AMELIA EARHART: THE TURBULENT LIFE OF AN AMERICAN ICON
By Kathleen C. Winters
Palgrave/Macmillan, $25, 242 pages, illustrated
From certain camera angles, Amelia Earhart - a tall, slender, blonde who tousled her short hair and wore masculine flying clothes - looked like a feminine version of Charles Lindbergh. It was because of this resemblance that, in 1928, as the first anniversary of Lindbergh's solo flight approached, this likable young social worker who "loved to fly" was plucked from obscurity to be a passenger on another trans-Atlantic flight. She had hoped to take a turn at the controls but never got the chance.
Nonetheless, when the plane landed safely in Wales, the crew was more or less ignored while Earhart was hailed as the "first woman to fly the Atlantic." (To her credit, she claimed to be embarrassed about the hype, telling her promoters, "I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.")
Four years later - 1932 was the high point of her career - she actually became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo and, subsequently, the first person to fly it twice, for which Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross. Now, of course, she is best remembered for having disappeared over the Pacific in a vain attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
Three years ago, Kathleen C. Winters, a licensed pilot and aviation historian who died just months before this book was published, wrote a slim book about Anne Morrow Lindbergh's often harrowing adventures in the early years of flight, mostly as navigator, radio operator and relief pilot on trips with her famous husband.
This similarly slim and equally absorbing book tackles questions that Ms. Winters' book-tour audiences kept raising about the ever-fascinating Amelia Earhart: "How did she die? Was she an incompetent pilot who tempted fate one too many times? Exactly what role did Earhart's husband, George Palmer Putnam, play in molding her into America's best-known female pilot? Had Putnam pushed his wife into making her world flight attempt?"
Some answers remain opaque, but Ms. Winters puts her own aviation experience to good use in interpreting the Earhart story. No one is sure how she died, but the author agrees with the conventional wisdom that she probably ran out of fuel in her futile attempt to find Howland Island, a speck in the Pacific that the U.S. government had expressly prepared for her as a refueling stop between New Guinea and Hawaii.
Ms. Winters points out that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have been looking in the wrong place: The charts they were using showed Howland six miles east of its true location. Moreover, she was trying to communicate by voice, and only once was she able to receive transmissions from her prospective rescuers. Despite the largest rescue effort ever to that date - she had cultivated friendships in high places, including both Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt - no trace of her or Noonan was ever found.
How competent a flier was she? According to Ms. Winters, "She was not the world's most skilled woman pilot in her day, by any means, nor even the best in America." She was not a "natural stick" - she struggled with training and spent far fewer hours in the air than her publicists claimed. She never liked detail, didn't attempt to learn Morse code and never applied herself enough to master radio communication. She crash-landed far more planes than her contemporaries, and yet walked away.
Authorities bent the rules for her: For example, when she applied for her instrument rating, which was required for her round-the-world trip, she was permitted to skip the first two of the three requirements: the written test, the demonstration of proficiency with radio navigation aids, and a flight performed entirely on instruments.
© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
