East to the Dawn

●●●● Commander Byrd was in charge of all arrangements for the flight; his decisions were the ones that governed the outfitting of the Friendship. His judgment was strongly influenced by the harrowing transatlantic flight he had taken the summer before in another Fokker, a virtual twin of the Friendship except that it had wheels instead of pontoons, in which he had taken off from Roosevelt field on Long Island and which he ended up ditching at sea off the coast of France.

Richard Byrd was a charismatic, glamorous figure—one of those people who loom large in the eyes of their contemporaries, but who in the light of history become reduced in size and can be seen as flawed. His misjudgments were monumental. Where he went, accidents happened. He recounts the first instance himself—the accident that almost sidelined his naval career. At Annapolis, as captain of the navy gym team, intent on winning the intercollegiate championship in 1911, Byrd devised a splendid gymnastic trick for himself, a “hair-raising” stunt on the flying rings—a kind of double flip that he tried successfully. Once. Then, instead of practicing, he never tried it again until the day before the meet, in a crowded gym. Not surprisingly, he fell, badly breaking his foot.

By 1926 he was a world figure by virtue of the fact that he and Floyd Bennett were the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole (a claim now disputed). To cap that adventure, in pursuit of winning the Orteig prize of $25,000, Byrd next set about assembling plane and crew to fly the Atlantic nonstop from America to France. His aircraft, a Fokker which he grandly named America, was ready before Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis but was involved in an accident caused largely by Byrd’s thoughtlessness. Aboard at the time were the plane’s designer, Anthony Fokker, Floyd Bennett, George Noville, and Byrd. It was Anthony Fokker, bitter at the needless accident that had ended the chance of his plane becoming the most famous in the world, who pointed the finger at Byrd. He had planned to test the plane alone, but Byrd turned up and not only insisted on going but insisted on Noville and Bennett going also. “I should have refused,” Fokker said later to Floyd Bennett, “because without any load in the rear, and with an empty main tank the ship became nose heavy.” The Fokker crashed. Byrd had his arm broken, Noville had his stomach muscles torn; Floyd Bennett, the most gravely injured, suffered a fractured thigh and a lung punctured by a propeller fragment; he was in the hospital for months and never did fully recover.

The America finally took off from Roosevelt field on June 29, laden down, in addition to what Byrd considered necessities, with 150 pounds of mail—and four in crew, Byrd, Bert Acosta, Bernt Balchen, and George Noville. They hit France, according to Byrd, right on target, then flew over Brest heading for Paris (their destination), but by then it was nighttime and foggy. Byrd later called the trip “a most terrible experience.” By his account, they saw bright lights just about the time they expected to see Paris and thought their flight was almost over, but flying a bit further, they realized that the lights were not Paris but a lighthouse beacon; they were lost. They flew on. The compasses had malfunctioned, and again according to Byrd, they tapped them, got them “okay,” and headed for Paris again. Then although “I knew we were heading toward Paris,” there were no lights. Just blackness. By then, afraid they would run out of gas, they cast out unnecessary equipment in an effort to lighten the plane and headed back for the lighthouse, which they found. As they peered through the rainy night by the light of the beacon, they couldn’t clearly distinguish the beach and therefore decided it would be safer to land their land plane in the water as close to the beach as possible. Bernt Balchen, at the controls, made a perfect, incredible landing in the sea, the water shearing off the landing gear “with hardly ajar to the plane.” Stunned but not hurt, they all hurriedly climbed out of the plane, inflated the rubber boat, and rowed to shore. They were lucky to escape unharmed. They had landed at Versur-Mer, later to become famous in World War II as Omaha Beach. After the flight, Byrd alone of the fliers always claimed the lights had been Paris.

Just that April 1928, Commander Byrd sent Balchen and Bennett, the pilots who would be going with him to the South Pole, to go rescue German pilots who were stranded on Greenly Island, off the northern tip of Newfoundland, after making the first successful east-to-west transatlantic flight. The rescue mission, sponsored jointly by The New York World and the North American Newspaper Alliance, drew public attention to Byrd’s upcoming Antarctic adventure. But the Germans had been in no danger. Byrd, with utter disregard for his men, sanctioned Balchen and Bennett to go, even though both were ill with the flu—so ill that when they arrived in Detroit to pick up the plane (as it happened, just a week after Bill Stultz and Slim Gordon picked up the Friendship), Edsel Ford took one look at the fliers and clapped them both in the Henry Ford Hospital. Still far from well a few days later, they took off in the specially equipped Ford trimotor bound for Greenly Island. Floyd Bennett, never fully recovered from the first plane crash of the America the year before, caught double pneumonia, and in spite of a dramatic flight to bring him serum by Charles Lindbergh, on April 26 he died at the Jeffrey Hale Hospital in Quebec.

There had been a mounting number of transatlantic air fatalities since Lindbergh’s successful crossing the summer before. Month after month, the world’s top fliers took off to cross the North Atlantic in land planes and were never heard from again. The worst stretch came during the first wrenching week of the previous September—three planes, two taking off from the North American continent, one taking off from England, disappeared at sea; eight fliers died within seven days. The first was the Fokker St. Raphael, carrying the English pilot Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim and British air aces Colonel Fred Minchin and Captain Leslie Hamilton, which took off on August 31 from Upavon, England. The second, another Fokker called Old Glory, took off on September 6 from Old Orchard, Maine, carrying the aviation editor of the New York Daily Mirror and two top pilots, one American and one French. The third was a Stinson, Sir John Carling, which took off the next day, September 7, from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, with two British pilots.

A feeling began to grow that Lindbergh had been lucky rather than smart. Such an august official as the U.S. secretary of the navy, T. Douglas Robinson (who naturally had a built-in bias toward seaplanes) announced: “the departmental policy will in the future be that no naval personnel will be permitted to engage in transoceanic flights in land planes.” The Australian government for a time prohibited land planes from flying more than fifty miles over open water within its territory. John A. Wilson, director of civil aviation for the Canadian Air Board, declared: “I deprecate the use of land planes in transoceanic flights.” So Byrd touched a chord when he said, “I believe that the flight of the three engine plane that will fly with one engine dead and which is equipped with floats for landing in water is the next step in transatlantic flying.” But he should have known better.

When Amelia first saw the Fokker in the shadows that mid-May of 1928, it still had wheels—but mechanics and welders were working on the struts for the pontoons that were shortly to replace them. As she noted, the pontoons were experimental, and “no one definitely could tell in advance whether or not it would prove practicable.” Not only was this the first Fokker to be fitted out with pontoons, it was the first pontoon-equipped plane to attempt a nonstop Atlantic crossing. The particular pontoons chosen—made of thin sheets of a new wonder metal, duralumin, a recently developed copper-aluminum alloy a third the weight of steel yet possessing the same strength, constructed by the Junker factory in Germany—were each divided into nine watertight compartments. Each of the huge pontoons, measuring twenty-nine feet in length by four feet in width, could supposedly float, airtight, for weeks in water.

The advantage of a seaplane for a transatlantic flight was obvious: if there were engine trouble and the plane was forced down at sea, the fliers stood a chance of survival because the plane wouldn’t sink. The disadvantage, more subtle, understood only by experts in the fledgling new world of planes, was formidable. It boiled down to the fact that a seaplane could not lift nearly as heavy a load as a land plane, therefore not as much fuel could be taken, therefore the range of the plane was cut down. Byrd publicly estimated that pontoons would cut two hundred miles off the range of the plane. He was way off, as the Friendship crew would learn. A second and related problem, as Commander Robert Elmer, USN retired, whom Byrd had chosen to supervise the day-to-day fitting out of the Fokker, noted, was that seaplanes needed a wind to become airborne at all; if there were no waves and the water was smooth, it was difficult for a fully loaded seaplane to rise, according to Elmer, “because pontoons stick to water much as a dime sticks to a wet table.”

Charles Lindbergh, meticulous planner that he was, knew exactly why he had chosen a land plane to fly the Atlantic: because flying boats couldn’t take off with sufficient fuel to go the distance. Byrd, on the other hand, was juggling the safety factor of a plane’s being able to land anywhere on the gray-green sea against its drastically curtailed range. He knew that a seaplane couldn’t make the direct flight from New York to Europe—that was why he had used wheels on the America the summer before. So whereas Byrd’s Fokker America, with engines similar to the Friendship, had been able to take off from Roosevelt field on Long Island with four men aboard and fly nonstop almost to the shores of France, Amy Guest’s Fokker Friendship, loaded down, handicapped, as it were, could not even approach making such a long flight even with one less person aboard—it didn’t have the range. The plan, therefore, was to fly to Newfoundland, refuel, and then to take off from its easternmost end, from Trepassey Harbor on the Avalon Peninsula, where the navy seaplanes had started off on their flight across the ocean in 1919—a much shorter flight of eighteen hundred miles.

In addition to loading the plane down with pontoons, Elmer, under the direction of Byrd, loaded it down with equipment. Lindbergh’s disciplined approach, which had led him to weigh every single necessary item—to go to the lengths of having a special lightweight seat made out of rattan, and special boots made of lightweight materials, of cutting out unneeded sections of charts, of worrying about the few letters he carried, of deciding against a radio, of deciding to fly alone because “I had decided to replace the weight of a navigator with extra fuel and this gave me about three hundred miles additional range”—was antithetical to Byrd’s thinking.

By the time Byrd and Elmer were finished with the Friendship, they had equipped it with, as Elmer proudly announced, “everything.” They installed the usual instruments, altimeter, gas gauge, speedometer, two magnetic compasses, the newly developed earth induction compass (reliable but having to be reset when a plane changed course), wind drift instruments, smoke bombs to determine wind direction and velocity, flares, a Cardwell, a radio similar to the one Byrd had on the America, which had a range of a thousand miles on a 600-meter wave length, and a receiving set designed, built, and installed by Wallace Battison, a Cambridge radio expert. There was also an emergency transmitter with aerial located in the tail of the plane with a range of 50 to 100 miles that would give them ten minutes, in case of a disaster, to send out a call for help to steamers. Battison said it was put on so securely, “you couldn’t jar it loose with a charge of dynamite.” The Cardwell, all by itself, according to Bill Stultz, weighed a hundred pounds.

Elmer, in spite of his reservations about pontoons, thought he had overseen the fitting out of “the safest and best equipped airplane ever to attempt an ocean flight.” Guest and Earhart certainly thought they were in good hands. So did George Putnam. By mid-May the varying load tests, the “countless” takeoffs from the bay, the “brief” flights around Boston, the fine-tuning of the instruments—all of which Amelia was kept apprised of but took no part in—were finished; the plane was ready.

David Layman and his wife came up to Boston hoping to witness the takeoff, as did Amy Guest’s two sons Winston and Raymond; Dorothy Putnam came up to join her husband, who by this time had taken to haunting the hangar. An auxiliary pilot, Lou Gower, hired to help out as far as Trepassey, was also present with his wife and waiting patiently. The new problem was the weather—it refused to cooperate. Amelia would remember long gray days.

David Layman had first grudgingly and then gratefully ceded control of the enterprise to George Putnam, whose expertise in mounting expeditions was second to none. Putnam, assisted by Hilton Railey, now addressed himself to the public relations aspect of the flight. Able to present Amelia as a published writer on the basis of her article in The Bostonian, he struck a deal with The New York Times: they would pay Amelia ten thousand dollars for the exclusive, syndicated rights to her story. (Amelia, of course, would turn this money over to her benefactor.) Then he worked out a deal with Emanuel Cohen, his friend at Paramount News, for an undisclosed sum, giving Paramount News exclusive newsreel coverage in Boston and in Trepassey, Newfoundland. The Paramount News man in New England, considered by all to be the dean of his profession, was Jake Coolidge; he went to work immediately. In the interests of secrecy all of his shots of Amelia were taken on the unused, unfinished roof of the Copley Plaza; there he took a “a great reservoir of shots” of her for future release, assisted by his son Phil. He kept his photographic equipment, in those years so bulky, hidden in a utility closet on the top floor under the roof. (The choice of venue must have been Amelia’s; who else would have thought of climbing out onto the roof of an elegant hotel?) It was Jake who deliberately created the “Lady Lindy” image that in later years would stick to Amelia like glue. He posed her mostly in her leather jacket, white-edged helmet, brown broadcloth riding “breeks,” high-laced brown riding boots, and goggles. The theme was “Remember Lindbergh.” Amelia had bought the jacket at a sale in 1922 for twenty dollars. When new, it had been “an elegant leather coat,” a bit too elegant—a bit too shiny for Amelia. Wrinkles, she had decided, were what it needed, so she had slept in it for three nights until it had “a properly veteran appearance.” Even then not quite satisfied, she had given it “a last going over—rubbing the sheen off here and there.” Now it was to become a fashion statement for the world.

Jake didn’t think that Charles and Amelia looked the least bit alike—it was just an illusion he created with his camera. “It wasn’t so much that the resemblance was there as that you could make it seem to be there, by camera angles.” Later, influenced by the poses and the similar outfits, many people would remark on their resemblance to each other, but just as many thought there was none. George Palmer Putnam, having been part of the magic act, couldn’t see it. “She couldn’t have resembled the Colonel very much or I would have noticed it,” he would write. His wife Dorothy, on the other hand, thought the resemblance “uncanny”; Hilton Railey thought it “extraordinary.”

Her new friends may not have known what kind of a pilot she was, but they undoubtedly noticed that sweet and modest though she was, she drove a car like a bat out of hell. Depending on their temperaments, her passengers were either impressed or scared. Marion Perkins was one of those impressed. Amelia was, she wrote, “an expert ... handling her car with ease, yes more than that, with an artistic touch.” Hilton Railey’s wife Julia was one of those who was not. “People got out of the way of it I noticed. Our battered and bedented bus scudded through the traffic like a car possessed. With something of a flourish we drew up at last at the Old France restaurant.” (She didn’t like the car, either, calling it “the worst looking automobile—hers—I think I ever saw, bar one. Its rear end was cigar-shaped and its ground color a sick canary.”)

Amelia’s actual preparation for the flight was minimal since she was going to wear her everyday flying outfit (which she had been donning for her photos for weeks). In addition to the breeks, boots, goggles, helmet, and leather jacket, she would be taking (and wearing) a light brown sweater, a blouse, a red necktie, fur-lined boots, and, “a single elegance,” practically a trademark for pilots of the day, a silk scarf—hers was brown and white. As protection against the cold that they would meet flying at high altitudes, Amelia and the men took fur-lined flying suits, hers borrowed from a friend, Major Charles L. Wooley, commander of the Massachusetts National Guard Air Force, a fellow member of the Boston NAA (she didn’t divulge where it was going). The few things she took—a toothbrush, a comb, fresh linen handkerchiefs, a tube of cold cream, a camera borrowed from Layman, field glasses borrowed from Putnam—all fitted into the small knapsack she bought for the occasion at a local army-navy store. She didn’t own a watch; Mrs. Layman lent her one, and David Layman loaned her his camera.

She wrote a will of sorts. She itemized her debts that, all told, amounted to slightly over one thousand dollars, most of it owed to a bank, but as a marker of the complexity of her character, it included a $140 debt to Filene’s for a fur coat. She suggested that her car be sold to cover the bills and directed that her interest in the Kinner Airplane and Motor Corporation and the ten shares of stock she owned in the Dennison Aircraft Corporation go to her mother. (“I hope they will pay and think they will,” she added.) She concluded, “My regret is that I leave just now. In a few years I feel I could have laid by something substantial, for so many new things were opening for me.... Selah.”

She left letters for her mother and father at Denison House, identifying them, for the unnamed person who would find them (undoubtedly Marion Perkins), with a penciled note clipped to the envelopes, as “popping off” letters that should be sent out. Her letter to Amy is carefully upbeat:

Even though I have lost, the adventure was worth while. Our family tends to be too secure. My life has really been very happy, and I didn’t mind contemplating its end in the midst of it.

I have tried to play for a large stake, and if I succeed all will be well. If I don’t, I shall be happy to pop off in the midst of such an adventure. My only regret would be leaving you and mother stranded for a while.

I haven’t told you about the affair as I didn’t want to worry mother, and she would suspect (she may now) if I told you. The whole thing came so unexpectedly that few knew about it. Sam will tell you the whole story. Please explain all to mother. I couldn’t stand the added strain of telling mother and you personally.

If reporters talk to you say you knew, if you like.

Clearly she was very much in control of herself. But she couldn’t do anything about the plane. The Friendship was moored off the Jeffrey Yacht Club in East Boston. The first predawn attempt to take off was a failure. There was not enough wind, and as Elmer had said, the pontoons acted like a dime stuck to the table. The second attempt was aborted because of fog. Amelia loved poetry and had an ingrained habit of retreating into it to handle difficult situations. At Columbia, when she could not answer questions in the weekly physics quiz, she had inserted a little French poetry. Now she quoted Carl Sandburg.

According to Phil Coolidge, with whom Amelia had become friends, both George Putnam and Bill Stultz were beginning to show signs of strain. George “grew irascible,” and Bill Stultz so edgy that Phil kept trying to calm him down so that he wouldn’t start drinking. There was a disquieting article in The Boston Globe on Friday, June 1. The paper reported that more than a thousand gallons of aviation gas and 150 gallons of oil had arrived at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in anticipation of the arrival of Thea Rasche, who planned to hop off from there on a transatlantic flight. Their two failures to take off took on an ominous meaning.

By that time all the support group were staying at the Copley Plaza. That night Mrs. Layman, in the room next to Amelia, heard her padding about late into the night. She knocked and asked if there was anything she could do. “It’s like being left waiting at the church. I’ll be all right, thanks,” fretted Amelia. It was the only display of tension Mrs. Layman noticed. After the long wait was over, Mrs. Layman would take away the indelible memory that of all the participants, Amelia had been the most controlled. As she told Janet Mabie, a great deal of the time Amelia had hardly talked at all: “But you got the feeling, whatever was going through her mind, that she wasn’t afraid.”

As they awoke on Sunday, June 3, at three thirty, to make a third attempt, the routine was familiar to participants and watchers alike. They breakfasted at an all-night restaurant, drove in the darkness to T wharf, boarded the tug Sadie Ross, fat and tidy and bobbing gently just beyond the Eastern Steamship Company docks, and headed out for the big orange and gold plane. If anyone asked what they were up to, they planned to say they were on a fishing expedition. Besides George Putnam, the Laymans, Lou Gordon’s fiancée, Gower’s wife, Stultz’s wife, and the Elmers were there, plus Jake Coolidge of Paramount News and his son. Besides their personal belongings, they had with them a copy of Byrd’s book Skyward (weighing in at one pound), which the commander had inscribed for Amy Guest, and an American flag. Five hundred gallons of gasoline had already been loaded into the wing tanks and into the elliptical gas tanks in the fuselage, and in addition there were eight auxiliary five-gallon cans in the cabin, making a grand total of 545 gallons. (Amelia alternated sitting on one of the cans and on the bag of flying suits.) The day dawned warm and clear. The sun, she noticed, was just coming over the rim of the harbor, and a few dawn clouds hung about in the pink glow.

The four of them got into the plane, and stowed their gear and supplies. Just before they closed the door, according to Jake Coolidge, they decided to discard Amelia’s fur-lined boots and the rubber life raft and oars. “I’ll make you a present of the rubber boat,” Amelia called out cheerily to Jake, who remembered grinning, a grin tinged with anxiety. As they left, Stultz checked out the instruments, then they saw Slim Gordon hop out onto the pontoons, crank first the starboard, then the port, then the center engine, all of which turned over perfectly, and with a roar the big plane taxied down the bay. Behind the Sadie Ross appeared another smaller boat. In it were Amelia’s four faithful friends—Sam Chapman, George Ludlam (manager of Denison House), Marian Perkins, and an unidentified woman friend, all of whom Amelia had invited to attend the two earlier abortive dawn liftoffs. This time she had told them not to bother getting out of bed again. They hadn’t listened but had gone down to Lewis Wharf the night before and hired a boat for five A.M.

Gasoline is heavy; each gallon weighs over 6.12 pounds. They threw out six of the eight five-gallon cans. Forty-two pounds lighter, they tried again. And again failed. Amelia and Slim Gordon were in the rear of the plane. Now, joined by Lou Gower, they retreated as far back as possible into the hold in an effort to lighten the nose as much as possible. Yet a fourth time they failed. The problem, they all began to realize, was weight. The solution was to remove even more weight. Since they couldn’t remove any more gasoline and still reach their goal, the only expendable poundage was the auxiliary pilot. As they turned back preparatory to making yet another run down the harbor, Lou Gower pulled his flying suit from the bag, Slim motioned a boat over, and Lou quietly said good-bye and stepped out of the plane.

Although Gower was thin—Amelia described all the men as having “distinctly Gothic” builds—his 150 pounds made the difference. On the next run the wind freshened, and the Fokker shook free, lifted, soared, made a brief turn over the Sadie Ross, and disappeared into the rising sun. Exultantly, Amelia wrote that the difference in weight turned the Friendship into a bird. Still, it took the bird a long time—67 seconds—to become airborne. It was 6:31 when the pontoons shook loose from the water and the Friendship headed east into the dawn, destination Trepassey, Newfoundland. The summer before, Byrd’s Fokker America, identical except that it had wheels, had taken off carrying a full load of gasoline, 800 pounds of extra equipment, and four men. The Friendship had not been able to take off with half a load of gasoline, no extra equipment, three men plus 118-pound Amelia. But none of the fliers had time to dwell on that ominous fact because a few minutes into the flight, still in sight of Boston Harbor, Slim Gordon somehow managed to fall against the cabin door in such a way that he broke the spring lock that held it closed. Almost falling out, he tied the door to one of the gas cans with a piece of string. But the gas can was not heavy enough for the job. It began to slide toward the gradually opening door. Amelia dove for it, almost falling out herself, after which, in a joint effort, they tied the door to a brace inside the cabin.

After that, the trip up the New England coast was uneventful. They averaged ninety-six miles an hour. It was hazy; they reached the southern tip of Nova Scotia. Amelia dozed as they headed up its eastern coast, and when she awoke, the clouds beneath them had thickened into fog. She had leisure time to notice what her traveling companions were wearing and discovered, much to her surprise, that though she was in flying clothes, they were not: they had dressed up in city clothes—undoubtedly in her honor.

Land disappeared. Stultz cautiously, figuring they were about fifty miles beyond Halifax, probably over Tangier, decided to turn back and wait it out in Halifax until visibility improved. The trick was to find Halifax, and as Bill Stultz admitted later, it wasn’t that easy. He was lost for a while; the Friendship dove through the clouds for several hours before finally sighting Halifax Harbor through a rift in the clouds. When he did, he set the Friendship down in the Eastern Passage, the easternmost part of the harbor, tying up at the Canadian seaplane station, which he had spotted as he was coming in. Dories came out to greet them, and Stultz and Gordon went ashore to the officers’ mess to ask for bearings and a weather report. Amelia meanwhile, to avoid being discovered, stayed out of sight in the plane.

They came back with the news that although the station had not yet received the weather report, it was thought that there was rain and fog ahead; the flight sergeant had told them that if they started out, they might have to return. But Stultz was impatient—they were halfway to their destination—so, Amelia wrote, “Bill says he’ll try to make T.” Slim cranked up the engines, and they took off without any problem, but within minutes they were again enveloped in fog and forced to turn back. A half hour later they were again taxiing to the seaplane station, tying up behind a Canadian Fairchild seaplane. This time when the flight sergeant came out to help anchor the Friendship, they invited him in to discuss the housing situation. The problem was Amelia. They wanted to keep her under wraps, for since midmorning, every flying office at Boston airport and at Dennison airport had been under siege by reporters seeking information. There had been rumors spreading since the day before that Amelia was to make the flight; now newspapers had the story, and reporters were working their way up the coast.

Stultz and Gordon went ashore with the flight sergeant to see if he could arrange for Amelia to stay with a government official, leaving Amelia again in the plane; again, because of circling boats, forced to stay away from the windows. They had no luck with private lodgings, however. They all set out for the Thorndyke Hotel in the town of Dartmouth, located across the harbor from Halifax, where they were booked into adjoining rooms on the third floor. Amelia immediately went up to her room and stayed there to avoid the reporters, although she found it little to her liking: the straw was coming out of the mattress, the window wouldn’t stay open, and both the single bedsheet and the pillowcase were dirty. Slim and Bill repaired to a Chinese restaurant, only to be spotted by reporters and photographers who followed them back to their room at the hotel. Amelia heard the newsmen trying to persuade the fliers to get dressed and have their picture taken. She was furious at the inconsiderateness (it was midnight) but said nothing for fear they would discover her next. They arose early, at five thirty A.M., but by the time they breakfasted at the hotel, they were surrounded by newsmen.

All the morning papers had the story and were going wild. The New York Times proclaimed on its front page in a four-column-wide head that dominated the page, “Boston Girl Starts for Atlantic Hop, Reaches Halifax, May Go On Today,” followed by reams of copy and photos of the three of them. The Herald Tribune was more optimistic: “Girl and Stultz on Atlantic Flight Halt at Halifax; Going On Today.” “Girl Hops from Boston to London, Forced Down at Halifax on First Leg” ran the headline in the Boston Herald.

They finally took off at nine thirty. The liftoff took just sixty seconds “in a perfectly calm sea”—a very good sign. It was a sparkling clear cool day, 52 degrees outside, 58 degrees inside the cabin. They flew along the coast at 1,800 feet and by 11:55 they were over Cape Canso, the northeasternmost point of mainland Nova Scotia. Stultz relinquished the controls to Gordon, and Slim headed northeast across the open sea. They climbed to 3,200 feet, and the temperature inside the cabin dropped to 53 degrees. “The sea,” Amelia wrote, “looks like the back of an elephant, the same kind of wrinkles.” At 12:50 they nosed down and sighted Newfoundland, the Burin Peninsula, to the left. Amelia set her watch ahead an hour. It was hazy, they were just under a cloud bank, flying at 3,000 feet, when they saw land—Peter’s River at the entrance to St. Mary’s Bay, which meant they were on target. Their destination, Trepassey, lay on the other side of Cape Pine, ten miles to the east.