Free Amelia by Nancy Nahra Page B

but everything else in the report came from Earhart herself and carried her byline. Straightforward and peppered with flashes of wit, she explained why she had begun the 2,408-mile flight almost in secret. “The final preparation was accomplished very cautiously,” she said. “I wanted to escape the fuss and crowds of a preannounced departure. It was easier to say no ‘Aloha.’” Later in the story came the comments that explained the headline: “I didn’t encounter really bad weather throughout the entire flight, and the greatest hazard I had to overcome was the criticism heaped on my head for even contemplating the flight [because several other aviators had died attempting it]. For this reason it was infinitely more difficult than my two Atlantic flights. The criticism I had received before taking off from Hawaii was entirely unwarranted and manifested itself in a physical strain more difficult than fatigue. Throughout the night I felt this, yet I never experienced actual nervousness.”
    She had flown the Vega 5B, the same plane she used to solo the Atlantic. It was so reliable that she dubbed it “Old Bessie, the fire horse.” Indeed, the flight was so smooth that Earhart, in the waning hours, had been able to relax and listen to a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera from New York.
    By 1935, Earhart’s accomplishments as pilot had become almost routine in the public eye, but she had just flown her longest flight so far. The distance from Honolulu to Oakland, some 2,401 miles, exceeded her earlier flight from Canada to Ireland (2,026.5 miles), which had inspired greater celebration.
    That same year, 1935, Earhart set another record when she made the first solo flight from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey, again in Old Bessie. Readers may not have remembered which flight she was talking about, but they would certainly remember the way she told the story of her tumultuous Newark welcome: “I was rescued from my plane by husky policemen . . . one of whom in the ensuing melee took possession of my right arm and another of my left leg . . . the arm-holder started to go one way, while he who clasped my leg set out in the opposite direction. The result provided the victim with a fleeting taste of the tortures of the rack. . . . It was fine to be home again.”
    Earhart’s description focuses on the humor of that story, but George Putnam was furious with the police. He expected better protection and security.
    Long before she reached Newark, crowds had been gathering at airports along the way, hoping to get a glimpse of her small red plane. Some of her admirers remembered that before Earhart’s flight only one pilot had attempted the same general path. In 1931, a young Mexican had begun in New York headed for Mexico City, despite warnings that bad weather lay ahead. He had flown only as far as New Jersey when severe thunder and lightning dashed his plans – and crashed his plane. He didn’t survive.
    Before that crash had faded from memory, an even worse accident happened, this one just three days before Earhart’s record-breaking flight from Mexico. Four people, including a United States senator, died when a plane traveling from New Mexico crashed.
    The drama surrounding that high-profile accident left many of Earhart’s admirers fearful for her safety. Mexico City itself - with its elevation of more than a mile above sea level - presented special challenges. Regular flying procedures had to be changed from the moment of takeoff. In an age when flight instruments were rare and sometimes inexact, pilot judgment was crucial. But Earhart transcended the technical difficulties as she made her successful and surprisingly fast flight.
    Records of earlier flights helped, particularly when she beat those records. Earhart knew, for example, that seven years earlier Charles Lindbergh had flown from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., and she had found out