Earhart - Last Flight

Few women have captured the imagination of the American public as Amelia Earhart did. None have held on to it longer. More than half a century has passed since her disappearance in the South Pacific in July 1937, and each succeeding year brings forth new books on her and her probable fate. The speculationsor, for the true believer, the factsabout the dangerous last flight in her Lockheed Electra cover an extraordinary range. Some make dramatic claims that she was on a cold-war reconnaissance mission analagous to that of Gary Powers, another pilot in a later Lockheed. Others, less romantic, believe simply that she had attempted more than she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were capable of achieving.

Ultimately, as time passes and the circumstances surrounding her last flight become less sensitive for nations and for individuals, the actual events will be revealed. If there are secret records that conceal a gigantic government conspiracy in which she played a willing part, time will permit their disclosure. If, when all the possible files are opened, there is nothing to indicate government involvement, a conclusion can be drawn that she suffered the fate of so many flyers of her day: valiant submission to great odds.

It undoubtedly would be fitting to know what happened to her, and to recognize appropriately any contribution she made to our nations security. Mere knowledge of her fate, however, would add little to her stature as the first American woman to be widely acknowledged as a pilot first and a woman second. She was preceded by such great women flyers as Harriet Quimby and Katherine Stinson and followed by others such as Jacqueline Cochran and Jena Yeager. But her status remains unique, for a variety of reasons.

Perhaps least important of these was her almost familial resemblance to Charles Lindbergh. It was a gift of God to the press to have a famous, attractive, daring woman flyer who just happened to look like the greatest male aviation hero of the time. The fact that neither Earhart nor Lindbergh cared for the comparison mattered not at all.

More important was that the public understood that she and she alone, was doing the flying, in airplanes exactly like those that men were using. There could be no condescension to a woman setting records solo in a Lockheed Vega when praise was being heaped upon men like Wiley Post and Jimmy Mattern for their exploits in the same airplane. Her instincts were correct. Flying as a passenger in the Fokker Friendship had been a galling experience, and she immediately discounted the praise that was heaped upon her. In her subsequent flightssolo across the Atlantic, across the United States, and from Hawaii to Californiashe was determined to make the public see that in the ability to fly, a woman was fully equal to a man.

That she succeeded in this is attested to by the organizations, the International Forest of Friendship and the group she helped found, the International 99s, which actively continue to honor her. And this brings us to the last and greatest mystery about Amelia Earhart: the failure of the great movements for womens rights to make full use of her legend and her example.

Amelia Earhart was in advance of her time by ten years in aviation and by two generations in promoting womens rights. Yet her contributions were all but overlooked by the most potent political elements of the time. This failure was a tremendous loss, for in Amelia Earhart women had a sensitive, powerful champion. She understood instinctively that the press and public must be relentlessly courted, yet that a distance had to be preserved and an image maintained. In the thousands of feet of motion picture film, in the millions of photographs of her, there comes across an intelligent, knowing woman, one who would have prospered mightily in the 1970s and 1980s as a symbol as potent as that of Joan of Arc in the crusade for womens rights.

Perhaps it does not matter. The real results of her legacy are all around us. The most obvious examples are in aviation. Airlines actively recruit women for positions as pilots (how she would have loved that), and there are many women serving as military crew members. Crews composed entirely of womenpilots, navigators, flight engineer, loadmaster and crew chiefroutinely fly huge Air Force jet transports everywhere around the world. In the Netherlands, women have been accepted as combat pilots, and there are those who seek the same role for them in the United States armed forces.

Amelia Earhart came perhaps before her time, but the image this book conveys so well, that of the smiling, confident, capable, yet compassionate human being, is one of which we can all be proud.

Walter J. Boyne
Reston, Virginia
1987

This is the story of Last Flight. It was to have been called World Flight, but fate willed otherwise. It is written almost entirely by Amelia Earhart herself.

We have her narrative of the journey all the way around the world to New Guinea, as it came by cable and telephone. Many of those accounts she supplemented with further notes which arrived later by letter. Likewise she sent back the log-books of the journey, their pages filled with her own penciling, scribbled in the cockpit as she flew over four continents.

There is, too, her own commencement of World Flight. She had promised her publishers the manuscript promptly; that was one of the chores she accepted to make possible her ambition. So when she was turned back from Honolulu by the accident there in March, she did what she could to get the book well launched. To all that is added some material from others, who knew her and wrote about her.

Weaving all this together, I have sought to make a simple record of A. E.s last adventure for myself and for the many who loved her and found cheer in her gallant, friendly life.

When time has smoothed out somewhat the rough sorrows of the present, there will be another bookthe full story of Amelia Earharts life. Thats a project for a tomorrow of retrospect.

Through the rich years of our work and play together, there was often a cloud hanging overheadthe shadow of danger. It was not, mind you, always an ominous cloud, but rather one somehow lined with a gay silver of understanding.

A. E. recognized its presence more frankly than I.

Some day, she would say, Ill get bumped off. Theres so much to do, so much fun here, I dont want to go, but

In the preparation for her flights, she recognized the risks. But in the hazards of living dangerously she seemed more concerned for others than for herself.