Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights

Sparks flew, a wing bent, and the landing gear snapped off as the silver Lockheed Electra 10-E plane smashed into the runway at Luke Field, outside Honolulu. The pilot’s only stroke of luck was that the aircraft, which contained nearly a thousand gallons of fuel, didn’t explode.

The thirty-nine-year-old Amelia Earhart and her crew of two navigators, Fred Noonan and Harry Manning, crawled out of the wreckage, unsettled but otherwise unhurt. They had meant to depart on the second leg of a gruelling voyage: a round-the-world flight that had begun in Oakland, California, and would continue westward, with two dozen or so stops, before ending up back in Oakland. People close to Earhart knew that she wasn’t fully ready for a challenge of this magnitude, and so a work-around had been devised. An extra crew member with extensive flight experience, Paul Mantz, had joined the flight to Hawaii. On the runway in Oakland, he switched places with Earhart and assumed the throttles during takeoff. She then piloted most of the way to Oahu, but Mantz often took over.

As they approached Luke Field, Mantz sensed that Earhart had “pilot fatigue.” He asked her, “Do you want to land it?”

“No, you land it,” Earhart said.

He did so, then said farewell. Earhart had been able to observe Mantz’s handling of the plane over the Pacific, and from now on she would be the only pilot onboard. Flying the Electra solo wouldn’t be easy. Although the plane had state-of-the-art technology for its time, piloting it demanded constant coördination among the throttle, the rudder, and the control column—especially during takeoff and landing. While taking off on the second leg, Earhart ignored advice that Mantz had given her not to “jockey the throttles”—change the speed to maintain direction and balance—and the plane veered into a violent spin across the runway. The press had assembled to watch Earhart soar, and instead witnessed an embarrassment.

The stakes were huge. Men had been flying around the world since 1924, when a team of eight military officers completed a twenty-seven-thousand-mile journey in a hundred and seventy-five days (with seventy-four stops). Only one pilot had done a solo circumnavigation: a Texan named Wiley Post. In 1933, Post completed a fifteen-thousand-mile journey, traversing Germany, the Soviet Union, Alaska, and Canada. Four years later, a round-the-world flight remained daunting. Earhart planned to have human navigators on board with her, but she’d be the first female pilot to accomplish the feat.

Earhart had become instantly famous in 1928, as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane. But, though she’d been photographed wearing a flight suit and a leather helmet, she was merely a passenger; the plane had actually been piloted by two men, Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. She had since been working on establishing her command of the cockpit. There were plenty of accomplished female pilots who could’ve taken command of a transatlantic flight themselves, and some of these women considered Earhart’s notoriety unearned. In 1932, after logging more flight miles—but not as many as other top female pilots—she flew solo across the Atlantic in a cramped red Vega, a single-engine plane barely insulated against storms and cold temperatures. She fought exhaustion, iced wings, and a broken altimeter. Her intention was to land in Paris, but she ended up in a cow field in Ireland. Earhart approached the experience with an easy, almost reckless, confidence. She’d always been this way; as a girl growing up in the Kansas City area, she jury-rigged a “roller coaster” with steep ramps, then barrelled down it and fell off, only to exult, “This is just like flying!”

A globe-circling flight would be Earhart’s lengthiest journey by far, twenty-nine thousand miles hugging the equator. This wasn’t mere hopping among landmasses, as with Post’s route. Her path had been ambitiously charted to include a refuelling stop on Howland Island, a speck between Hawaii and Australia. A pilot making such a journey needed to be in excellent shape, with sufficient strength and stamina to manage the controls in turbulence, particularly during long hours in a cockpit with no autopilot. The dangers were extraordinary: enormous stretches over open ocean, unpredictable weather, extended isolation, intense psychological pressure. Yet the rewards promised to be substantial, from marketing opportunities to media attention. NBC and CBS were fighting over the rights to exclusive broadcasts.

Noonan and Manning had agreed to accompany Earhart nearly the whole way. They were excited to be associated with her glamour, but they also considered the job a risk. Rather than spending time practicing in the powerful Electra, Earhart had been crisscrossing the country, giving lectures, making sponsorship appearances, and attending promotional events. For a while, she had a gig as the aviation editor at Cosmopolitan, in which she published a column about flying; she also launched a line of pilot-inspired women’s clothing. Seen from today’s perspective, Earhart was at once a pioneering aviator and a proto-influencer. Her goal, in both roles, was to keep topping herself—and to keep the public captivated.

After the crash in Hawaii, Earhart faced reporters with a brittle smile, promising that she would mount another circumnavigation soon. Her husband of half a dozen years, George Palmer Putnam—six feet of restless energy in a tailored suit—publicly blamed a blown tire, skirting any mention of pilot error. An heir to the Putnam publishing empire, he was more than Earhart’s husband; he was her manager, dealmaker, and publicist. Some found him dashing, but others thought of him as a hustler. He’d launched Earhart into fame with that Atlantic crossing in 1928—arranging the flight entirely with the intention of publishing a quickie memoir from Earhart about the stunt. (The book, “20 Hrs. 40 Min.,” was allegedly ghostwritten; Earhart wrote to a friend, “I should like to have made it better but time was short and I done as good as I could.”) He’d chosen her over other female aviators in no small part because of her gamine beauty—and he soon began pursuing her romantically, even though he was married.

Every stage of her round-the-world attempt was being overseen by Putnam, all coördinated to maximize publicity. He had once been an executive at his family’s publishing house, focussing on memoirs of adventure and exploration, but he’d left after a merger, and as the Great Depression dragged on Earhart’s fame became one of the couple’s few reliable assets. Her paid appearances kept them afloat, and Putnam feverishly worked to line up side deals, including film rights. A Christmas-season release date for another memoir was already pencilled in. Putnam’s career had been bumpy, but he repeatedly succeeded in giving Earhart’s exploits a romantic aura—one that has lingered to this day.

The wrecked Electra had to be shipped back to California for costly repairs. Putnam fretted: Who will pay for the damage? Can we afford a second attempt? Other difficulties had arisen well before the Hawaii crash. Putnam asked Bradford Washburn, a skilled explorer, mapper, and pilot, to accompany Earhart. (When Putnam was at his family’s publishing house, he’d worked with a teen-age Washburn as one of the authors on a series about boy explorers.) Putnam invited him to their estate in Rye, New York, and Earhart showed him her planned route on a world map, highlighting how the westward leg from Hawaii to New Guinea necessitated the refuelling stop at Howland Island. Washburn pronounced it a dangerous folly. When he asked about her navigational plan, Earhart responded, “Dead reckoning”—estimating a plane’s position based on speed, time, and direction from a known point. Washburn was appalled. “I didn’t feel that she had anywhere nearly adequate equipment and preparation for a long overseas hop to Howland Island,” he later reflected. Earhart, however, was certain that she’d hit her tiny target with the gear already on board. Washburn said that she should at least place a radio on the island which would allow the Electra to home in on its position. Putnam dismissively told Washburn, “If you go to all that trouble, the book will not be out for Christmas sales.” As Washburn recalled it, “G.P. was just as confident in Earhart and her judgment as A.E. was herself, and this made a very difficult combination to argue with.”

Earhart and Putnam stopped trying to win Washburn over. They soon announced that Harry Manning—a marine officer who’d become a national hero after saving the crew of a sinking Italian vessel—would be Earhart’s navigator. Although Manning had a pilot’s license and knew Morse code well, some of Earhart’s friends doubted that he had the experience required for a round-the-world flight. Manning brushed off the skepticism, but after the humiliating crash in Hawaii he grew uneasy—not just about becoming an object of mockery but about risking his life.

From Honolulu, Earhart and her crew booked berths on a ship headed to California. By the time they disembarked, Manning had made it clear to Earhart that he was quitting. As always, Earhart and Putnam were undeterred. Fred Noonan—who’d been hired, shortly before the first attempt, to handle Pacific navigation—was still up for a second attempt. A lanky six-footer with auburn hair, Noonan was a Pan Am veteran who’d helped pioneer transpacific routes. His capability as a navigator was beyond question. But so was his fondness for drinking.

In an off-the-record exchange, Earhart told James Bassett, Jr., the Los Angeles Times’ aviation editor, that she’d seen Noonan inebriated, and that she didn’t trust him. But Putnam had apparently insisted on using Noonan; for one thing, he was an inexpensive hire. Noonan, Bassett later recalled, had sworn to Earhart that he’d remain sober during the trip. But the danger was obvious.

When Manning learned that Earhart was planning a second attempt with just Noonan, he was deeply concerned. In his view, they were both dangerously casual about radio discipline: Earhart had never bothered to master Morse code, and Noonan relied heavily on celestial navigation. Together, they preferred voice communication, even though ships in the Pacific depended on continuous wave transmissions, which could travel farther and cut through static. In an interview, Earhart acknowledged, “Both Fred Noonan and I know Morse code but we’re rank amateurs and probably never would be able to send and receive more than 10 words a minute.” In a life-or-death emergency, voice signals might fade or be unintelligible; Morse code could punch through static and bad weather.

Earhart was content to stick with voice communication, though. It was just easier.

Earhart knew that Putnam would be frustrated by the wasted expenditures and the repair bills caused by her crashing the Electra. She told a friend, “I’ve just got to get away for a couple of days by myself, before it drives me crazy.” Upon returning to California, she fled to a tranquil desert ranch near Palm Springs owned by close friends: Jacqueline Cochran, a fiery aviator, and her husband, Floyd Odlum, a financial titan known as the Wizard of Wall Street.

Cochran had bluntly warned Earhart against attempting a round-the-world voyage that included Howland Island. “You just don’t have sufficient navigation communication,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll ever hit it.” But Earhart wouldn’t abandon the idea. Cochran and Odlum adored her, and they had financially supported her flying career. Their feelings toward Putnam, however, were less charitable. “We didn’t like or dislike him at the start,” Odlum later said. “But we came to dislike him because . . . we thought he was taking advantage of Amelia.” He added, “She was his meal ticket.”

Some top female aviators also had their doubts about Earhart’s latest project. Elinor Smith, who had been flying since she was a child and who, at sixteen, became the youngest licensed pilot in the U.S., felt that Earhart was courageous and determined. But in 1929, in New Castle, Delaware, Smith had an eye-opening experience with her during an evaluation flight of a plane designed by the aircraft manufacturer Giuseppe Bellanca. A Bellanca test pilot, George Haldeman, handled takeoff, with Earhart in the co-pilot seat and Smith observing from the rear. At about a thousand feet, Earhart took over, and the plane immediately began lurching and wobbling. Embarrassed, she signalled for Haldeman to take over. “She knew the basics, I guess, but she didn’t have that much practice,” Smith recalled in a memoir. “As sure as God is my judge, she could not keep her nose on the horizon.”

In Smith’s view, Putnam was a grifter who kept pushing Earhart’s celebrity ahead of her skills. Getting her into a Bellanca cockpit before she was ready, Smith thought, was typical of his approach: “Knowing full well she was too inexperienced to fly it, he would simply sideline the plane in a hangar until the day when she could. He would meanwhile line up backing for a future flight.”

In March, 1929, in the lead-up to the Powder Puff Derby—a headline-making race from Santa Monica to Cleveland in which Earhart finished third—the Times reported that Earhart had earned a transport license, the highest civilian aviation rating issued by the government. Just a few American women held one at the time. But stamps on the license go back only as far as 1930. It’s not clear why the Times reported otherwise, but Putnam was known to feed stories to the papers.

Such airbrushing probably seemed harmless, even apt, for a rogue like Earhart. To become aviators, women had to aggressively scramble for resources, whereas men could receive pilot training in the military. Yet Putnam sometimes tried to push Earhart’s career forward with unscrupulous methods. Smith’s memoir recounts that, before the derby, Putnam offered her a peculiar job: “What would you think of a guaranteed seventy-five-dollar weekly income for a two-year period—as a starting figure, that is? You would be Amelia’s pilot and mechanic during the derby. . . . You would do all the difficult cross-country flying—A.E. is not physically sturdy, you know—but of course, she must appear to be doing it. When pictures are taken at various stopovers, you will see to it that you stand to her left, so her name will always come first in the captions. You will, of course, do no writing or public speaking for another two years at least. It’s all spelled out in this contract.” Smith refused the offer.

The ruse, Smith suggested in her memoir, was employed successfully on at least one occasion. At an airfield on Long Island, the press celebrated Earhart’s “perfect landing” of a single-engine Fokker Universal plane. But Earhart had actually stepped out of the rear of the aircraft, and a man whom Putnam had identified to the press as her mechanic could be seen sitting in the cockpit. Nobody, Smith wrote, had bothered to question how Earhart “had disembarked perfectly coiffed, immaculate from head to toe, and wearing a dress in a plane that couldn’t be flown in one!”

Earhart needed thousands of dollars to repair the Electra. In New York, she met with Harry Bruno, an aviation publicist who had worked for Charles Lindbergh, whose piloting feats in the Spirit of St. Louis had made him an international hero. Bruno agreed to help her raise funds. At his behest, Admiral Richard Byrd contributed fifteen hundred dollars, repaying a kindness from 1928, when Earhart had directed her earnings from Lucky Strike cigarette ads to support his expedition to Antarctica; the financier Bernard Baruch added another twenty-five hundred dollars. Earhart and Putnam scraped together enough cash to repair the Electra within two months. They also revised her flight plan: this time, Earhart would launch from Miami and head east, from Puerto Rico to Brazil to West Africa and onward. This would allow her to pass through India before the height of the summer monsoon season.

Throughout the spring, Earhart and Putnam crisscrossed the country for more appearances and meetings. Quaker Oats executives promised Earhart that, after she’d completed the flight, they would give her five thousand dollars to star in a series of ads as the brand’s “World Reporter.” Meanwhile, Putnam secured a book contract with Harcourt, Brace & Co. for Earhart’s next memoir, to be titled “World Flight.” The text would be based on in-transit dispatches that she would wire to Putnam. A deal was also struck with Gimbels department store to sell “commemorative covers”—decorated envelopes bearing buyers’ home addresses that would be packed into the Electra’s nose and postmarked at stops along the route, as proof that Earhart was completing her itinerary.

In May, 1937, while Putnam was working to keep his wife in the spotlight, the Hindenburg exploded at an airfield in New Jersey, killing thirty-six people. Earhart’s aerial exploits no longer seemed headline-worthy. Putnam, desperate for funds, mortgaged a house that he and his first wife had owned in Rye. To save costs, modifications recommended for the Electra after the Hawaii crash—stronger radios, better direction-finding gear, upgrades to the emergency equipment—were scaled back or scrapped.

In mid-May, the Electra, housed at Lockheed’s Burbank facility, was deemed ready to fly again. Within days, Earhart took off for Miami from Burbank’s Union Air Terminal, with Putnam, Noonan, and her mechanic, Ruckins (Bo) McKneely, Jr. C. B. Allen, of the New York Herald Tribune, was dispatched to Florida, having been tipped off by Putnam about the imminent start of Earhart’s second attempt to circumnavigate the Earth.

Paul Mantz, who’d remained Earhart’s technical adviser, was at an aviation competition in St. Louis, oblivious to her latest plans. Earhart and Putnam had decided to move ahead without informing him. When Mantz eventually heard the news, he was livid.

On the way from Burbank to Miami, Earhart made a refuelling stop in Tucson. But one of her plane’s engines caught fire, which occasioned an unplanned overnight stay (and the purchase of a new fire extinguisher). The next day, she dodged a sandstorm in El Paso and arrived in New Orleans, where she reconnected with the pilot Edna Gardner, who ran the New Orleans Air College. That night, Gardner, Earhart, Putnam, and Noonan went out to dinner. Gardner, never a fan of Putnam, found herself cringing throughout the evening. “He was so domineering and so pushy,” she later said. Earhart mentioned something about the plane’s radio, and Putnam snapped, “You had a chance to change. It’s too late now.” When Earhart looked downcast, he said, “Stop your snivelling!” Gardner subsequently recalled, “I wondered if she wouldn’t relish being off and away on the greatest adventure of her life.” She also said, “We all loved her and disliked seeing what he was doing to her.”

At the same time, Gardner worried that continuing the flight was dangerous. She calculated that, without better preparation and equipment, Earhart had slim odds of survival.

After a night in New Orleans, the Electra headed to Miami. Noonan guided them into the municipal airport, but Earhart’s landing was rough and bumpy, and it was witnessed by Jane Wood, a Miami Herald reporter. Wood gasped, but Earhart climbed out of the cockpit laughing. “I certainly smacked it down hard that time,” she joked, dusting herself off.

Earhart confirmed to Wood that she was going to try again to circumnavigate the Earth, though she didn’t specify when. “Just what of scientific value do you expect to get out of your trip?” Wood asked.

“Not much,” Earhart said. “I am going for the trip. I am going for fun. Can you think of any better reason?”

Earhart was more candid with Allen, of the Herald Tribune. “I’m getting old and want to make way for the younger generation before I’m feeble,” she said. “I have a feeling that there is just one more good flight left in my system, and I’m hoping this trip is it. . . . As far as I know, I’ve only got one obsession—a small and probably typical feminine fear of growing old—so I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back.” Allen, recognizing the news value of these words, wanted to publish a story about the interview, but Earhart asked him to hold off until after the journey.

Meanwhile, Allen did some investigative reporting, running through equipment checklists from Earhart’s California-Hawaii flight to see how carefully the Electra had been refurbished since the crash. He noticed a glaring omission: the Electra’s marine-frequency radio, which would help the plane send out a distress call to ships, had been removed. He asked Earhart for comment, and she shrugged it off. “Dead weight,” she said. She reminded him that she and Noonan barely knew Morse code. Better to leave the device behind.

Hangar space was secured for the Electra. Before the big takeoff, Putnam needed to sort out some logistics and publicity operations. He and Earhart didn’t want to reveal the plan yet, and she stuck to the script. She fibbed to the Miami Daily News, “We’re just out on a shakedown trip”—a practice flight.

Earhart, Putnam, and her crew stayed at the Columbus Hotel, overlooking Biscayne Bay. Putnam was thrilled that the Miami papers were hailing their arrival and speculating about what was next. Even better, Earhart was added to the guest list of a gala honoring the aviators Dick Merrill and Jack Lambie. There, she ran into her old friend Phoebe Omlie, a trailblazer who’d won the light-aircraft crown at the 1929 Women’s Air Derby. Earhart soon told her that she was about to make another world-flight attempt. Like Gardner, Omlie was skeptical. She asked about the Pacific leg and expressed concern about the risks. Earhart assured her that all contingencies had been considered.

Meanwhile, Putnam asked Bo McKneely, the mechanic, to join Earhart and Noonan for the round-the-world flight. McKneely seriously considered the offer—Putnam promised to arrange everything, fast—but his father had a heart condition, and the thought of being unreachable for weeks weighed too heavily on him. His decision to stay behind, he later said, haunted him for the rest of his life.

Putnam, for his part, expressed nothing but optimism about the journey. “We are going to make enough money out of this flight to buy a little place in California,” he told an assistant. “Then we’re going to settle down and enjoy life together. I’m going to write some books.” During the Florida interlude, Putnam noticed that Earhart had developed an obsession with eating pompano, a local fish. He and the crew began referring to her as Madame Pompano.

One of Putnam’s two sons from his first marriage, David, was living in Florida, and he came to Miami to wish his stepmother luck. The day before the first leg of the second attempt, Earhart scribbled a letter to her mother on hotel stationery: “Hope to take off tomorrow a.m. to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Here is three hundred bucks.”

The next day, McKneely was at the hangar before dawn, soldering a part that had broken off inside the Electra. Years later, he recalled the tension of that morning—Lockheed officials were reportedly whispering about weight and balance, and about the eleven hundred and fifty-one gallons of fuel sloshing in the plane’s tanks, each gallon weighing six pounds. The Electra was so heavy that just getting it aloft would be no simple feat.

Noonan squeezed uncomfortably inside the fuselage, wedged amid fuel tanks and gear. At 5:40 a.m., Earhart was ready to go. Putnam later recalled seeing her off in the hangar: “There in the dim chill we perched briefly on cold concrete steps, and the feel of her hands in mine told more than the words we did not speak could have told.” The Electra’s twin engines roared, and Earhart taxied toward departure. McKneely chased after the plane with several fire extinguishers, in case of another runway accident.

The Electra lifted into the air. Putnam watched his wife soar until the plane disappeared among the clouds.

At thirty-five hundred feet, the Electra settled into its first real rhythm. Earhart and Noonan, now alone, cruised at about a hundred and fifty miles per hour.

Seven hours and thirty-four minutes later, they touched down at Isla Grande Airport, in San Juan. Waiting for them was Clara Livingston, an old friend of Earhart’s who was also an accomplished pilot—she’d been one of the first women to fly a helicopter. Livingston now ran a grapefruit-and-coconut plantation on the island. She escorted Earhart and Noonan to the property and let them rest undisturbed, shielding them even from Putnam’s calls.

That night, Putnam called to speak with his wife. Livingston said that she was sleeping, and would wake her only if the matter was urgent. Putnam was irritated, but Livingston didn’t particularly care; like many in Earhart’s circle, she found him obnoxious.

From San Juan, Earhart and Noonan traced the northeastern curve of South America, flying more than six hundred miles to Caripito, Venezuela. It was Earhart’s first real view of the jungle—from the air—and she was transfixed. They landed amid oil tanks and refuelled at a Standard Oil hangar. Executives served her and Noonan steak, grape juice, and fruitcake.

By June 3rd, Earhart and Noonan had reached Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Guiana (now Suriname). Earhart gawked at markets where soft-shelled-turtle eggs were sold alongside string beans. She jotted impressions in a notebook. Especially intriguing to her were the Saramaka people, the descendants of enslaved Africans who had fought for, and won, their freedom.

Next came a nine-hour flight to Fortaleza, Brazil. Crossing the equator, Earhart was spellbound by the sprawling Amazon River below. The airport, situated outside the city, was antiquated, but their hotel, the Excelsior, was all Art Deco glamour and gleaming chandeliers. Earhart and Noonan had a laugh when they learned that the hotel had assigned them to one room. (They slept separately.)

From Fortaleza, they made a shorter flight to Natal, Brazil, a picturesque coastal city. Ahead of them loomed their most ambitious stretch yet: a nineteen-hundred–mile leap across the South Atlantic to Senegal. The leg would take twelve hours over open water—a brutal endurance test. The engine was thunderous, and to communicate Earhart relayed notes to Noonan that she attached to a bamboo fishing pole.

Over the Atlantic, they battled winds and rain for hours. Eventually, as they neared Africa, the weather broke. They touched down in Saint-Louis, Senegal—more than a hundred miles northeast of their intended target, Dakar. In Saint-Louis, Earhart attended a reception at the governorgeneral’s mansion, then wired some impressions back to Putnam, who commissioned a colorful column that appeared in the Herald Tribune. (“I explained that I had only slacks and shirts in which to meet kings and beggars.”)

Readers were rooting for Earhart back home. “All day I have been thinking of Amelia Earhart somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and hoping she will make her flight safely,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column. “She is one of the most fascinating people I know, because . . . she never seems to think that any of the things she does require any courage.”

Earhart and Noonan now had to traverse Africa, on far less established routes. They followed a section of the Niger River, flew a thousand miles across the Sahara, and, after spotting a herd of hippos below them, landed in what is now N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. On June 14th, after a five-hundred-mile flight from El Fasher, Sudan, to Khartoum, Earhart wrote, “It is really very hot . . . but the nights have been genuinely comfortable. Twice I have been able to sleep out under the stars. I should like to make this a habit.”

After arriving in Assab, Eritrea, Earhart did something unprecedented: she flew nearly eighteen hundred miles to Karachi (then part of British India, now in Pakistan). It was the first time that anyone had flown non-stop from the Red Sea to India. Putnam proudly pointed out the milestone to Earhart over the phone. “I’ll cable tomorrow an estimate of when we should get to Howland,” she told him breezily. “Goodbye! See you in Oakland!”

In Karachi, Earhart sent along more light dispatches, including a story about a morning camel ride, which his office polished up for the Herald Tribune. “I climbed into the saddle and swung between his two humps,” the article noted. “It was a startling takeoff as we rose. . . . Camels should have shock absorbers.”

From Karachi, Earhart sent Putnam a private letter, tender in its simplicity: “I wish you were here. So many things you would enjoy. . . . Perhaps someday we can fly together to some of the remote places of the world—just for fun.” They no longer had the passion of a secret liaison, but she admired his mind and appreciated his championing of her career. Their partnership was equally personal and professional.

Around the time of the Electra’s flight around the Arabian coast, rumors were swirling of a romance between Earhart and Noonan, and of a plane crash. Noonan wrote his wife a reassuring letter: “We have had no trouble whatsoever. Earhart is a grand person for such a trip. . . . She can take hardship as well as a man—and work like one.”

During this period, Putnam gave a jovial interview to a reporter from the London Daily Telegraph. He described the Electra’s cockpit, which was crammed with more than a hundred instruments, and shared details about his wife’s piloting habits. She had an alarm clock that she used to monitor fuel tanks, and kept emergency rations in case of a crash landing. “She lives on tomato juice,” he revealed. “She carries cans in which she knocks a hole, and then inserts a straw.”

The next leg of the flight took Earhart and Noonan some thirteen hundred miles across India. Navigating by following the spiderweb of railway lines below, they had a tense moment when a cluster of black eagles came dangerously close to their propellers. Their flight path skirted Agra, the location of the Taj Mahal, and Earhart felt a little remiss, joking, “It would be like a European sightseer dropping in on Buffalo and not viewing Niagara Falls.”

As they crossed the Thar Desert on the way to Calcutta, strong southerly winds whipped sand into blinding waves. “A great barren stretch,” Earhart called it, in a dispatch. “The ridges grew into mountains and poked their dark backs like sharks through a yellow sea.”

They spent a night in Calcutta, and Noonan got extremely drunk at a bar. Earhart placed a call to Putnam, who was entertaining some guests at the Hotel Seymour, in Manhattan. She said that her faith in Noonan was faltering. Putnam, alarmed, urged her to call off the entire attempt, but she wouldn’t hear of it. There was only one real “bad hop” left.

On June 18th, Earhart and Noonan lifted off from Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport, even though certain equipment issues, such as a nonfunctioning radio direction finder, hadn’t been fixed. On the plane’s way to a refuelling stop in Akyab, Burma (now Sittwe, Myanmar), farmers waved at them from rice fields. The eastward hops continued, among them Rangoon, Bangkok, and Singapore. After landing in a part of the Dutch East Indies that is now Indonesia, Earhart got dysentery—a dangerous infection in an era before antibiotics. A photograph taken at the time shows Earhart smiling, but she was drained and frail, and could barely eat.

By the time Earhart and Noonan had reached Port Darwin, Australia, a few days later, she still felt unwell. Nevertheless, she maintained a calm front. She politely asked for a bath before meeting the press. At the Victoria Hotel, she enjoyed a ritzy meal, telling a reporter, “We eat very little while in the air, but we make up for it at landing places.”

An official at Port Darwin’s airport, Stan Rose, inspected the Electra and determined that a blown fuse had rendered the radio direction finder inoperable. Without it, Earhart had no way of establishing real-time contact with ships or stations below—and no reliable way to fix her position over the open ocean. When Rose pressed her about this, she sheepishly admitted that the device had been dead since she and Noonan left the Americas. Rose was startled by how little Earhart and Noonan understood about basic equipment maintenance. He gave her some spare fuses and taught her how to replace them. He also offered her some special assistance for her next leg: after she took off, he would give her “back bearings”—radioed directional readings—every fifteen minutes, to help her keep course. Earhart gratefully accepted. Rose ended up offering her precise bearings for an hour, until the Electra flew out of range.

Earhart and Noonan touched down in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937. Crouched between the mountains and the sea, Lae was an infernally hot gold-mining outpost. Locals gathered at the grass airstrip to welcome them as the gleaming Electra rolled to a stop.

Earhart was sleep-deprived, and she was worn thin from the still persistent dysentery and the long stretches without meals. Wire images showed her face to be bloated and pale, and her frame looked almost skeletal. Earhart and Noonan’s accommodations were the nicest Lae could offer: the Hotel Cecil. That night, Noonan caroused at the hotel bar with James Collopy, the district superintendent of the civil-aviation board. Eric Chater, Guinea Airways’ handsome general manager, had invited Earhart to dinner, and Noonan, several Scotches in, groused to Collopy that the “skinny bitch” hadn’t invited him along.

After Collopy helped Noonan stagger back to his hotel room, Noonan toppled into the mosquito netting around his bed and crashed to the floor. Earhart, in a neighboring room, barked through the walls, “Is that you, Fred?” When Collopy answered instead, she wasn’t amused. It didn’t sound like they would be departing the next day, as they’d planned.

This proved correct. Some minor repairs were needed on the Electra, and Earhart—now concerned about her navigator’s sobriety—delayed departure by a day. She sent a terse cable to Putnam: “Radio misunderstanding and personnel unfitness. Probably will hold one day.”

The next day, Earhart, determined to keep Noonan occupied (and sober), borrowed a truck, and they drove out to a village, Butibum, where they encountered pigs that had been trained as watchdogs. That night, a local official and postal workers stamped some of the thousands of commemorative covers crammed into the Electra’s nose. Earhart’s flight remained at heart a money-making venture.

On July 1st, Earhart oversaw final preparations at the airstrip. Mechanics tuned the Electra and filled it with eleven hundred gallons of gasoline and sixty-four gallons of oil. Earhart off-loaded “unessential” items, to reduce weight. Some essential items, however, were left behind. The smoke bombs meant to facilitate a sea rescue? Noonan had apparently left them under his hotel bed.

Earhart, perhaps feeling some anxiety, asked Chater, the Guinea Airways head, to let Harry Balfour, the company’s radio operator, come along with her to Hawaii. Chater said that he couldn’t spare Balfour.

Earhart reflected, “Not much more than a month ago I was on the other shore of the Pacific, looking westward. This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific. In those fast-moving days which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us—except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.” In newsreel footage at the Lae airfield, Earhart looks collected but serious. Noonan, clean-shaven and steady on his feet, gives a smile to the camera.

At 10 a.m., the overburdened Electra roared down the grass strip. For a terrifying second, it seemed to disappear over a bluff at the end of the runway—but then it reappeared, skimming the ocean waves and bouncing lightly until it ascended into the sky.

Balfour, listening for Earhart’s radio communications from the ground, marvelled at her nerve. The plane was at least five thousand pounds over its normal gross weight, but Earhart had coaxed the Electra into the air with her usual casual daring. For all the messy planning and makeshift repairs, she was a woman who had always won a bet when it really mattered.

Earhart radioed Balfour. She was heading east with heavy clouds ahead. “Goodbye, Lae,” she said. “I’m turning over to night frequency.”

Roughly twenty hours after the Electra took off, it went down somewhere in the Pacific. The location is still unknown. The ocean has kept its secret. ♦

This is drawn from “The Aviator and the Showman.”