FLYBOYJ
"THE GREAT GAZOO"
AP diary adds clue to Earhart mystery By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 31, 6:03 PM ET
It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet it keeps warming to life. Seventy years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes taken of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart...," are getting another look.
The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter reveals a new perspective.
A team that has already found aircraft parts and pieces of a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll hopes to return there this year to search for more evidence, maybe even DNA.
If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been found alive? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.
For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island.
The date was July 2, 1937, and the pair were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest and most perilous leg of a much-publicized "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif.
At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart, already the most famous aviator of the decade, was to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to land, rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii.
Earhart pushed the talk button on her radio mike and said, "200 miles out."
Her voice — described as a "whispery drawl," evoking her Kansas roots — was heard by the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, rocking gently in calm seas off Howland. The U.S. government had built an airstrip on the treeless, 500-acre coral spit, and at the request of Earhart's husband and manager, publisher George Putnam, dispatched the cutter from Hawaii to help her find her way.
During the night, Itasca's radio operators had become increasingly exasperated. Earhart's voice had come through in only a few, brief, static-marred transmissions — "sky overcast" was one — and hadn't acknowledged any of Itasca's messages or its steady stream of Morse code A's sent as a homing signal: dot-dash, dot-dash... They decided the glamorous 39-year-old "Lady Lindy" was either arrogant or incompetent.
What nobody knew — not Earhart, and not Itasca — was that her plane's radio-reception antenna had been ripped away during the takeoff from Lae's bumpy dirt runway. The Itasca could hear Earhart, but she was unable to hear anything, voice or code.
Also listening in the Itasca's radio room was James W. Carey, one of two reporters aboard. The 23-year-old University of Hawaii student had been hired by The Associated Press to cover Earhart's Howland stopover. His job was to send brief radiograms to the AP in Honolulu and San Francisco.
But during the eight days since arriving at Howland, Carey also had been keeping a diary.
In small notebooks, he jotted down comments about the island's "gooney birds," beachcombing and poker games in Itasca's wardroom. He also noted how Earhart's delayed departure from Lae was affecting crewmembers' morale, writing on June 30: "They are getting tired of waiting for a `gooney' dame who doesn't seem to be aware of the annoyance the delays have made."
Carey's diary was unknown to Earhart scholars until last September, when a typewritten copy turned up on eBay and was bought by a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR. The non-profit organization believes Earhart and Noonan were not lost at sea, but landed on an uninhabited atoll called Gardner Island, and lived for an unknown period as castaways.
"Even though the diary doesn't answer the big question, it's an incredible discovery," said TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie, who has led eight expeditions to the island since 1989, and plans another this July if his group can raise enough money.
"We have long had the transcripts of the radio traffic, but this is the first document that puts a real person aboard Itasca and tells us something from a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days."
___
On July 1, word came from New Guinea that the Electra was finally airborne.
Early on Friday, July 2, Carey wrote in his diary: "Up all last night following radio reports — scanty ... heard voice for first time 2:48 a.m. — `sky overcast.' All I heard. At 6:15 am reported `200 miles out.'"
By the time Earhart, her voice stronger, reported she was "100 miles out," a welcoming committee had gone ashore and was "waiting restlessly," Carey wrote.
If Noonan's dead-reckoning did not bring the plane directly over Howland at the "line of position," Earhart would fly up and down the 337-157 degree line until she found the island.
"To the north, the first landfall is Siberia," says Gillespie, "so if they didn't find it soon, they'd have turned back south, knowing that even if they missed Howland, there were other islands beyond it — Baker, McKean and Gardner — on that same line."
But nothing was that simple. By now, Earhart would be burning into her five-hour fuel reserve, and even in daylight, islands could be obscured by billowy clouds and their shadows on the water.
At 7:42 a.m. local time, Earhart's voice suddenly came loud and clear: "KHAQQ to Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."
At 7:58 a.m., there was a nervous edge to Earhart's normal calm. A log entry had her saying, "we are drifting but cannot hear you." An operator changed this to "we are circling." Gillespie believes she actually said, "we are listening."
As birds wheeled over the Howland shoreline, human ears strained for the sound of engines, and binoculars scanned for any sign of the silver Electra. Itasca continued sending Morse code A's.
About 8:30 a.m., believing Earhart must be out of gas, Itasca's captain, Cmdr. Warner K. Thompson, ordered the welcoming committee back to the ship. "Flash news from ship Itasca: `Amelia down,'" Carey wrote in his diary.
Suddenly, at 8:55 a.m., Earhart was back on: "We are on the line 157 337... we are running on line north and south." The radiomen agreed she sounded distraught; one thought she was near hysteria.
Then the radio went silent.
Having won a coin-toss with his United Press rival, Howard Hanzlick, to decide whose news bulletin would go first, Carey had prepared two versions: "Earhart landed __ Howland time," and "Flash Earhart crackup landing __ Howland time."
He had not anticipated a third alternative, that she might not land at all.
Now, with all frequencies reserved for possible distress calls, neither reporter could send anything. While AP broke the "Earhart missing" story from Honolulu, quoting Coast Guard officials there, it would be 18 hours before Carey's first report reached San Francisco.
In the meantime, he kept busy with the diary: "Itasca set off `full speed ahead' to search the northwest quadrant off Howland," the most likely area for the plane to be afloat on empty gas tanks.
Nothing was sighted, and by evening the ship's mood, Carey wrote, had "taken a turn to the more serious side."
___
Sat Mar 31, 6:03 PM ET
It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet it keeps warming to life. Seventy years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes taken of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart...," are getting another look.
The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter reveals a new perspective.
A team that has already found aircraft parts and pieces of a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll hopes to return there this year to search for more evidence, maybe even DNA.
If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been found alive? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.
For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island.
The date was July 2, 1937, and the pair were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest and most perilous leg of a much-publicized "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif.
At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart, already the most famous aviator of the decade, was to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to land, rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii.
Earhart pushed the talk button on her radio mike and said, "200 miles out."
Her voice — described as a "whispery drawl," evoking her Kansas roots — was heard by the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, rocking gently in calm seas off Howland. The U.S. government had built an airstrip on the treeless, 500-acre coral spit, and at the request of Earhart's husband and manager, publisher George Putnam, dispatched the cutter from Hawaii to help her find her way.
During the night, Itasca's radio operators had become increasingly exasperated. Earhart's voice had come through in only a few, brief, static-marred transmissions — "sky overcast" was one — and hadn't acknowledged any of Itasca's messages or its steady stream of Morse code A's sent as a homing signal: dot-dash, dot-dash... They decided the glamorous 39-year-old "Lady Lindy" was either arrogant or incompetent.
What nobody knew — not Earhart, and not Itasca — was that her plane's radio-reception antenna had been ripped away during the takeoff from Lae's bumpy dirt runway. The Itasca could hear Earhart, but she was unable to hear anything, voice or code.
Also listening in the Itasca's radio room was James W. Carey, one of two reporters aboard. The 23-year-old University of Hawaii student had been hired by The Associated Press to cover Earhart's Howland stopover. His job was to send brief radiograms to the AP in Honolulu and San Francisco.
But during the eight days since arriving at Howland, Carey also had been keeping a diary.
In small notebooks, he jotted down comments about the island's "gooney birds," beachcombing and poker games in Itasca's wardroom. He also noted how Earhart's delayed departure from Lae was affecting crewmembers' morale, writing on June 30: "They are getting tired of waiting for a `gooney' dame who doesn't seem to be aware of the annoyance the delays have made."
Carey's diary was unknown to Earhart scholars until last September, when a typewritten copy turned up on eBay and was bought by a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR. The non-profit organization believes Earhart and Noonan were not lost at sea, but landed on an uninhabited atoll called Gardner Island, and lived for an unknown period as castaways.
"Even though the diary doesn't answer the big question, it's an incredible discovery," said TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie, who has led eight expeditions to the island since 1989, and plans another this July if his group can raise enough money.
"We have long had the transcripts of the radio traffic, but this is the first document that puts a real person aboard Itasca and tells us something from a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days."
___
On July 1, word came from New Guinea that the Electra was finally airborne.
Early on Friday, July 2, Carey wrote in his diary: "Up all last night following radio reports — scanty ... heard voice for first time 2:48 a.m. — `sky overcast.' All I heard. At 6:15 am reported `200 miles out.'"
By the time Earhart, her voice stronger, reported she was "100 miles out," a welcoming committee had gone ashore and was "waiting restlessly," Carey wrote.
If Noonan's dead-reckoning did not bring the plane directly over Howland at the "line of position," Earhart would fly up and down the 337-157 degree line until she found the island.
"To the north, the first landfall is Siberia," says Gillespie, "so if they didn't find it soon, they'd have turned back south, knowing that even if they missed Howland, there were other islands beyond it — Baker, McKean and Gardner — on that same line."
But nothing was that simple. By now, Earhart would be burning into her five-hour fuel reserve, and even in daylight, islands could be obscured by billowy clouds and their shadows on the water.
At 7:42 a.m. local time, Earhart's voice suddenly came loud and clear: "KHAQQ to Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."
At 7:58 a.m., there was a nervous edge to Earhart's normal calm. A log entry had her saying, "we are drifting but cannot hear you." An operator changed this to "we are circling." Gillespie believes she actually said, "we are listening."
As birds wheeled over the Howland shoreline, human ears strained for the sound of engines, and binoculars scanned for any sign of the silver Electra. Itasca continued sending Morse code A's.
About 8:30 a.m., believing Earhart must be out of gas, Itasca's captain, Cmdr. Warner K. Thompson, ordered the welcoming committee back to the ship. "Flash news from ship Itasca: `Amelia down,'" Carey wrote in his diary.
Suddenly, at 8:55 a.m., Earhart was back on: "We are on the line 157 337... we are running on line north and south." The radiomen agreed she sounded distraught; one thought she was near hysteria.
Then the radio went silent.
Having won a coin-toss with his United Press rival, Howard Hanzlick, to decide whose news bulletin would go first, Carey had prepared two versions: "Earhart landed __ Howland time," and "Flash Earhart crackup landing __ Howland time."
He had not anticipated a third alternative, that she might not land at all.
Now, with all frequencies reserved for possible distress calls, neither reporter could send anything. While AP broke the "Earhart missing" story from Honolulu, quoting Coast Guard officials there, it would be 18 hours before Carey's first report reached San Francisco.
In the meantime, he kept busy with the diary: "Itasca set off `full speed ahead' to search the northwest quadrant off Howland," the most likely area for the plane to be afloat on empty gas tanks.
Nothing was sighted, and by evening the ship's mood, Carey wrote, had "taken a turn to the more serious side."
___
