfield, with paved runways
and a well-equipped hangar. It is managed jointly by Pan American Airways and
the Standard Oil Company.
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The airport
management at Caripito had a dinner party for Earhart and Noonan. The main
hangar doubled as the dining room. Note the white-jacketed
gentleman sitting on a milk box and the Pratt & Whitney crate behind the
head of the table
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