Electra

Prologue

What was real and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of one thousand feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that. She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Island, where they were to make a refueling stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal — a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woman, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.

Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island — probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.

She smiled to herself in spite of the situation, recalling good times spent with her pilot mentors. “Any landing you can walk away from…” She could hear them laughing across all the miles and all the years. This once humble farm girl, born in America’s heartland in 1897, six years before the pivotal Wright brothers’ first flight, had come farther than she had ever dreamed, both literally and figuratively.

Now, as the waves of the Pacific rushed up to greet her, it all came down to this. She squinted through her goggles at the outline below—there! A white line indicating breaking waves on a reef. It was real land and not just a cloud shadow. She would at least have a chance. But there was yet another problem.

She needed desperately to communicate with Noonan, who sat ten feet behind her in the cargo area, rather than in the co-pilot’s seat, to accommodate his navigation equipment. The combined noise of air rushing into the plane and its twin Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines made it very loud, however, making normal conversation impossible. To overcome this, they had devised a crude clothesline system where they clipped a paper with a written message to a clothespin and slid it back and forth on a pulley. In this way they could communicate during the long hours in the air. Right now, though, there was no time for that. But with her engines out, there wasn’t as much noise as usual and by shouting she could make herself heard. She craned her neck to face backward and yelled, “Secure the payload, Fred! Secure it now!”

She could just make out his reply. “Okay!”

Earhart quickly glanced to her right and frowned, then focused her full attention on the little island below. Much of it was forested and offered no hope of a real landing. On the far side of the island she picked out a pathetically small strip of sand or crushed coral, and she nosed her plummeting craft toward that.

She was not sure she would be able to reach it.