Vanishing Point: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart stands as a paragon of determination and groundbreaking achievement in aviation history, as she not only defied societal expectations but also meticulously orchestrated her final journey around the globe. This episode meticulously chronicles her transformative trajectory, beginning with her adventurous childhood in Kansas and culminating in her fateful attempt to circumnavigate the world. As we delve into the intricacies of her pioneering flights, we shall explore the technological advancements of her era, the formidable challenges she faced, and the critics who both championed and disparaged her endeavors. Furthermore, we shall examine the myriad theories surrounding her enigmatic disappearance over the Pacific, as well as the enduring legacy she left behind. Through an analytical lens, we will uncover the profound impact of her life and achievements on future generations, particularly women in aviation and beyond.
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Transcript
She was a barnstormer, a record breaker, fashion mogul, and somehow still had the time to take Eleanor Roosevelt on a joyride over D.C.
Speaker A:amelia Earhart wasn't just flying planes, she was flying past expectations.
Speaker A:Before she vanished over the Pacific, she'd already carved her name into the sky through sheer will, guts, and uncanny ability to look a male dominated field dead in the eye and say, cool story, bro, I'm doing it anyway.
Speaker A:She didn't actually say that, but in this episode, we're taking off from her Kansas childhood and flying straight through the early stunt flights, record breaking solo missions, her rise to international celebrity, and that final attempt to circle the globe.
Speaker A:We'll dive into the technology of the time, the logistical challenges, the critics and the champions.
Speaker A:And yes, we'll get into the theories, because how could we not?
Speaker A:And she didn't just disappear, she became a legend.
Speaker A:So grab your goggles and true that compass because when the story flies this high, you know we've got a lot to cover.
Speaker A:This is the Remedial Scholar.
Speaker A:That's ancient history.
Speaker A:I feel I was denied critic need to know information belongs to the museum.
Speaker A:Stop skipping your remedial class.
Speaker A:Holy smokes.
Speaker A:Welcome to the Remedial Scholar.
Speaker A:I am Levi.
Speaker A:Thank you for joining me on this high flying episode.
Speaker A:I know I say this pretty much every time, but I.
Speaker A:I am very excited.
Speaker A:I think it would be weird and sad if I wasn't though, so there's that.
Speaker A:Before we get too far along into this, I'll be honest, this is a behemoth of an episode.
Speaker A:There's a couple things I want to say.
Speaker A:One, thank you to everyone who has been watching the show on YouTube.
Speaker A:Gonna be trying something different with how I do the video, so I think you're gonna like it.
Speaker A:Let me know if you don't, I guess.
Speaker A:But if you're listening, that's fine.
Speaker A:Keep on listening.
Speaker A:I would say just go and check out the video when or if you want to.
Speaker A:Secondly, if you're a returning listener and have thus have thus far enjoyed the show, do me a favor a kindness and review us wherever possible.
Speaker A:That helps all the new folks find the show.
Speaker A:And you know, trying to do this a little more grassroots as much as I can.
Speaker A:Anyway.
Speaker A:Lastly, I love you.
Speaker A:Okay, onto the episode.
Speaker A:This episode definitely one I have wanted to do for a very long time now.
Speaker A:There are countless documentaries, YouTube videos and podcasts about Emilia.
Speaker A:Books, TV shows, movies and more.
Speaker A:All trying to understand the mystery of her tragic end to the triumphant life.
Speaker A:She seemed to have passion, fearlessness, adventure, and a mission of equality all seem to flow through her blood.
Speaker A:We know this because of a not so distant relative of hers, Dale Earnhardt.
Speaker A:He would be a fearless and passionate part of his own sport.
Speaker A:No, there's no documented relation between the two, although their spirits are very similar, and fate's also, unfortunately, too similar.
Speaker A:Their surnames do share a commonality, though.
Speaker A:I spent way more time than I'd like to admit trying to find a distant relative shared between them.
Speaker A:But that's okay.
Speaker A:Their names, Earhart and Earnhardt, respectively, do come from Germany.
Speaker A:The root of the name comes from an old German or Bavarian term for very honorable, the compound of er or honor and heart strong or firm.
Speaker A:So Earnhardt is a variation of that.
Speaker A:And both legends ancestors shared some very similar immigration patterns as well, so that's kind of cool.
Speaker A:Also, another cool link is that Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Speaker A:Had a car named Amelia, which was a specific chassis that he raced a few times, and it was allegedly his favorite one.
Speaker A:And I have to wonder how much of their family believed there to be bigger connection to Amelia.
Speaker A:But in any regard, Amelia was a trailblazer all on her own.
Speaker A:She not only knocked down barriers for future female aviators, but she really did it for many women in all sorts of different jobs.
Speaker A:Obviously, she was not the driving force behind it, but a piece in a larger, more intricate web of the women who inspired other women to step out from the shadows of the men of the world and go, hey, we can do things, too.
Speaker A:I know it's not that odd in today's world to have women doing things, unless you are that sheltered or whatever.
Speaker A:Also, don't want this to come off as preachy, because, honestly, it should not be a shock to have women doing jobs that men traditionally.
Speaker A:There's little reason in this day and age that there should be any separation.
Speaker A:There's obvious examples, but for the most part, who cares?
Speaker A:Like, if they're qualified, let them do it.
Speaker A:Women have proven time and time again that they are statistically more emotionally regulated, intelligent, and they can see more colors than us.
Speaker A:Sounds like it'll be okay.
Speaker A:Anyway, enough pontificating.
Speaker A:Like I said, this isn't that strange to me, and I think anyone who cares about what people doing certain jobs have between their legs have issues to work out all on their own.
Speaker A:I say all this to paint a picture, because more and more women are in jobs that men typically dominate, and this is relatively new in the history of humans.
Speaker A:Women did deviate from societal norms, but more often than not, it was status quo.
Speaker A: Early: Speaker A:I'll get into some contemporary accounts and responses to what people like Amelia were doing that back then.
Speaker A:But just know that there's a little.
Speaker A:There's little in terms of equal opportunity in this story because that's kind of how things were.
Speaker A:People like Amelia, like Bessie Coleman, Marie Curie.
Speaker A:Marie Curie, Jacqueline Cochran, Margaret Sanger, and Josephine Banker were actively chipping away at those types of barriers, though.
Speaker A:All right, moving on from that, let's talk about the flight log of today's episode.
Speaker A:Before we get into Amelia's story, going to give a little summary of the history of flight before our girl arrives on the scene.
Speaker A:Then little refresher on radio technology, because that's actually a huge part of this story.
Speaker A:And then we get into Amelia, her life up until the final voyage.
Speaker A:And then for that, we're going to be going day by day, breakdown of events, then final transmissions before transitioning into some theories and evidence behind them.
Speaker A:Sound good?
Speaker A:Great, let's get into it.
Speaker A:This episode scratches a few itches for me.
Speaker A:History, obviously, mysteries.
Speaker A:Also great and fun to learn about.
Speaker A:Bigger part and maybe one that you guys don't know about me just yet, but aviation.
Speaker A:I love airplanes.
Speaker A:I do not know a ton about every single one of them.
Speaker A:But I do know that I always thought being a pilot would be super awesome.
Speaker A:When I joined the Navy, I wanted to work on airplanes.
Speaker A:Humble brag moment.
Speaker A:But I scored so high on the asvab, the entry basic knowledge test, that they used to decide where to put you.
Speaker A:I scored high enough that they wanted me to try again to get a higher score so that they could try and get me into the nuclear power plant field.
Speaker A:I was not interested.
Speaker A:My recruiter was like, hey, that score is good if you get a.
Speaker A:You can get any job you want pretty much.
Speaker A:But if you want to study, take it again.
Speaker A:You could go nuke, you know, get a nice enlistment bonus.
Speaker A:I think it was like 90,000 at the time.
Speaker A:I shot it down right away, so that should also tell you a little bit about me.
Speaker A:But I was like, nope, I want to work on airplanes.
Speaker A:And you might ask yourself, self, why would Levi join the Navy if he loved airplanes so much?
Speaker A:Why not join the Air Force?
Speaker A:Well, the answer is two for the price of one.
Speaker A:Quick answer.
Speaker A:They had a long wait time before they were sending people to basic training and I wanted to leave as soon as possible possible.
Speaker A:And two, my grandpa and my uncle were both in the Navy and I always thought that was awesome.
Speaker A:So I got to pick my job.
Speaker A:Aviation Structural mechanic.
Speaker A:I did maintenance on fighter jets.
Speaker A:Pretty sick.
Speaker A:Got to travel all over and met some alright people along the way.
Speaker A:But most importantly, I got to work on airplanes.
Speaker A:I loved it.
Speaker A:Even when I hated it, I loved it.
Speaker A:One day I do want to get my pilot's license or at least try take flight lessons.
Speaker A:Something that's not part of today's story.
Speaker A:Basically all of that to say I enjoy all aspects of flight and I think it's awesome.
Speaker A:And I never got to dive really deep into the history of aviation like I did for this episode.
Speaker A:So that's why it's very front heavy with aviation history.
Speaker A:I also should tell you final thought before the show begins for real.
Speaker A:In prep for this episode, I flew Amelia's route, the final route on Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Speaker A:I even paid for a custom plane, a community made version of the Lockheed Electra that she flew.
Speaker A:And I gotta tell you, super boring.
Speaker A:You know, I got to fly it on my computer with two monitors so I could watch Seinfeld on the other screen and have some entertainment.
Speaker A:Because you might be surprised to know this, there was no in flight movies for her and Fred.
Speaker A:They didn't get to hit autopilot and go heat up some Hot Pockets.
Speaker A:They were in it to win it and you kind of have to be to do something this crazy.
Speaker A:These distances, they're insane even in the game.
Speaker A:I mean, granted the game is supposed to be a one to one scale, right?
Speaker A:But this is so freaking long.
Speaker A:Even with all my creature comforts that I could enjoy while flying, I still have tremendous respect for them because I was still like, all right, well, kind of wish this plane was a little bit faster.
Speaker A:And to top it all off, I don't know the tuning for the plane that I bought to do this super wonk.
Speaker A:It kept veering off to the left every time I tried to take off.
Speaker A:Crashed a super ton.
Speaker A:You know, it's infinitely harder for the actual pilots to control them.
Speaker A:I have a controller and I was struggling, so that tells you anything.
Speaker A:Even the other model, there's like, there's one that was supposed to be exactly like her plane, tuned and everything.
Speaker A:And then there was another version that was like the Electra back then.
Speaker A:And then there's another version that's like a modern retrofitted Electra and I could get the other two to fly, but not her.
Speaker A:So I don't know if they were a little tongue in cheek in that or what.
Speaker A:But anyway, not an easy time for me on my computer game.
Speaker A:So there's a lot of respect for what they tried to accomplish, what they did accomplished and all other pioneers in aviation accomplished is that's insane to think about.
Speaker A:And, you know, they.
Speaker A:They basically just did it for the love of the game.
Speaker A:Like they were excited.
Speaker A:They're doing new things, seeing new stuff, just in awe pretty much all the time.
Speaker A:All right, a lot of setup for.
Speaker A:Here's a little more.
Speaker A:People have pretty much had a desire to fly for a long, long time.
Speaker A:I don't know if it's just the instinctual call of the void, the phenomenon experienced when standing near a ledge, that wondering what it would be like to jump.
Speaker A:It's not a suicidal thing, but a legitimate thing that happens in pretty much all of us.
Speaker A:Though the science hasn't been studied very much as it's kind of a recent discovery.
Speaker A: A: Speaker A:Over half of the respond.
Speaker A:Half of them responded positively to having thoughts of leaping off a high place and also not having suicidal thoughts.
Speaker A:75% of the student body responded positively to both.
Speaker A:So what that boils down to is there's a lot of people who want to jump off at a high place at least one time, but that doesn't mean they are overly depressed, just a little curious.
Speaker A:That same study indicated that there were people who said they were less anxious in general, had less experience in the feeling of the call to void.
Speaker A:But people who said they had a higher levels of anxiety, more likely to experience it.
Speaker A:People who are more nervous about more things feel this more often than less anxious people.
Speaker A:And that feels pretty odd and backwards, but that's what it is, backwards brain stuff.
Speaker A:The researchers hypothesized that this could be a misinterpreted safety signal of the brain, rather than what your brain naturally does.
Speaker A:This phenomenon makes it so your brain tells you to jump instead of not to fall.
Speaker A:Touch the hot thing you can already feel the heat from.
Speaker A:You know, that kind of stuff.
Speaker A:It momentarily flips the script and makes you want to do the bad thing.
Speaker A:Just like intrusive thoughts, right?
Speaker A:What does that have to do with flight?
Speaker A:Well, my hypothesis is that through that phenomenon, humans have invented aviation.
Speaker A:It is the adrenaline junkie's dream to jump off a tall thing, be up super high, and also know you'll probably live after.
Speaker A:I have no science to back this up, but I thought it was funny and just kind of a silly rationalization of how ideas were made.
Speaker A:I also think that the call of the void is just kind of an evolutionary trait, part of our old Selves that never learned to be wary of the surroundings.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:A little proof of concept for Charles Darwin.
Speaker A:So I don't know if that's it or just genuine human curiosity to try new things, but.
Speaker A:Or do new things.
Speaker A:In either event, the people have been trying to fly forever.
Speaker A:Earliest one is Daedalus and Icarus.
Speaker A:It obviously didn't go well for anyone until Orville and Wilbur.
Speaker A:I don't know why I pronounced their name so funny.
Speaker A:Outside of this legend in medieval Spain in the 9th century was home to one Abis in furnace.
Speaker A:He was not a crazy man or extremely confident jumper.
Speaker A:He was a Renaissance man.
Speaker A:Before the Renaissance, he was a polymath inventor, astronomer, physician, chemist, engineer, Andalusian musician, and a poet.
Speaker A:Dude had almost as many hobbies as I do.
Speaker A:He attempted to.
Speaker A:He.
Speaker A:He didn't have a podcast, though.
Speaker A:What's up?
Speaker A:He attempted to jump from a considerable distance.
Speaker A:Poems written about it.
Speaker A:Eventually a historian from the 17th century finds one quoting it in his own notes.
Speaker A:Then we find those, and bam, now we know about this guy.
Speaker A:Super weird how that plays out.
Speaker A:Anyway, kind of an interesting dude in his own right.
Speaker A:He had made various versions of things and he needed, you know, he made a version of corrected lenses, essentially.
Speaker A:Mostly see through rocks, right?
Speaker A:They're minerals, Marie.
Speaker A:Anyway, that could be used to distort things, make them appear bigger to the user.
Speaker A:It's kind of weird to think about medieval people needing glasses because not many of them could read.
Speaker A:Even weirder to think that before glasses existed, people just held rocks up to their eyes to see better.
Speaker A:We've come a long way.
Speaker A:Anyway, this guy strapped some feathers to himself and fell.
Speaker A:Pretty much.
Speaker A:He was injured, but he lived.
Speaker A:So now we have someone doing something crazy and living, sparking more people to do so, trying to improve and not get injured.
Speaker A:Higher, faster, further that they went.
Speaker A:Also, want to make an observation?
Speaker A:This guy was an accomplished tinkerer.
Speaker A:He made functioning things, didn't just leap out of a window.
Speaker A:He had clocks, devices.
Speaker A:Even a metronome that he devised.
Speaker A:Didn't invent them, didn't create them out of nowhere.
Speaker A:But think about this.
Speaker A:Back then, if they needed something, they pretty much just invented something.
Speaker A:Created something.
Speaker A:No, Amazon engineers in town weren't exactly always going to be privy to whatever was needed.
Speaker A:So crafty people figured it out and then sometimes made things for other people who needed something similar.
Speaker A:And then somewhere, you know, along the way, what, what I'm.
Speaker A:What I'm getting to is that the idea of inventing a thing out of pure randomness is not necessarily the way things happen.
Speaker A:Every invention owes its creation to something that came before it.
Speaker A:Typically because a newer technology came about to solve a different problem and then someone appropriated that and made their thing better.
Speaker A:It's a constant change and improvement.
Speaker A:Here's a quote by Mark Twain that feels appropriate.
Speaker A:There's no such thing as a new idea.
Speaker A:It is impossible.
Speaker A:We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
Speaker A:Where am I going with this?
Speaker A:I don't really know.
Speaker A:I was trying to make a some sort of connection that back in, you know, Abbas's day that he was a tinkerer on many hats and today it would have struggled because so many people rushed to put a patent on their ideas, which are just newly rehashed versions of something else, essentially barring anyone from innovating any further.
Speaker A:Does this sometimes help small inventor from being Tesla'd by Edison?
Speaker A:Yeah, sure.
Speaker A:But it also prevents someone like Tesla from being able to experiment with their own ideas on like a larger scale.
Speaker A:Anyway, so box over anyway.
Speaker A:In the 11th century, a monk named Ilmer Eilmer strapped wings to his hands and feet and jumped off church roof.
Speaker A:He reportedly flew for 15 glorious seconds before slamming into the ground and breaking both of his legs.
Speaker A:Not ideal.
Speaker A:Meanwhile, over In China around 500 BCE, someone invented the first kite, or a kite, which is like the my first aviation kind of kit.
Speaker A:It used the basic principles of lift and would later inspire gliders, flying contraptions.
Speaker A:Chinese also had an early version of the hot air balloon.
Speaker A:Those sky lantern things, they're still around today.
Speaker A:They're super sick.
Speaker A:It's a paper balloon that has like a little candle thing inside.
Speaker A:And that hot air from the candle lifts up.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:There's also stories that armies use them to scare enemies who had never seen floating fire orbs before, which is awesome.
Speaker A:Alright.
Speaker A:And then we get to our boy Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance man who invented everything except for chill.
Speaker A:Leo sketched helicopters, gliders and even parachutes.
Speaker A:None of them worked because, well, you know, physics, that pesky thing.
Speaker A:But the guy was always thinking way ahead of his time.
Speaker A:His aerial school screw helicopter idea, for example, was supposed to lift via spinning power, but the only power source was muscles.
Speaker A:So imagine pedaling a helicopter like a peloton and hoping for liftoff.
Speaker A:But then also you couldn't like change course, you could only go forward.
Speaker A:So if you wanted to like you couldn't break or anything.
Speaker A:Is not super ideal.
Speaker A:But you know, he's kind of thinking three Dimensionally about these kinds of things about flight.
Speaker A:He also had that, that glider and I have a tattoo of his, his glider on my arm.
Speaker A:Everybody assumes it's Spider man because they can only ever see like the bottom part of it.
Speaker A:But yeah, no, it's Da Vinci's flying machine because I'm, I'm just like that, you know, jumping forward a few centuries and know hot air balloon.
Speaker A:Oh, balloons came along and then hot air balloons spun out of that.
Speaker A:So now we have balloon jumping which is people taking a hot air balloon up and then jumping out.
Speaker A:Seems super safe.
Speaker A:And then you could start to actually get flight taking shape.
Speaker A: George Cayley in the: Speaker A:His gliders work better than anything else at the time and even came up with a governable parachute which is essentially just gliders with better branding, I guess.
Speaker A:His work inspired John Stringfellow who attempted to build a steam powered flying machine which flew 10ft.
Speaker A:But hey, that's 10ft more than anybody else managed with steam.
Speaker A:So that's pretty cool.
Speaker A:1856, French guy used a horse to tow his glider and it worked sort of, kind of.
Speaker A: e from Otto Lilienthal in the: Speaker A:He was dubbed the glider king.
Speaker A:He was the first to fly untethered, repeatedly with control, he refined the shape of the wings, including the now iconic curved underside lining.
Speaker A:With Bernoulli's principles, he also became first person photographed mid glide, which is pretty solid Instagram flex if you know if it would have been a thing back then.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:And then America enters the chat.
Speaker A:Samuel Langley, big science guy, namesake, namesake of several government buildings, built The Aerodrome Number 5.
Speaker A:A powered but unmanned aircraft that flew over 3,000ft.
Speaker A:Pretty good.
Speaker A: ft in: Speaker A:So that's kind of sick.
Speaker A:Naturally US government and military specifically got involved and gave Langley $50,000.
Speaker A:That's back then money.
Speaker A:So I don't even know if you as a lot to develop recon gliders for the Spanish American war.
Speaker A:Unfortunately his bigger versions just kind of fell apart.
Speaker A:Scaling up without strengthening things tends to do that.
Speaker A: Then in: Speaker A:Maybe, I don't know.
Speaker A:There's a lot of debate.
Speaker A:Some people say he flew, some people say he paid to have it written that he flew The Smithsonian says no.
Speaker A:And they seem pretty trustworthy because they hired Ben Stiller.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Not once, but four times.
Speaker A:They weren't the first to dream of flying, just the first to solve everything at once.
Speaker A:Lift, control, power, and not dying.
Speaker A: After some tweaks, by: Speaker A:That's, that's practically business class back then.
Speaker A:Jet lag not included.
Speaker A:What followed was global aviation frenzy.
Speaker A: ted the Wrights to le Mans in: Speaker A:French inventors just kept at it though, and soon ailerons were introduced for roll control, making turns smoother and safer.
Speaker A:The next big change was the biplane.
Speaker A:Two wings stacked on top of each other, one motor, and kind of just a lot of guts.
Speaker A:This design dominated the next two decades.
Speaker A:And as World War I loomed, these once novel machines became tools of war.
Speaker A:Dog fighting was born.
Speaker A:Namesakes like Manfred von Richtolfen, aka the Red Baron, became legendary.
Speaker A:He had 80 confirmed kills before being shot down.
Speaker A:His top rival, Renee Funk, had 75, but he survived.
Speaker A:So a little complicated scoreboard there.
Speaker A:Then the war ended, and with it, the world had thousands of planes and skilled pilots and zero wars to fly in.
Speaker A:So began the golden age of aviation.
Speaker A:Military bombers were gutted and turned into airliners.
Speaker A:Flights were rough, no pressurization, frigid temperatures and goggles still very much required.
Speaker A:But they flew.
Speaker A:In Britain, Handley Page converted warplanes for passenger routes like London to Paris in France.
Speaker A:Louis Blieral, his aircraft company took off in a big way.
Speaker A: nclosed passenger aircraft in: Speaker A: America caught up quickly in: Speaker A:Pan America Airways was founded, initially just flying mail between between Key west and Havana.
Speaker A:We talked a little bit about them in the defunct companies episode.
Speaker A:I don't even remember what the title was.
Speaker A:But under the direction of Juan Trippy, it grew into a global airline titan.
Speaker A:Pan Am introduced flying boats like the Boeing 314 Clipper.
Speaker A:This dominated long haul routes and later helped launch the jet age with the Boeing 707.
Speaker A:They were a blueprint for international air travel.
Speaker A:Stylish, ambitious and just kind of a vibe.
Speaker A:Behind them stood three, the big three of American aerospace.
Speaker A: McDonnell Aircraft in: Speaker A:Lockheed rolled out planes like the Vega flown by Amelia eventually, and a Constellation, which brought luxury to long range travel.
Speaker A:Boeing started with wooden mail planes, grew into a behemoth, from the Model 247 to the dominating B17 and the iconic 747 jumbo jet, which made air travel accessible to millions.
Speaker A:Even as aviation became more practical, it never lost its flair.
Speaker A:Barnstormers wowed crowds with aerial stunts and heroes like Charles Lindbergh became household names.
Speaker A:It wasn't just the guys making the headlines.
Speaker A:While rare, women were also getting into the cockpit too.
Speaker A:And they weren't just tagging along.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A: And in: Speaker A:Then there was Bessie Coleman, who couldn't find a flight school in the United States because she was a woman and also black.
Speaker A: Paris, earned her license in: Speaker A:And you know, they were, they were rewriting expectations of what pilots could be.
Speaker A:And all of that sets the stage for what would become one of the most iconic figures in aviation.
Speaker A:Amelia.
Speaker A:All right, so let's go get, let's, let's do the thing.
Speaker A:All right, on to our heroine.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Of course her middle name wasn't Mary Dale, but you know, I want it to be.
Speaker A:I have so many fun ideas that I know I cannot make into merch because of copyright infringement, but I digress.
Speaker A:Her father, Samuel Edwin Earhart, was a lawyer, though never having a lot of success.
Speaker A:Despite this, her family was respected well enough.
Speaker A:Her mother even considered by some to be a debutante, high society type.
Speaker A:Her father was a lawyer for the railroad, working in claims for them.
Speaker A:He also struggled quite a bit with alcoholism, which definitely hindered his upward mobility.
Speaker A:This would then cause some financial issues with the family, forcing him to move cities to follow jobs of, and follow jobs instead of growing within one job itself.
Speaker A:Her mother, Amy Otis, came from a respected and wealthy family.
Speaker A:She was highly educated, forward thinking and her father was a judge, so he did not respect Edwin very much as he struggled in the legal field.
Speaker A:He was also a president of the local bank.
Speaker A:So, you know, very critical.
Speaker A:Vettie, you know, many outside of her father also felt Amy married beneath her.
Speaker A:I also wonder if this story was placed in modern Times if Amy would have been the lawyer and breadwinner.
Speaker A:In any event, the progressive nature of Amy, her sense of independence and education, instilled the same in her children.
Speaker A:She advocated for their independence even as children.
Speaker A:She encouraged them to be explorative, adventurous, and in that vein, didn't even care if they wore pants.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's right, women in pants.
Speaker A:Amelia herself would still opt for dresses out of a sense of peer pressure.
Speaker A:Seeing the neighbor girls in dresses and feeling like an outsider because she was wearing pants.
Speaker A:I bet.
Speaker A:Amelia had just one sister, two years her junior, so she had a little buddy to hang out with from an early age, which is good.
Speaker A:With the tumultuous nature of their father's employment, the children moved a lot.
Speaker A:And at a certain point, it was decided that they would spend a significant amount of time at their maternal grandmother's or grandparents house, where they were homeschooled by old Granny Otis.
Speaker A:Amelia was actually named after Granny Otis, so it was Ameliotis, Amy's mom.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Anyway, bouncing back and forth from her parents home to her grandparents home was still more stable than just staying with her parents.
Speaker A:This explorative and adventurous child thrived on her independence and creativity.
Speaker A:After visiting St.
Speaker A:Louis earlier in her childhood, Amelia was inspired by the thrill of a roller coaster ride and convinced her uncle to build a makeshift one off of a shed roof in the backyard.
Speaker A:This was hard to describe as a success, but she survived with a few scrapes and bruises.
Speaker A:Afterwards, she told her sister excitedly, oh, pigs.
Speaker A:It's just like flying.
Speaker A:Definitely had that mid Atlantic accent going.
Speaker A:So the seeds were planted, right.
Speaker A:She's like, she's got this adrenaline thing going.
Speaker A:Other things she would do as a child included collecting bugs, toads, Gross.
Speaker A:She was also given a.22 rifle.
Speaker A:At nine with her grandparents.
Speaker A:Very nervous about this.
Speaker A:It was a practical gift.
Speaker A:And she would hunt rats in the barn, you know, clearing out pests and such.
Speaker A:And also according to her father, he said, quote, this is really a very small rifle.
Speaker A:You know, it's.
Speaker A:He's not wrong.
Speaker A:It is.
Speaker A:It's a small rifle.
Speaker A:It's still a rifle, but, you know.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Around the same time, she had seen her first airplane.
Speaker A: lay at the Iowa State Fair in: Speaker A:She described it as a thing of rusty wire and wood and ran off to the merry Go round instead.
Speaker A:In a little over a decade, her opinion would change.
Speaker A:But the moving portion of her childhood, not over.
Speaker A:The Earharts would again moved to St.
Speaker A: Paul, Minnesota in: Speaker A:She was not super popular in Chicago.
Speaker A:She became kind of recognized as outspoken and very serious.
Speaker A:So much so that she organized a petition to fire a teacher because they were lazy, which, as you might expect, backfired on her social life, did not make her super popular with her peers very much.
Speaker A:Hey, what about her homework kind of student, which is, you know, annoying for sure, but also looking back on it as an adult, you know, they're told what to do all day every day, and expecting every single student to play it cool when something they were expect expected to have finished was not brought up.
Speaker A:You know, that's got to be tough.
Speaker A:And, you know, she's very bright, had good grades, but, you know, like I said, not super popular.
Speaker A:As mentioned before, the various moves were largely due to her father's instability in employment thanks to his drinking.
Speaker A:Emilia even tried to help in the ways that kids often try to do.
Speaker A:She found hidden booze and poured it out, which enraged him to the point of physicality.
Speaker A:Although her mother stepped in before he actually was able to struck strike her.
Speaker A:You know, it was her mother that caused the move to Chicago, feeling that a stable separation from whatever the heck Edwin was doing would be good for the girls.
Speaker A:This move came on the heels of a legal victory for Amelia's mother, who was awarded an appropriate amount of the inheritance that was held from her when her mother had passed away.
Speaker A:This time with her mother, I think impacted her trajectory pretty heavily.
Speaker A:Remembering her mother was a big proponent of independence, progressiveness, and also just very intelligent.
Speaker A:So when Amelia graduated, she left Chicago Chi town and enrolled in Ogance School for Young Ladies in Pennsylvania.
Speaker A:She was elected the vice president of her class and was secretary for the local Red Cross chapter.
Speaker A:She also helped have discriminatory sorority practices abolished.
Speaker A:You know, real leadership stuff.
Speaker A: be noticing that the year was: Speaker A:The war to end all wars part one kicks off.
Speaker A:And in that, Amelia was inspired to volunteer in the Red Cross as a more than a secretary.
Speaker A:She was visiting with her sister Pidge, Muriel is her actual name in Canada and saw that wounded soldiers were arriving and this kind of struck a nerve with her.
Speaker A:She was a nurse's aide at Spadina Military Hospital where she would care for wounded soldiers, particularly the heavily injured ones.
Speaker A:While enjoying her time off, Amelia attended a flying exhibition at an event and a stunt plane buzzed the crowd.
Speaker A:You know, flew super low, diving at the crowd and then pulling up last second.
Speaker A:When the dive happened, people naturally and instinctively scattered except for Amelia.
Speaker A:She would later say that the plane had spoken to her and this was calling to flight.
Speaker A:She had not decided what that calling meant.
Speaker A: attend Columbia University in: Speaker A:She continued to do well in her classes, but there was just something holding her back.
Speaker A:She did not feel a sense of fulfillment that she thought she would.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:She was unsuccessful, but the time she spent there, she attended several more air shows and flight demos.
Speaker A:On one such occasion, while attending an air show, her father with her father, Amelia paid $10 to be taken on a 10 minute flight with a veteran pilot named Frank Hawks.
Speaker A:Amelia later said that in this moment, as soon as we left the ground, I knew myself I had to fly.
Speaker A:Let me know if that impression gets annoying.
Speaker A:Immediately, every spared cent she had went straight, straight to savings for flying lessons.
Speaker A:She worked as a truck driver, stenographer at a telephone company, photographer's assistant, all sorts of odd jobs just to save money to follow her dream.
Speaker A: In January: Speaker A:She was also one of the few female pilots at the time.
Speaker A:According to Snook, Emilia was a little rough at first, but intensely focused and fearless, but definitely needed refinement, obviously.
Speaker A:I mean, she's new.
Speaker A:In addition to the odd job, she worked for money for lessons, she also resorted to making her own clothes, even creating her own leather flight jacket which she wore to bed to make it look more.
Speaker A:Look more seasoned, which is pretty cool, pretty adorable.
Speaker A: Halfway through: Speaker A:A great starter plane, only two seats, one engine.
Speaker A:Nothing crazy with owning her own plane.
Speaker A:She was able to get her solo flight hours up rapidly without the reliance on renting and scheduling times to use others other people's planes.
Speaker A:She became obsessed, wanting nothing more than to be as good as she could be.
Speaker A: chievement came in October of: Speaker A:Word of this confident, independent trailblazer began to spread the California Aviation Club welcomed her in as part of their typically tight knit community.
Speaker A: In May of: Speaker A:This turned her into a bona fide professional aviator and put her amongst an elite and very tiny community in the world.
Speaker A:The determination she got to had to go from working all sorts of kind of odd jobs just to pay for lessons.
Speaker A:Being a licensed pilot in two years, super impressive.
Speaker A:She also had the tenacity to challenge and break records, something that would obviously continue through her lifetime.
Speaker A:She took part in various air shows, exhibition flights, and of course, flew for her own excitement.
Speaker A:But she was not really earning any money from any of this, not enough to maintain a living anyway.
Speaker A:She also had a bad sinus issue which ultimately kept her from flying for quite a while.
Speaker A:While she was away from flying, she did public speaking events, wrote and worked as a social worker in Boston, helping immigrant women and children during her time there.
Speaker A: In May of: Speaker A:Major feat, increased public interest in aviation.
Speaker A:And there were promotional opportunities that could help grow it even further.
Speaker A:Capitalizing on this moment, there was an idea to have a woman do the same thing that Lindbergh had just done, fly solo across the Atlantic.
Speaker A:Of course it had been done already, but there's always some aftershock, excitement to have it be done by, you know, the next person of a minority group.
Speaker A: In April of: Speaker A:So George Palmer Putnam, the publisher, publisher and public.
Speaker A:Yeah, I can't even say that.
Speaker A:Once he approached Amelia to get her to be the first woman to be a passenger on a transatlantic flight.
Speaker A:Notice I said passenger.
Speaker A:She was, you know, known in aviation circles.
Speaker A:She could fly, but was not chosen for this ability.
Speaker A:She was chosen because he felt she embodied the adventurous, modern woman.
Speaker A:She was tall, athletic, photogenic.
Speaker A:And America was primed to have such a woman become the vision of female aviators.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A:Amelia, along with pilot Wilmer Stoltz and mechanic Louis Gordon, departed Newfoundland and traveled 20 hours and 40 minutes before landing in Wales.
Speaker A:She became known as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air.
Speaker A:But she was not satisfied at this moment.
Speaker A:Amelia said that she was, quote, a sack of potatoes on this flight and clearly spurned by being just, by just being an icon without actually doing anything.
Speaker A:And I respect that.
Speaker A:If, despite how she felt when she returned to America, she was a hero celebrated with ticker Tape parades in New York, invited to the White House to meet President Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker A:She published a ghost written book titled 20 hours 40 minutes recounting the journey.
Speaker A:Started doing speaking engagement lectures and various endorsements.
Speaker A:All of this spearheaded by George Putnam, who had convinced her to do the flight in the first place.
Speaker A:George was crafting her public image, posing her to be the symbol of American womanhood.
Speaker A:Independent, capable and adventurous.
Speaker A: By: Speaker A:Amelia was very much part of the American lexicon.
Speaker A:People knew who she was.
Speaker A:Of course, with any level of fame, there are critics who come out and say she didn't deserve the spotlight.
Speaker A:People said that she was nothing more than a symbol, not a renown, not renowned for her flying abilities.
Speaker A:But Amelia did not listen to them.
Speaker A:She worked relentlessly to prove herself, wanting to earn status the right way.
Speaker A:In her mind, she wanted to go for real records, not just for women, but for everyone.
Speaker A: Also, in: Speaker A:She set a record for women's speed at 181.18 mph.
Speaker A:In May of that year, she entered various events, like the Woman's Air Derby, which I assure you is not an airplane version of a demolition derby.
Speaker A:She was, with every flight, getting more synonymous with women aviation pioneers.
Speaker A: s in: Speaker A:This was an organization aimed at providing mutual support and promotional opportunities to women in aviation.
Speaker A: e elected as the president in: Speaker A:Every appearance she made, whether speaking, interviewing, was practice to be modest as possible and give the credits to give the critics no fuel.
Speaker A:George Putnam was making sure Amelia was well prepared and noticed as much as possible.
Speaker A:In fact, she was so well noticed by his efforts that his wife said, whoa, what's happening here?
Speaker A: he and Amelia Got married in: Speaker A:Scandalous.
Speaker A: In April of: Speaker A:And that's super impressive because you could not catch me in an autogyro at 3ft.
Speaker A:These are essentially if a helicopter and an airplane had a baby, no chance.
Speaker A:In addition to looking absolutely insane, it was harder to fly.
Speaker A:Shocker.
Speaker A:This record gave her skills a little bit of a proof of, you know, proof to back them up.
Speaker A:This auto is.
Speaker A:This also established a trend of experimentation, always up for a challenge, of trying new aircraft.
Speaker A:This coinciding with many different mediums that she dipped her toes into at the guidance of George resulted in many different companies wanting to work with her.
Speaker A:She would often write articles for nationally published published magazines, endorse various products like luggage companies, clothing, and even cigarettes.
Speaker A:By the middle of the 30s, she was one of the most famous women in the nation and recognized outside of it quite often as well.
Speaker A:All of this recognition, super nice, but she still had naysayers.
Speaker A:She wanted to keep going until she proved them all wrong.
Speaker A:This started with rewriting her story.
Speaker A:She was the first woman to travel by air across the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker A:She wanted to be the first woman to fly across it solo.
Speaker A: In May of: Speaker A:If she were confused as she flew, she had a lot of challenges.
Speaker A:The plane was flying.
Speaker A:Plane she was flying was a Lockheed Vega 5B which experienced several mechanical issues.
Speaker A:Basically, as soon, as soon as she took off, she had to deal with intense headwinds.
Speaker A:This not ideal, since the wind would actively resist her forward motion and just trash her fuel mileage, basically.
Speaker A:To combat this, Amelia decided to fly higher.
Speaker A:But when she would do that, she began to have ice build up on her wings at around 12,000ft, also not optimum because it adds weight and extra stress to the wing.
Speaker A:She was forced to descend again and endure poor conditions and lower elevation.
Speaker A:Her altimeter also malfunctioned, which is good.
Speaker A:You know, that's the little mechanism that tells you how high up you are.
Speaker A:Not important at all.
Speaker A:She was flying blind.
Speaker A:No GPS to speak of, no altimeter, and basically no real way of determining where she was outside of a compass.
Speaker A:Storms mounted as she flew.
Speaker A:Various updrafts rocked the plan around and she had no way to communicate with anyone.
Speaker A:Nor did she have a parachute or a life raft.
Speaker A:She trusted her skills to take her to her destination, which is bold, but, you know, also a little insane.
Speaker A:All of the, you know, basically great weather made it impossible to land in Paris.
Speaker A:So now she was forced to make an emergency landing.
Speaker A:She dipped below the clouds, which is also super scary when you don't have an altimeter.
Speaker A:Because flying over the ocean in cloudy weather can put you right into the drink if you're not careful.
Speaker A:During the descent, she spotted an open field and opted to land there.
Speaker A:Touching down near Coolmore in Northern Ireland.
Speaker A:Over 2,000 miles, 14 hours 15 minutes.
Speaker A:She crossed the Atlantic by herself.
Speaker A:On the flight itself, she had this to say.
Speaker A:I've often Said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.
Speaker A:But I was not alone in finding the Atlantic crossing, a thing of stern reality and grim trial.
Speaker A:I felt myself alone, more than alone.
Speaker A:More alone than any, any person could ever experience on land.
Speaker A:As if I were suspended somewhere far out in space between two worlds.
Speaker A:I don't know why I decided to do that voice for her, but that's.
Speaker A:That's what it is.
Speaker A:She was found by a farmer, the farmer whose land it was.
Speaker A:And he was probably super confused as to what was happening.
Speaker A:For her efforts, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the first woman to do so.
Speaker A:National Geographic Society's Gold Medal, given to her by President Herbert Hoover.
Speaker A:She was also made an honorary member of the British Royal Aeronautical Society.
Speaker A:The fanfare did not stop there either.
Speaker A:When she returned to the United States, she began to get even more attention from people wanting her as a speaker for events, endorsements and books.
Speaker A: he published the Fun of it in: Speaker A:She was involved in lecture circuits all across the country.
Speaker A:The wife of fdr, Eleanor Roosevelt, befriended her, and she was given a personal flight around D.C.
Speaker A:airspace by Amelia.
Speaker A:Amelia, a staunch supporter of equality, equal opportunity, not only in aviation, but everywhere, often spoke on the importance of women being able to do things for themselves.
Speaker A:Never getting in political discussions, but often spoke simply on the possibility of women needing to try to do things that men can do.
Speaker A:The accomplishments were also still coming in.
Speaker A: In January of: Speaker A:That's right, I said person.
Speaker A:She flew over 2, 400 miles across the open ocean and did it with very little issues compared to her last ocean crossing.
Speaker A:Later that year.
Speaker A:She was also the first person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City, in Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey.
Speaker A:And I realize that these things might seem like silly to be the first person to do so, but when the technology of something is still growing into the public eye, you got to keep attention somehow.
Speaker A:Around this time, Amelia also partnered with Purdue University.
Speaker A:Go Owls.
Speaker A:She worked as a consultant for them.
Speaker A:Also would encourage engineering students of the female persuasion to pursue careers not just in aviation, but any scientific field they may be interested in.
Speaker A:All these ideas and encouragement were well and good, but Amelia had more dreams, more adventures to be had.
Speaker A: By: Speaker A:She would steal the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker A:No, she.
Speaker A:She wanted to circumnavigate the globe.
Speaker A:You know, this has already been done several times, both by air and sea.
Speaker A:And she wanted to be the first to do it blindfolded.
Speaker A:A daring and challenging thing, especially since I made it up.
Speaker A:No, she wanted to travel as close to the equator on this trip as she possibly could.
Speaker A:She believed this to be the truest circumnavigation that could be achieved because that's obviously the widest point of the planet.
Speaker A:This would be roughly a 29,000 mile trip.
Speaker A:Not only was it a long trip, it would be very expensive.
Speaker A:The funding came from a few different sources, mainly Purdue University, who I am being told now are not the Owls, but actually trains.
Speaker A:Weird.
Speaker A:Anyway, Amelia had been working with the university.
Speaker A:They had agreed to be part of the funding.
Speaker A:Honestly, not a lot needed to be paid for.
Speaker A:You know, the fuel and plate, you know, were the lion's share of it.
Speaker A:The plane itself, a Lockheed Electra 10e specially tailored for this trip.
Speaker A:It was called the flying laboratory because of all the pieces to record data inside it.
Speaker A:It also had a reinforced frame and hole and seating removed except captain and navigator chairs.
Speaker A:The freed up space now designated for extra fuel tanks.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:Nothing to sneeze at for sure.
Speaker A:Around $1.7 million today.
Speaker A:Then the fuel and oil and you know, all that stuff for round trip, also not super cheap, including mechanical services, spare parts and everything.
Speaker A:They were looking at upwards of a hundred thousand dollars of their money.
Speaker A:The one thing they were able to spare in expenses for was lodging.
Speaker A:But you know, not because they were like camping inside the plane.
Speaker A:Granted, the full extent of their sleeping, not to the same level you might expect, is more like long naps than anything else.
Speaker A:Either in their, in their seats or on the floor or they had like a little tent that they could like prop up on the wing.
Speaker A:Off of the wing anyway.
Speaker A:Yeah, loose pillows here and there.
Speaker A:And this was only an issue when they were going to be in very remote areas like as they cross Africa and into the Asian islands, right in, in the near the Pacific.
Speaker A:In places with more population around the the airstrips, they were able to secure hotels, staying at houses of people offering shelter or government provided lodging.
Speaker A:But have to imagine this wasn't hard to do in places that knew who Amelia was.
Speaker A:Her husband George also played a part in securing various arrangements.
Speaker A:Thanks to his publicity skills.
Speaker A:The pair also had financial incentive to make sure this was successful.
Speaker A:You know, while Emilia was popular, that doesn't equate to being wealthy.
Speaker A:She had to write books, do speaking engagements and things like that to keep a steady income.
Speaker A:And she was not the sole breadwinner, but you know, they had to keep earning if she wanted to keep flying.
Speaker A:There's also the issue of the country being on the back end of the Great Depression, which slowed the attendance to her speeches quite a bit.
Speaker A:George was very nervous about the trip, feeling it could be very dangerous, but also supported her and agreed to handle as much of the logistics and media bits as he could.
Speaker A:Then you have the trailblazing nature of Emilia, where she wanted to do whatever it took to inspire more women to pursue careers or activities dominated by men.
Speaker A:Immense pressure on many sides of this event, but she was sure she could do it.
Speaker A:The plans for this trip originally consisted of a route that went from east to west, from the US to Hawaii, Hawaii to the Howlin island, and then through the islands in the southeast, southeast Pacific towards Australia, up to India and around through Africa.
Speaker A:Basically, this was actually changed after an unfortunate crash occurred on takeoff from Hawaii that not only changed the voyage altogether, but also put a delay on the trip.
Speaker A:Stories are mixed up of what actually occurred, but what is known is that shortly after takeoff, well, during takeoff, actually, the plane experienced what is known as ground loop.
Speaker A:This is a sharp swerve that resulted in landing gear, undercarriage and propellers being damaged in the process.
Speaker A:It's also cost a lot of money, you know, some $20,000 in repairs.
Speaker A:A contemporary of Amelia's and certified hater, Major Al Williams, said, quote, that ship got away from her, and that's the lowdown.
Speaker A:That feels like how he would have sounded.
Speaker A:Witnesses and Amelia herself stated that the tire blew or something happened with the landing gear.
Speaker A:Others say she struggled to maintain the plane on takeoff.
Speaker A:There might be some credence to what Williams says.
Speaker A:And, you know, he's not just any type of hater.
Speaker A:He's a very decorated pilot, Marine Corps officer.
Speaker A:He was a stunt pilot, raced planes, all the things.
Speaker A:And while I did call him a hater a moment ago, this is not an instant in which I'm referring to.
Speaker A:I'll share that in a little bit.
Speaker A:According to Amelia Earhart, the Truth At Last, written by Mike Campbell.
Speaker A:Williams wrote in a Cleveland newspaper that I quoted, you know, a moment ago.
Speaker A:In that same book, another man states that he was told by Harry Manning, who was in the co pilot's chair at the time, that Amelia was jockeying the throttle on takeoff and she tried to do too much and it got away from her.
Speaker A:If this is true, although a lot of the statements made in that book are secondhand, so if we look at that statement and the statement made by Al Williams, then it could Be, I mean, I'm going to add my own personal experience here that I have been, like I said, been flying her flight via Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Speaker A:And I told you about my struggles with her airplane taking off and that plane of hers, every time it would veer.
Speaker A:And so her plane, the Electra, two front landing gear and then one tail wheel in the back.
Speaker A:And as you get to a certain speed, the tail lifts up because you're beginning to lift off the ground.
Speaker A:So the front two wheels are on the ground, the back one is not.
Speaker A:And the only way to control it is via your ailerons or your, you know, your horizontal flaps on the back and the rudders.
Speaker A:So you have to manage to prevent this thing from turning.
Speaker A:And a lot of the issues that you deal with is what's called prop wash, which is basically turbulence created on the back side of the propellers that can throw off the way the plane lifts and takes off.
Speaker A:So maybe that's what.
Speaker A:Maybe I'm just bad at flying that plane.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:But here's the thing is, on the other versions, I can take off just fine.
Speaker A:I took off and landed in the.
Speaker A:The other Lockheed 10, not the.
Speaker A:The more modern one, but the.
Speaker A:The regular one.
Speaker A:So I don't know what the deal is anyway.
Speaker A:Williams was more harsh and less nuanced on his thought process of the entire voyage.
Speaker A:He stated that he believed it to be nothing more than a publicity stunt aimed at padding her pockets.
Speaker A:I think this is kind of a whack stance to take because, you know, isn't that kind of like every trip after the first one in a new vehicle?
Speaker A:Like, at a certain point, every subsequent iteration of a trip is done to gain something?
Speaker A:Maybe.
Speaker A:Maybe I've read too many philosophical books or listened to too much Pink Floyd, but there's rarely just a true, authentic, unselfish reason to do anything.
Speaker A:Even, you know, simple things like holding the door for somebody makes you feel like a good person, doesn't mean you are one.
Speaker A:You did it to satisfy that internal need of recognition.
Speaker A:The flights that Amelia did, yes, she was trying to break barriers, open the door wide open for women and male jobs.
Speaker A:Yes, she was successful at becoming a pilot, despite the lack of training and abilities to become one that men had much easier access to.
Speaker A:She still had bills to pay and still had to make a living.
Speaker A:She was lucky in the way that she was able to pursue financial success, to live her life by doing something she was passionate about.
Speaker A:Not many get to say that.
Speaker A:So was this a stunt by her?
Speaker A:Sure, Was it worse than any other person trying to one up the Wright brothers?
Speaker A:I don't really think so.
Speaker A:And also, Major Al Williams was up.
Speaker A:He raced planes.
Speaker A:That's stump flying.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:Yeah, I appreciated that she was willing to go the extra length, not just to circle the globe, but to go to the widest part possible.
Speaker A:That's, you know, especially cool to me.
Speaker A:Major Al Williams, he hated her plane.
Speaker A:Also, he despised that they called it the flying laboratory, stating that it wasn't carrying anything other than long distance, anything any other long distance blade had at the time.
Speaker A:And while this is mostly accurate, the plane was not a laboratory in the true sense of the word.
Speaker A:It was a metaphorical lab that was, you know, it's, it's a pushing boundaries of what people saw as possible.
Speaker A:It did have different instruments to help gather data, and these could have been placed on any other aircraft, but they had put a lot of them on Amelia's because it was a good way to market it, in a sense.
Speaker A:And that brings me back to the publicity comment.
Speaker A:What exactly is wrong with being a stunt, it being a stunt flight?
Speaker A:Are those somehow less involved, skillful or valid?
Speaker A:Of course it's a publicity stunt, but like I said, so is racing.
Speaker A:Mr.
Speaker A:Williams, is that not a publicity stunt to try and be the fastest person in a plane to do a certain route?
Speaker A:Almost like she was going to be the person to be the fastest to circumnavigate the earth along with along the most challenging route ever attempted.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Wasn't Charles Lindbergh's New York to Paris flight also a stunt?
Speaker A:It was done for a prize.
Speaker A:It was done for fame.
Speaker A:But nobody said Lindbergh didn't deserve respect because of it.
Speaker A:I mean, maybe the guy that stole his baby the same.
Speaker A:The same rules should apply here.
Speaker A:Amelia wasn't hiding the risks or pretending this flight was something it wasn't.
Speaker A:She knew it was ambitious, dangerous, and yes, history making.
Speaker A:That's what pioneers do.
Speaker A:Whether you're chasing a trophy or a headline or the horizon, the courage it takes is still pretty real.
Speaker A:Got in the weeds about that.
Speaker A:My bad.
Speaker A:Back to the preparations.
Speaker A:I mentioned the Electra.
Speaker A:Hers was left in a stainless finish with red being painted on the front of the wings.
Speaker A:I don't know if there's a specific reason for this, but, you know, maybe it's like a corrosion prevention, I don't know.
Speaker A: e was also given the number NR: Speaker A:Also, fun fact, only 149 of these planes were ever made.
Speaker A:And the second most famous one is in the movie Casablanca.
Speaker A:So, yeah.
Speaker A:Anyway, plane is ready to go onto the crew.
Speaker A:How was Fred Noonan chosen to be a navigator?
Speaker A:Who is he?
Speaker A:Why does he get left out of pretty much every conversation about this doom trip?
Speaker A:Because he's the hat man.
Speaker A:No, no, of course not.
Speaker A: Fred Noonan was born in: Speaker A:He was a merchant sailor, became a licensed ship navigator.
Speaker A:Master of celestial navigation, which is the use of elements outside of our planet to navigate and determine location.
Speaker A: By the: Speaker A: ossibility of flight grew the: Speaker A:He was hired by a company we discussed before in the episode and then, you know, the Pan, Pan America Airways.
Speaker A:He charted tons of routes for them, being a major contributor to their clipper routes that connected California to China by way of Hawaii, Midway Island, Wake island and Guam.
Speaker A:By the time he was chosen, he had logged thousands of hours of navigation across open water for using tools that have been used for hundreds of years, Sexton's compasses, and even what is known as dead reckoning.
Speaker A:Dead reckoning is much less scarier than the name sounds.
Speaker A:Simply using the speed at which you're going, combined with a fixed spot and set direction to calculate your current position.
Speaker A:Obviously, in other words, if you know how fast you're moving, what direction you're heading and where you started, you can make a pretty good estimate of where you are without needing to see landmarks or receive radio signals, although those are super helpful and prevent errors from building up over long flights.
Speaker A:George Putnam and Amelia both agreed they needed someone with the right kind of moxie to get her through the Pacific leg of the journey.
Speaker A:As we have learned on several occasions, the Pacific Ocean is a fickle mistress and is not to be trifled with.
Speaker A:His experience was very valuable and as luck would have it, he recently left Pan Am.
Speaker A:He was also initially only supposed to be part of the Pacific section, but after the failed first attempt, they revised to keep him on the entire route.
Speaker A:Some contemporary concerns of Fred was that he had a bit of a drinking problem.
Speaker A:Some even suspect that this might have something to do with their fate.
Speaker A:But also there's millions of things that might have done had to do with it.
Speaker A:So who's to say on the positive side of contemporary counts, one of Pan Am pilot, one Pan Am pilot said this of Noonan, quote, fred could find a postage stamp in the Pacific if he had a sexton and a and the time to read the stars, which is pretty high praise.
Speaker A:I can dig it, man.
Speaker A:I also wonder how much of his drinking was obvious to Amelia, if it was true, right?
Speaker A:Since she had a history with her father being an alcoholic and all.
Speaker A:Anyway, among other things to note for the trip, the plane would have been outfitted with radio equipment.
Speaker A:We discussed the evolution of radio a few episodes back.
Speaker A:The pirate radio episode.
Speaker A:The advent of radio.
Speaker A:Obviously super helpful for travel across the seas.
Speaker A:But as aviation become more and more long distance, there was a benefit to having it on planes as well.
Speaker A:This started small with basic Morse code transmissions, where pilots would tap signals back to the ground.
Speaker A:As radio technology advanced, long wave and medium wave frequencies become more commonplace in aviation.
Speaker A:But there were problems.
Speaker A:Planes had to rely on bouncing signals off the Earth's atmosphere, particularly the ionosphere, which worked, but also meant the signals could be distorted, delayed or weakened, especially over long distances or in bad weather.
Speaker A:Instead of getting a clean direct line, pilots often picked up multiple overlapping signals or ghost signals bouncing around unpredictably.
Speaker A:It made locking onto a signal, guiding signal challenging, especially when trying to find something as tiny as an island in the middle of the Pacific.
Speaker A:And there was another issue.
Speaker A:Amelia, the trailblazer that she was not exactly the most tech savvy, sir, she sir, sure.
Speaker A:Sir, sure.
Speaker A:Are you saying sir or sure, sure.
Speaker A:She could turn knobs and levers with the best of them, but understanding radio frequencies at basically its infancy was a whole other issue.
Speaker A:I think had she been born maybe five to 10 years later, she probably could have figured it out a lot easier.
Speaker A:But she was, you know, not only she was not the only one learning about it, and even the people who had been using it frequently were still learning new things about it all the time.
Speaker A:That said, her struggles with radio weren't just common, they were consequential.
Speaker A:For starters, Amelia never became proficient in Morse code, which was still the primary backup communication method for long distance flights.
Speaker A:She preferred voice transmissions, which were convenient but far less reliable, especially over open ocean.
Speaker A:This wasn't a minor oversight.
Speaker A:It meant she couldn't receive or reply to coded messages when communication, voice communication failed.
Speaker A:She also had a direction finding receiver installed on the Electra, theoretically a tool that could help her lock onto radio beacons and navigate more accurately, but by multiple accounts, including from radio technicians who worked with her, she didn't fully understand how to use it.
Speaker A:There are even reports that she missed some of the training sessions on how it worked, or didn't seem particularly concerned with technical side of the equipment.
Speaker A:That overconfidence, or perhaps just prioritization of the mission elements came back to haunt her.
Speaker A:Right right before the final leg from Laida Howland, she reportedly failed to test transmission.
Speaker A:With the ground radio operators unable to receive a test signal that would have helped her calibrate for the most dangerous part of the journey.
Speaker A:Then there's the frequency confusion.
Speaker A:Amelia and the Coast Guard cutter Itasca weren't on the same page literally.
Speaker A:They were using different frequencies for transmission and reception and neither side seemed entirely clear on what the plan was.
Speaker A:Worse yet, Amelia tried to use a frequency direction finding, forward direction finding that the Itasca wasn't equipped to transmit on.
Speaker A:And her own direction finding gear may have been broken or under tested or just misused.
Speaker A:And it wasn't all on her.
Speaker A:1930s aviation tech technology was notoriously finicky, malfunctions super common.
Speaker A:Even experienced military pilots had troubles with it.
Speaker A:But Amelia's radio related issues weren't just a product of faulty gear.
Speaker A:They stemmed from this disconnect between the radio, the rapid pace of emergency, emerging aviation technology, limited time.
Speaker A:Pilots had to master all of it.
Speaker A:After her disappearance, some critics like Major Al Williams were harsh, saying she was, you know, a stunt flyer out of her depth.
Speaker A:Others defended her fiercely, pointing out that she was doing what many others wouldn't do or wouldn't dare to do, which is fair.
Speaker A:Still, it's hard to escape the reality that radio missteps were one of the biggest contributors that contributors to the, to the tragedy that followed.
Speaker A:And it is kind of interesting to me that she did not have a navigator who was also a skilled radio operator.
Speaker A:But either way, we are now to the final voyage.
Speaker A:Their plans, as I mentioned, shifted from a westward trip to, from Hawaii to Howland and so on.
Speaker A:You might be curious as to what was so special about Howland island since you've probably never heard of it or only heard of it in regards to Amelia.
Speaker A:Well, Howlin island was not chosen because it has this scenic, majestic view.
Speaker A:It's not a tourist location like Hawaii.
Speaker A:It has no residents.
Speaker A:The island is less than 2 miles in length.
Speaker A:There's over 3 acres total land.
Speaker A:So why there?
Speaker A:Well, because.
Speaker A:Because she said so, that's why.
Speaker A:No, it was actually a little bit bigger than Amelia on this end.
Speaker A:While this uninhabited slab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean did good stopping point for Amelia and Fred between Hawaii and New guinea, there were definitely other larger options.
Speaker A:The bigger part is that the United States government had just picked Howland as a place to develop an Airstrip and potentially a hangar, a strategic point in the Pacific.
Speaker A:As the American military had been observing the Japanese advancement leading up to World War II, the US started to prepare the land for such a project a few years prior to Earhart's flight.
Speaker A:And her landing on it would provide much needed proof of its usefulness.
Speaker A: ,: Speaker A: This was around: Speaker A:Nothing major to note.
Speaker A:She was at each stop talked to by reporters who said that she was more upbeat and, but also like determined, purposeful.
Speaker A:Arrived in Miami on the 25th of May and stayed until June 1st.
Speaker A:Give maintenance crews just enough time for one final once over in tweakage, they had to fix a window.
Speaker A:You know, big important things.
Speaker A:There would be maintenance crews available at some of the other stops, but it was going to be, you know, few and far between after they Left me the U.S.
Speaker A:amelia's husband, George, George Putnam, spoke in an interview around this time in response to some who called this a publicity stunt.
Speaker A:He said, quote, this is not about showing off.
Speaker A:It's a scientific, pioneering endeavor, and I stand behind Amelia every step of the way.
Speaker A:I would hope so.
Speaker A:Be super weird if her husband and publicist was like, oh, yeah, did not think she was serious.
Speaker A:She snuck out of the house, took the keys to the plane, and off she went.
Speaker A:First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had this to say about the trip.
Speaker A:Quote, abilia Earhart shows us what courage looks like.
Speaker A:She represents the independence and potential of women everywhere in Miami.
Speaker A:Amelia went over the plans with Fred, making sure there was no two ways about what they were doing, where they were going.
Speaker A:Maintenance crews checked over the plane, rechecked some of the radio equipment.
Speaker A:Even if there were, was still confusion fueled up.
Speaker A:Also decided to leave their parachutes or their life raft here in Miami.
Speaker A:Eventually, they would get rid of their parachutes too, which feels weird, but they were trying to save weight as much as they could.
Speaker A:Amelia wrote a final letter to George in Miami, ensuring him of her commitment to the journey.
Speaker A:She the letter in full is as follows.
Speaker A:Please know I'm quite aware of the hazards of the trip.
Speaker A:I want to do it because I want to do it.
Speaker A:Women must try and do things as men have tried.
Speaker A:When they fail, their failures must be but a challenge to others.
Speaker A:She was all in.
Speaker A:I respect the heck out of that attitude.
Speaker A:June 1, they departed Miami and headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Speaker A:This was around a thousand Miles.
Speaker A:And when they departed, the trip was starting to gain some traction in the press.
Speaker A:Before leaving Miami, Amelia gave a mini speech to the reporters and said, we are finally on our way.
Speaker A:This time, I hope, around the world.
Speaker A:June 2nd, they flew to Carapito, Venezuela.
Speaker A:This section was around six hours of flying for 611 miles, give or take.
Speaker A:They landed at an airfield which was in use by Pan Am and Standard Oil, apparently had excellent facilities.
Speaker A:And, you know, I mentioned that, you know, in my replication of this flight via flight simulator, this airfield no longer exists.
Speaker A:And then I went to look it up because I wanted to land there, because I wanted to be as accurate as possible, and it's not there.
Speaker A:So I googled it, try to figure it out, and there's like a travel pin there on Google Maps and then there's reviews, and people are talking about how locals had no idea who Amelia Earhart was, why this plot of land had any significance.
Speaker A:And also, apparently they had been using it as a.
Speaker A:As a racetrack, which is understandable.
Speaker A:It just kind of cracked me up because people in the United States have this weird sense of entitlement when it comes to landmarks in other countries.
Speaker A:Anyway, I wanted to share that.
Speaker A:Onward we go.
Speaker A:From Carapito they flew to Dutch Guyana, Paramaribo, to be specific.
Speaker A:Another 610ish mile flight.
Speaker A:Pretty tame, a little rainy at first.
Speaker A:Flew around 5,000ft in elevation for this section.
Speaker A:Amelia ecstatic to see the plush jungles of South America and snaking rivers.
Speaker A:After staying in Paramaribo overnight, hosted by Dutch officials, they departed around 6am on 4 June, flying to Fortaleza Airport in Brazil.
Speaker A: This is around: Speaker A:970ish miles were over the jungle and then the remainder over the Atlantic.
Speaker A:And Earhart remarked that during the flight that the Brazilian coast from the air is beautiful but lonely, long green and edged with endless surf.
Speaker A:She sounds like she needs to be in, like, Gone with the Wind or something.
Speaker A:I'm not sure that that voice is working, but it's cracking me up, so I'm gonna keep doing it.
Speaker A:She was also impressed with the facilities at Fortaleza.
Speaker A:And they, you know, made the next day, 5 June, a crew rest day.
Speaker A:In terms of rest, you know, they were still working.
Speaker A:They have various preparations and things to think about.
Speaker A:The departure and destinations were fixed kind of.
Speaker A:They had, you know, room for adjustment, but depending on the weather, both rain and wind, that could change what route they end up taking and what elevation they needed to be at maintenance crews inspected the Electra here, fueled and serviced the next day.
Speaker A:Short flight from Fortaleza to natal, Brazil, around 267 miles.
Speaker A:This was a flight to get to the furthest possible spot of South America to prepare for the voyage across the Atlantic in full.
Speaker A:She wanted to get every possible bit of leverage on her side to cross the Atlantic.
Speaker A:Yeah, across the Atlantic.
Speaker A:They even fixed the plane at eastbound takeoff before resting for the evening.
Speaker A:She had planned on potentially flying the Atlantic that same day since they departed before 5am and landed before 7, but ultimately decided to push it to give themselves some rest for the long haul.
Speaker A:The next day they departed at 3:15 in the morning, before dawn even, and.
Speaker A:And they took off from a grass Runway to avoid crosswinds.
Speaker A:The journey From Natal to St.
Speaker A: San Luis, Senegal, was around: Speaker A:Took 13 hours to complete.
Speaker A:They encountered some thunderstorms, rain, thick clouds, which hindered navigation.
Speaker A:Noonan had to use dead reckoning to determine position.
Speaker A:The haze and some slight navigational errors actually landed them in the wrong place.
Speaker A:They were meant to go to Dakar, but instead landed in St.
Speaker A:Louis.
Speaker A:The pair credited their missed navigation to the worst weather they had experienced flying over the ocean.
Speaker A:June 8th, they corrected their mistake flying from St.
Speaker A:Louis to Dakar.
Speaker A:There was a welcoming party.
Speaker A:The plane was tended to after their cross ocean trek engines needed a little bit of a tune up and the pair stayed the night in Dakar and the next day was also no fly day so that they could study for the newest weather reports for the trip across the Sahara.
Speaker A:Flying over the Sahara, not super popular at the time, obviously it's one of the most harsh deserts in the world due to, and due to that fact, very little in terms of emergency landing options.
Speaker A:Not only that, but this stretch was going to test the plane and crew in terms of wind and heat.
Speaker A:Amelia stated, quote, the Sahara is an open to.
Speaker A:Sorry, the Sahara is an ocean of a different kind.
Speaker A:Less forgiving in some ways.
Speaker A:June 10, the pair departed Dakar and flew to Gao, French Sudan.
Speaker A:This flight was around a thousand miles, took around eight hours to complete.
Speaker A:They decided on Gal is a last minute alternate due to storms.
Speaker A:In their original intended stop of Nami, the pair landed in Gao with a reception from French officials who gave them places to sleep overnight.
Speaker A:Earhart described their journey over the desert as utterly flat and utterly flat, arid and uninhabited, which checks out.
Speaker A:After staying overnight, they departed to Chad, a 9 hour 910 mile journey.
Speaker A:Before they left, they were given a marvelous Breakfast by the French, an omelette du fromage and some hot cocoa.
Speaker A:Not, not exactly the kind of beverage I would like while I was in the Sahara before air conditioning.
Speaker A:But you know, it's the thought that counts, right?
Speaker A:A trip to Chad was also mind boggling to Amelia.
Speaker A:As they flew over the vast desert.
Speaker A:She found it incomprehensible in condition, an internal no man's land of barren desert.
Speaker A:She expressed relief when they landed in Chad, which makes sense.
Speaker A:I know it's not the same, but I've driven through the salt lake flat.
Speaker A:The salt flats in Utah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Boy, howdy, was I ready to end that.
Speaker A:That just show me some kind of color.
Speaker A:It's just so bright and boring.
Speaker A:I can only imagine being in a plane where your view changes on a scale hard to see from 10,000ft For 10 hours.
Speaker A: eparted Chad and flew a balmy: Speaker A:They made a stop a quarter of the way through at a leak and landing gear strut that delayed their departure and Chad.
Speaker A:Heat must have been getting to her because they stayed the night in Al Fashir in Sudan before continuing to Khartoum the next day.
Speaker A:Amelia also noted that the heat was more than 100 degrees in the shade, which is, you know, not fun at all.
Speaker A:Combine that with being in a tin can flying in this, you know, in the bright sun.
Speaker A:Sure it's not sure.
Speaker A:I'm sure it was very hot.
Speaker A:They actually had concerns of mental fatigue, which is stress on the metal structures due to high heat.
Speaker A:Fred had described this flight to journalists when they landed.
Speaker A:We traveled through the air so hot it felt like flying through a kiln.
Speaker A:Yeah, you know what I'm telling you, I'm pretty sure I'm nailing these voices.
Speaker A:On 13 June, they departed Al Fasher to Khartoum, arriving in three hours.
Speaker A:Once they landed, bridge officials there had to told them to pay a fee for landing.
Speaker A:So they refueled and then continued to Massawa in the afternoon.
Speaker A:During this day, Amelia described having seen the Nile river corridor for the first time.
Speaker A:She said it was like a thin green lifeline across an endless brown sheet.
Speaker A:The flight to Masau was a respite.
Speaker A:The Massawa is a major port in the Red Sea.
Speaker A:It was still very hot there, but, you know, the crew needed a rest, so they stayed the night.
Speaker A:The next day they took a short flight to Assab, another city in Eritrea.
Speaker A:Eritrea.
Speaker A:This was a 250 mile flight and chosen due to its better facilities and larger supplies of fuel.
Speaker A:There's plenty of attention as the pair had been asked to be in several photographs and you know, locals even would come take photos with the plane while Amelia and Fred worked on it.
Speaker A:June 15 they leave Assab and fly to Karachi, India which is now in Pakistan.
Speaker A:This was a big trip.
Speaker A:1880 miles, 13 hours record setting non stop flight from Red Sea to Indian subcontinent.
Speaker A:Pretty cool.
Speaker A:After the long seaway flight the lecture was inspected and they stayed the night there and the next day as well.
Speaker A:Fully serviced plane.
Speaker A:Earhart herself going through anything she could like a want list to be done, you know.
Speaker A:They departed Karachi for Calcutta, India on June 17.
Speaker A: That's: Speaker A:They noted there was a dust bowl type storm going on below them which obscured ground but they still managed to navigate just fine.
Speaker A:They landed at Dum dum Airport around 4pm local time and British officials and onlookers welcomed them.
Speaker A:The next day they left at 6:00am for Akia, Burma.
Speaker A:They had to take off from a mud soaked Runway thanks to some storms in the afternoon prior.
Speaker A:This was dangerous but it was better than the alternative of waiting for them to rework the Runway which could take days.
Speaker A:They barely cleared the trees at the edge of the airfield.
Speaker A:They flew for 400 miles landing in Aqiab and just three and a half hours later they refueled and took off for Rangoon but had to return due to monsoon conditions.
Speaker A:June 19 they successfully landed in Rangoon, Burma, modern day Myanmar.
Speaker A:The trip itself only taking three hours to cover less than 300 miles.
Speaker A:Earhart was impressed by the Mingaladan aerodrome in Rangoon.
Speaker A:It was, you know they were received well by the British and native Burmese doing to the due to the flight being some public like the public being excited to hear for it to see them land after the delay prior the day prior.
Speaker A:June 20 they flew from Rangoon to Bangkok, Thailand in a 300 mile trip.
Speaker A:Flight was not unpleasant as the days prior.
Speaker A:Worst they had on this stretch was some wind as they flew through a mountain range between Burma and Siam.
Speaker A:Once on the other side things cleared and there were endless lengths of jungle and rice paddies below.
Speaker A:She noticed how if they had to there was no emergency location that would you know, tear the plane apart upon landing.
Speaker A:The jungle, the jungle is magnificent carpet until it's your only landing option.
Speaker A:They quick a quickly refueled and departed Bangkok to Singapore.
Speaker A:Love Singapore.
Speaker A:This was a 900ish mile flight taking them around 6 hours.
Speaker A:They arrived in Singapore having left Rangoon just after another airline but they had arrived before that airline.
Speaker A:So that's pretty cool.
Speaker A:They took a more direct route.
Speaker A:Singapore had just opened their airport eight days prior to their arrival.
Speaker A:And once her and Fred landed, they put the Electra in a hangar and the pair stayed overnight with the American consulate, who provided sleeping arrangements and dinner and such.
Speaker A:First thing in the morning on June 21st, they departed.
Speaker A:They flew 550 miles to Bondung.
Speaker A:This is in modern day Indonesia.
Speaker A:When they arrived, a little bit of a problem.
Speaker A:Amelia made a respectful faux pas.
Speaker A:She dissed Terry.
Speaker A:No, hold on, I read that wrong.
Speaker A:She fell ill and with dysentery.
Speaker A:Okay, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker A:She, she was ordered to rest as dysentery.
Speaker A:Not exactly something you want to do anything with, let alone fly an airplane over crazy harsh environments.
Speaker A:She and Noonan were grounded for the next few days, partly due to her illness and then also because of the weather.
Speaker A:Good news is that it gave them plenty of time to make sure the monsoons, other major weather events they flew through, didn't damage the aircraft.
Speaker A:They were back in the air on June 25, flying to Java, a 300 mile flight.
Speaker A:But upon landing, there noticed some things that needed to be repaired and so they flew back to Bandung.
Speaker A:They tried again the next day.
Speaker A:Amelia had also recovered a little bit more and landed in.
Speaker A:Sorry, sorry.
Speaker A:Java, around 310 miles, under three hours.
Speaker A:There's some accounts also here that Noonan was drinking.
Speaker A:Again, I mentioned it before, but some of his contemporaries stated that he was drinking.
Speaker A:But also there's also some counters to that of like how quickly they were getting ready in the morning and how, how he was navigating, like the, the skills he was navigating in certain spots kind of made it seem impossible that he was over drinking.
Speaker A:He might have had like a couple drinks to go to sleep or something.
Speaker A:But anyway.
Speaker A:Amelia was also reported to have said this to mechanics in Java.
Speaker A:I don't like relying on radio.
Speaker A:I can't understand it.
Speaker A:On the 27th, they were back off, this time to Timor, which is in modern day Indonesia.
Speaker A:They flew for around 670 miles in around five hours.
Speaker A:Amelia noted the monsoon season was still present, but it was lessening, which is, you know, good.
Speaker A:Upon arrival, Dutch officials greeted her.
Speaker A:The plane was checked over once again, specifically the direction finder, radio equipment.
Speaker A:Got the plane fueled up, had some lunch and took off for Australia.
Speaker A:500 miles from Timor to Darwin, Australia, in three hours.
Speaker A:When they arrived, the press was anxiously awaiting them.
Speaker A:They had a plane.
Speaker A:They had the plane repaired further along with any minor issues that they had found a local paper had discussed her arrival, stating, a slender woman.
Speaker A:It's Australian.
Speaker A:A slender woman with a windswept hair stepped down like a visiting dignitary of the skies.
Speaker A:I don't know, I lost at the end there.
Speaker A:There's too many accidents for me to try to do.
Speaker A:They also made any changes to their planned route that they needed to found some ways to lighten the plane further.
Speaker A:And this is where they ditched their parachutes.
Speaker A:Apparently, Noonan is quoted as stating, we travel light.
Speaker A:Weight is fuel, fuel is life.
Speaker A:Kind of similar to the D OT Love Pass group, right?
Speaker A:Light packs, because everything else will just burn energy.
Speaker A:They also had an antenna removed.
Speaker A:The trailing antenna had been taken off due to reduced drag or taking off to reduce the drag, really trying to squeeze every ounce of fuel they possibly could.
Speaker A:They intended on utilizing the fixed direction finding loop for their navigation.
Speaker A:The remaining remainder of the journey, along with radio communication with the Itasca, which was anchored near Howland Island.
Speaker A:Noonan had said, much of the importance of that will be depending heavily on radio bearings.
Speaker A:If the Itasca can't hear us, we're going to have a time of it.
Speaker A:June 29, they fly from Darwin, Australia, to Lee, New guinea or La New guinea, leaving Australia's pivotal moment because they had now departed the last major city of their journey, right?
Speaker A:Every place marked after Australia would have smaller infrastructure, if any, less support, harder emergency landing options, less access to immediate public needs.
Speaker A:Upon arriving in Lay, they would now just be two stops away from accomplishment, from the accomplishment of a lifetime.
Speaker A:Final stretch.
Speaker A:By the time they arrived, they had flown over 20,000 miles, around 161 flight hours.
Speaker A:They landed in the afternoon on the 29th.
Speaker A:There are photos of her with the Electra.
Speaker A:They had both been pleased with the performance of the plane, but, you know, the engines needed some tweaks here and there.
Speaker A:They were excited to almost be done, but, you know, still wanted to be very cautious.
Speaker A:Earhart and Noonan were hosted by the administrators of Guinea Airways as well as the colonial officers.
Speaker A:They stayed in the state the next day as well, dedicating the entire day to planning and overhauling the plane as much as they could.
Speaker A:They fueled the Electra with over a thousand gallons, which is crazy.
Speaker A:That's a lot of.
Speaker A:That's a lot of fuel replaced, you know, change the oil, check the aircraft, you know, with heavy focus.
Speaker A:They went over all of the instruments, the engines, the radio transmitter, receiver, sent out telegrams to us and also to the crew on the Howland island, giving them Updated plans.
Speaker A:It actually made plans to leave on July 1, but they deemed it too risky navigationally to do so.
Speaker A:The plane now weighed at a lofty £15,000, which is close to the operational ceiling that the Electra could handle.
Speaker A:A Guinea Airways ground technician stated she was concerned about the weight but confident it would fly.
Speaker A:We all will.
Speaker A:I mentioned they were trying to hone in the radio during this stop.
Speaker A:Some of the issues that plagued the flight were simple.
Speaker A:Radio operator at LA noticed the frequencies Amelia had given them for the radio seemed off and, you know, kind of talked about a little bit, sparing a lot of the technical mumbo jumbo.
Speaker A:Amelia's lack of understanding of the radio frequencies led to her giving out incorrect numbers for the different types of radio technology.
Speaker A:Essentially, she got frequencies mixed up.
Speaker A: d be ready to receive them on: Speaker A:So potentially she met 750 kilocycles.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:She also had, you know, the damaged antenna that could have received more signal, and they elected to have it removed altogether.
Speaker A:So while the Itasca was sending out signals to her for her to follow, she could not tune in to any wavelength.
Speaker A:They had tried to coordinate with the Itasca one last time, but were unsuccessful in this.
Speaker A:The Itasca was aware of the confusing radio frequencies, not in terms that they knew the mix up, but that they knew that the numbers didn't quite add up to what they were saying they could do.
Speaker A:Now, what they chose to do about it, you know, that's kind of up to them.
Speaker A:Maybe they believe that the fancy equipment this flying laboratory was supposed to have, you know, could transmit in those signals.
Speaker A:Obviously they could transmit, but they had a lot more infrastructure to support that.
Speaker A:They could have also just believed that, you know, such a tremendous undertaking ahead that Earhart and Noonan would have figured out their mix up before they got too far along.
Speaker A:Amelia did send a cable transmission to George stating radio misunderstanding and personnel unfitness probably will hold one day.
Speaker A:Have asked Black to hold one day.
Speaker A:Black being Richard Black, who was overseeing Howland Island's receivers.
Speaker A:July 2, at 10am The Electra took off for the last time.
Speaker A:The crew in Lei noticed the plane barely cleared the end of the Runway with how heavy with fuel it was.
Speaker A:Adding to this was the field was damp and also a grass field.
Speaker A:There were also signs that a headwind was mounting, which is not a good Sign if you're trying to squeeze every last drop of fuel to make it to your very tiny destination.
Speaker A:The distance was 2,556 miles over basically open ocean.
Speaker A:No room for error.
Speaker A:The Itasca was anchored around 20ish miles or less than 20ish miles from Howland Island.
Speaker A:They were to provide both voice and Morse communication.
Speaker A:They had constant Morse beep that was to be used as homing signal.
Speaker A:If the signal got fuzzy, they were going the wrong way.
Speaker A:If it was strong, that was the right direction, so on.
Speaker A:The ship was also to send out smoke signals for the plane, as well as rescue if need be.
Speaker A:This flight was going to take anywhere from 18 to 20 hours.
Speaker A:The ship received no communication from Earhart until 5am the next day.
Speaker A:She was supposed to check in hourly and she never did or acknowledged their regular messages.
Speaker A:At 5:12am, a weak signal was heard.
Speaker A:Dipped into her voice a little too soon there.
Speaker A:A weak signal was heard.
Speaker A:KHAQQ calling a taska.
Speaker A:We are approximately 200 miles out, approximately on schedule.
Speaker A:The ship responded, but again she gave no response.
Speaker A:The assumption is they had the dial set wrong or it was damaged so she couldn't hear the ship and that's why she never responded.
Speaker A:An hour later, at 6:14am, another signal came through, stronger than the last KHA Q Q calling Itasca.
Speaker A:We are about 100 miles out.
Speaker A:Still no reply from Earhart.
Speaker A:When the ship responds, the clarity of the signal indicated that she was in fact getting closer, though.
Speaker A:7:42am, the infamous transmission from Earhart is received.
Speaker A:We must be on you, but cannot see you.
Speaker A:Gas is running low.
Speaker A:Their estimates were she was within 100 miles of the island, but with cloud coverage and poor visibility, you know, the smoke signals that they put up weren't going to help either.
Speaker A:8:43am, the last transmission.
Speaker A:Last confirmed transmission from Earhart comes through.
Speaker A:We are on the line of 157, 337.
Speaker A:We are running north and south.
Speaker A:Amelia was attempting to take navigational line north and south to search for the island as it should be there.
Speaker A:Noonan, despite his stellar record as a navigator, was held back by their poor visibility.
Speaker A:He could have used dead reckoning, but he, you know, had he done that, it could have just ended just as bad.
Speaker A:Dead reckoning, super helpful.
Speaker A:But over a long period of distances, the errors, however minute, start to stack up.
Speaker A:Yeah, Taska was unable to locate by RDF tracking because they were not.
Speaker A:She wasn't transmitting on the proper frequency for them to home in on her signal.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:30 minutes after the last signal, the Itasca began searching.
Speaker A:Planes from Holland flew low over the ocean in grid patterns trying to locate any signs of a wreck, oil slick, wreckage, distress flares or anything else Leah had reported.
Speaker A:They last heard Earhart a few hours after she had departed.
Speaker A:US Navy quickly jumped in to help.
Speaker A:With various ships brought to Central Pacific.
Speaker A:They combined they combed a 250,000 square mile area, but they had called the search off after 16 days.
Speaker A:The Itasca's chief radio operator, Lee Bellar stated that they were close.
Speaker A:We knew they were close and they passed us like ghosts in the morning fog.
Speaker A:We just couldn't reach each other.
Speaker A:And that's both depressing and beautifully said.
Speaker A:Witnesses aboard the Itasca state that the last transmission sounded like she was sending it from directly above them with how loud and clear it was.
Speaker A:So what happened?
Speaker A:No clue.
Speaker A:See you next time.
Speaker A:No theories about what happened range from mundane to movie worthy.
Speaker A:Most likely in my mind, you know, the crash and sink theory or you know, crash near an island and you know, whatever.
Speaker A:Yeah, all of the signs were hidden by the ever changing waters of the ocean.
Speaker A:Seems like the good luck that she had finally ran out.
Speaker A:She was not taking radio technology seriously enough.
Speaker A:And that was a fatal flaw in my opinion.
Speaker A:Noonan unable to get a good read on their location because of poor visibility and had they had proper radio equipment, he could have calibrated a chronometer inlay.
Speaker A:You know, things might have been differently.
Speaker A:I think they are lucky enough to have had any contact with the Itask at all.
Speaker A:Nobody on Howland nor the Itasca ever even saw the plane.
Speaker A:Despite the proximity and clarity of the transmission they had received, they were tired, they were covered in clouds and adding to adding in radio issues, there's little chance it could go well.
Speaker A:There are other theories of course.
Speaker A:This next one points to the Pear landing on Nika Maroro.
Speaker A:This island is 350 miles southeast of Howland.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A: gh the bones were lost in the: Speaker A:There were also local legends of a man and woman castaways living on the island For a short time.
Speaker A:Radio operators in the Pacific log dozens of super faint transmissions alleging to be from Air Airheart.
Speaker A:Many people chalk this up to people trying to eke out fame from the disappearance.
Speaker A:But some credible radio operators reported it as well.
Speaker A:The US Navy did a flyover of the island on July 9, but were unable to find any type of sign of anybody being There.
Speaker A:So especially like an airplane, skeptics point out that they could have been hiding in the trees or something.
Speaker A:But, you know, if you were a stranded pilot, one of the first things you'd do is make an indicator or sign that people could locate you.
Speaker A:Whether it's just some kind of like very man made rock formation on the beach or something, you're gonna try and make it obvious that somebody's there.
Speaker A:In my opinion, I don't know.
Speaker A:The next one is the theory from one of the books I got a lot of the information with I talked about earlier.
Speaker A:And I will say that the introduction to this book makes me think twice about the theory.
Speaker A:Just because it's so aggressive in tone about how this is a major government cover up.
Speaker A:And you know, that's like, that's how it sounded.
Speaker A:And you know, those types of books, you know, tend to always sound that way.
Speaker A:But anyway, this theory, the Saipan theory or Japanese capture theory, points to the pair straying northwest on their path, landing or crash landing on or near an island near Saipan or on Saipan itself.
Speaker A:Following this, the Japanese captured her and Noonan took the plane out of the water or whatever.
Speaker A:According to this theory, they viewed Amelia and Fred as American spies.
Speaker A:They were subsequently arrested and possibly tortured and killed.
Speaker A:Civilians from Saipan claim to have seen a tall white woman and man who were captured.
Speaker A:There are some testimonies that come from various soldiers and marines who were on the island during and following the war in the Pacific.
Speaker A:But there's never been any hard proof of this.
Speaker A:It's all just he said, she said.
Speaker A:A bigger problem is that the Japanese offered to help to look for her, which is usually a good sign.
Speaker A:But then again, they were pretty sneaky back then.
Speaker A:One story from the book I read was that there were some interesting looking people on the island that, you know, they were preventing others from from going towards a lone hangar they had.
Speaker A:There was.
Speaker A:This person had witnessed a group of soldiers yelling that they knew Amelia's plane was in the hangar.
Speaker A:A bureaucratic type man was seen on the island as well.
Speaker A:A man who was potentially James Forrestal.
Speaker A:He was the Secretary of the Navy during the war, then the first Secretary of Defense.
Speaker A:Following the war.
Speaker A: e and was forced to resign in: Speaker A:Added alleged in there because, you know, this whole theory hinges on the fact that he Just couldn't live with the fact that he was hiding up the truth of Amelia and Fred's, you know, fate and that the reason why they were covering it up was to maintain diplomatic relations between the US and Japan following the war.
Speaker A:But I gotta tell you, I don't think people would have cared if they knew that Japan had them.
Speaker A:You know, I mean, like, we were still very hostile towards Japan after the war.
Speaker A:So I don't know why we're like, why this theory is acting like, well, we just wanted to be friends with them again.
Speaker A:We just nuked them twice.
Speaker A:Like, I don't think they care.
Speaker A:Another theory of that kind of ties to this is a double life spy theory.
Speaker A:This one says that Amelia was on a secret mission for the government to spy on Japan, and their military buildup was.
Speaker A:And then was captured or rescued and hidden or assumed a new identity.
Speaker A:Main thought process was similar to this quote that is from an aviation magazine in the 60s.
Speaker A:If she had crashed, we'd have found something.
Speaker A:But if she were on a mission, that's a whole different story.
Speaker A:How does that make sense?
Speaker A:Did this person just forget how vast the ocean is?
Speaker A:Like, there's even claims that her new identity was that of Irene Bolam, who, you know, this was debunked heavily, even in court.
Speaker A:In any instance, she and Fred disappeared.
Speaker A:FDR issued the most expensive air search, his search, air sea search in history at the time to find her.
Speaker A:George Putnam, her husband, continues searching even after the Navy had stopped.
Speaker A:He had stated, quote, shortly after the disappearance, quote, the ocean is big and she was small.
Speaker A:It's as simple and tragic as that.
Speaker A:So kind of a not good lookout on that.
Speaker A:Throughout the years, more evidence has been found, though more confusion has also stirred.
Speaker A:The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or tigar, started to search Nikomororo, Nikumaroro, Thailand, as they believe this was the most likely of places they found bones.
Speaker A:But they were identified as male and then lost.
Speaker A:As mentioned prior, they didn't find those bones, but you know that that's what was found.
Speaker A: the United States in from the: Speaker A:All right, a woman's shoe heel, which chemically matched to Earhart's known footwear.
Speaker A:And pieces of aircraft aluminum consistent with the Electra.
Speaker A:Though none of this is conclusive, the bones, despite being lost, did help a little bit.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A: Back in: Speaker A:Richard Jantz said that the measurements of them were consistent with earhart to a 99% degree higher than any other other samples.
Speaker A:Though without the actual bones, impossible to know for sure.
Speaker A:Most evidence points to the Nikumaroro island theory, though it's hard to tell if they crashed, landed near that island, or if things they found merely floated to the shore thanks to the waves.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:There's been some deep sea sonar type imaging done to the area, also with one promising lead last year, but it turned out to be just a natural rock formation.
Speaker A:Another lead on Nikumaro island is called the Teraya object.
Speaker A:This is an anomaly located on the Teraya Peninsula of Nikumaroro, noted for its sharp angles and straight lines.
Speaker A:Dr.
Speaker A:Pettigrew of Taigar believes this to be pieces of the Electra.
Speaker A: ropic storm passed through in: Speaker A:So there's a current funding operation going on if you want to donate to that.
Speaker A:He has hopes to travel to the island in August of this year and figure out what that object is.
Speaker A:The object has eluded searchers of the island previously due to the fact that it had been partially covered by sediment and also below the surface of the water, combination that hinders even the best researchers.
Speaker A:So, you know, maybe, maybe we will know by the end of the year.
Speaker A:That would be cool if we do.
Speaker A:What happened to it?
Speaker A:Well, you know, this.
Speaker A:This island actually has a population of aggressive crabs.
Speaker A:Not even kidding.
Speaker A:They bite and they're mean.
Speaker A:As to the mystery of her fate, we may never know.
Speaker A:What we do know is that her legacy has endured.
Speaker A:Her disappearance is only part of her story.
Speaker A:A compelling part, yes.
Speaker A:But I don't believe it's the defining moment.
Speaker A:What draws people in isn't just the unsolved ending.
Speaker A:It's everything she did before that moment.
Speaker A:And it was a lot.
Speaker A:Amelia Earhart was truly incredible.
Speaker A:Not because she vanished, but because she refused to be invisible in the first place.
Speaker A:She challenged gender norms and took the road or sky less traveled and succeeded in nearly every way imaginable.
Speaker A:Her name is still synonymous with courage, rebellion and purpose.
Speaker A:She's not remembered with pity.
Speaker A:She's remembered with admiration, with inspiration.
Speaker A:And she's been everywhere since her childhood home in Atchison, Kansas, now a museum.
Speaker A:The 90, the 90 nines, that aviation organization she helped found, still going strong today, been subjects of books and biographies, documentaries and yes, wonderful podcasts.
Speaker A:She's even been portrayed by the likes of Hilary Swank and Amy Adams, you know, two award winning actors of high regard.
Speaker A:Okay, being honest, Hillary Swank, the movie she was in Amelia, not really a critical dynamo movie.
Speaker A:She was a great casting choice though critics said that it felt like a surface, level depiction of events we already knew about and didn't quite bother to explore the depth of the woman behind them.
Speaker A:Fair critique.
Speaker A:Because, you know, Amelia wasn't just a pilot.
Speaker A:She was a speaker, an author, an advocate, fashion designer, a consultant, an educator.
Speaker A:She was the whole plane, not just the propeller.
Speaker A:Her story continues to be told not because we lost her, but because of what we gained from her.
Speaker A:Women must try to do things just as men have tried.
Speaker A:When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.
Speaker A:That's what she said and that's what she did.
Speaker A:She never needed to finish that final flight to prove anything.
Speaker A:Her legacy was already cruising at altitude.
Speaker A:So wherever she ended up, in the sea, on a reef or somewhere, only history knows.
Speaker A:Amelia Herhart still flying.
Speaker A:Not on radar, but in legacy and in the hearts of those who dare to dream.
Speaker A:I hope you all found this as interesting as I did.
Speaker A:I also hope that I did not bore you to death with the history of aviation in the beginning.
Speaker A:I wanted to make sure you had an understanding of, you know, the burgeoning technology that she was a part of as she grew.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:There's so much to her story and the story of those around her.
Speaker A:Also do kind of feel bad because Fred Noonan gets talked about only ever so briefly as like an afterthought when it comes to Amelia.
Speaker A:And I think he gets.
Speaker A:He just gets lost in most of the conversation.
Speaker A:So I wanted to give the little tip of the cap to him.
Speaker A:That's why I included his brief bio in the episode as well.
Speaker A:You did enjoy.
Speaker A:Let me know.
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Speaker A:Probably I'm not flawless as some of you may believe.
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Speaker A:So thank you to everyone who has followed me on this journey.
Speaker A:I hope you're enjoying it and learning lots.
Speaker A:Remember, keep questioning the past.
Speaker A:The future will thank you.
Speaker A:See you next time.
