Chapter 9 #2
It was one of the trickiest bits of flying she’d ever attempted, trying to time her descent and gauge the track of her turn to come out right over the runway’s threshold, barely above the ground.
As she flew down the sweeping turn, she craned to see the starting line of the race.
Please don’t let there be a plane on the runway when I get there.
She definitely didn’t trust her flight controls to make a sharp, last-second course correction to avoid hitting a plane.
As she peered toward the airfield, she spied a downward flash of green.
What looked like the last of the heavy-class planes accelerated down the wide grass field.
Praise the Lord. The runway was about to be clear of aircraft.
Assuming the race officials didn’t plan to take off immediately after the racers.
But then an even more awful thought occurred to her.
Other planes weren’t the problem. The crowd of spectators was.
What if the thousands of people lining the airfield rushed out into the middle of it to get a better look at the last departing planes, or the folks on the far side of the runway simply started walking across it to get to their cars?
Practically none of the spectators had any experience around planes or airports.
They wouldn’t know to check final approach for an incoming plane before they crossed the runway on foot.
If music was playing over the loudspeakers or the huge crowd was talking noisily, the spectators might not hear her coming either.
As she slowed, her nose blocked more of her view of the airfield. As the last bit of the runway disappeared beneath her engine cowling, she thought she glimpsed the crowd still standing off to the sides of the airstrip. She might just make it in before they overran the field.
She chanted out loud to the people below, even though she knew they wouldn’t hear her: “Stay off the runway. Stay off the runway. Stay off the runway.” She prayed someone on the stage would see her coming and make an announcement for the crowd to stand clear.
She refused to think of what would happen if people swarmed out in front of her.
I have to put this plane down now. There’s no help for it.
She set her jaw and moved the stick to level out her wings as she completed the turn a few hundred yards short of the edge of the airfield.
She knew better than to hold her breath, but she did so anyway in the nerve-racking instant between moving the stick and the aircraft responding.
A big, bright flash exploded beneath the instrument panel.
This spark lit the fuse of her temper. If this was indeed sabotage, whoever had done this to her plane was going to pay dearly for messing with it.
Gripping the stick tightly, willing the plane to obey her inputs and land safely, she raged silently against the unkindness of fate.
The plane flew down short final, settling toward the ground.
She was completely blind to the front but caught the flash of the runway threshold passing by her side windows.
Almost there. Please, do not let me be the one to crash in front of a huge crowd .
. . Whatever else she might have thought, there was no more time.
The ground came up at her fast. Be it a crash or a safe landing, either way she was going to be on the ground in a few seconds.
“Ladies and gentlemen, stay off the field! stay off the field!” the loudspeaker blared.
The crowd was intoxicated by the sight of so many planes taking off, one after another. The people chattered excitedly as they peered skyward, shading their eyes with their hands, watching the last aircraft make the sweeping turn to the north and race off toward San Bernardino.
“We have a plane returning to the field!” the announcer called over the loudspeakers. “It looks like number six. That’s Amelia Earhart coming back in. She must have a problem with her airplane. Mechanics to the field now, please.”
People were still stacked ten deep along the sides of the airstrip. The ones in the back were eager to get a good view of the incoming aircraft and not miss seeing a crash if one were to happen. They pushed against the people in front of them, forcing the front of the crowd onto the active runway.
“Stay back, folks! Stay back!” the man at the microphone yelled frantically.
The sound of the incoming aircraft drowned out the rest of the announcer’s warnings.
The crowd held its collective breath and strained on tiptoe to get a look at the plane making an emergency landing.
As the crowd went ominously silent, a few voices here and there sent up prayers for the pilot’s safe landing.
Breathe. Breathe . . . Pulling back on the stick as she cut the throttle, the Vega’s nose lifted in a partial flare, but not enough.
Come on, girl, Amelia coaxed the plane. Give me just a little more flare.
She pulled harder on the stick, willing the nose to come up.
But as the plane slowed, floating down the runway, the nose didn’t move.
Please, God, keep those people off the runway and out of the path of my propeller. The plane refused to flare anymore. I’m fast and flat. It’ll be a hard landing. Amelia clenched her teeth and braced herself.
The plane’s front wheels hit the dirt. The plane bounced and came down again.
But this time the Vega stayed down. She engaged the brakes, moving the stick in exaggerated commands to steer her plane straight down the field and not veer into the crowd lining the runway.
She stepped on the brakes as hard as she dared, frantic to stop as soon as possible.
But if she braked too hard, the Vega could nose over, flipping over the propeller in a forward somersault that could destroy the plane and crush her, given the high cockpit position.
The Vega came to a full stop.
Holy cow. She’d done it. She’d made it out of a bad pinch alive, and with her plane in one piece. She realized with surprise that her knees were shaking, knocking against the stick. A rush of relief made her feel weak all over.
She’d barely shut down the engine before her mechanic rushed over.
Two more men chocked her tires with triangular wedges of wood to keep the Vega from rolling anywhere in the stiff breeze, and one of them signaled to her that the prop had stopped turning and was safe.
Now that the crisis was past, she bloody well wanted to check the flight-control cables and take a look under the instrument panel.
The telegram, with its warning of sabotage, taunted her. It was one thing to get taken out by a mechanical failure. It was quite another to be hamstrung by someone out to harm her.
Her mechanic, who’d flown a second Vega identical to this one to California with her, quickly put up a ladder beside the plane and climbed into view beside her.
She unlocked the cockpit’s small triangular side window and opened it, calling for a screwdriver.
He angled his head and one arm through the window to pass her the screwdriver.
Still sitting in her seat, she reached down between her feet and unscrewed the fasteners holding down the cover at the base of her control stick.
She lifted the metal ring up and off the stick, then removed the canvas sleeve that kept dirt and debris out of the flight cables but allowed for full movement of the control stick in all directions.
She leaned in close to get a good look at the steel cables and stared in shock at what she saw.
Both of her aileron cables had nearly ninety-degree bends in them, a few inches from the control stick.
The right-hand kink stuck up in the air far enough that her right rudder cable was twisting awkwardly around it.
“How did that happen?” the mechanic blurted out.
She glanced up at him grimly. “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”
She climbed out of her seat and backed up in the tight cockpit until she could drop to her hands and knees, partially draped over her seat.
From this angle, she had a clear view of the cables and saw parallel rows of tiny bright scratches on them.
They looked exactly like the marks someone would make if they grabbed hold of the cable with a pair of pliers and gave it a hard twist.
The flight-control cables were made of twisted steel, and it would have taken considerable force to bend them like that.
There was nothing anywhere near the base of the stick they could catch on that could bend them like this either .
. . Someone had opened this exact covering, reached in, and intentionally damaged the cables.
“Those marks look like they were made by a wrench or plier teeth,” the mechanic declared. “But who would . . .” He trailed off. Then, in sudden enlightenment, he breathed, “Oh.”
She glanced up at him soberly. “Yeah. Oh.”
His eyes went wide and worried. “Who’d mess with your plane like that?”
“Who knows? Anyone who thinks women shouldn’t fly airplanes or who’s out to prove women can’t fly safely. Heck, maybe someone bet against me in the race and wanted to make sure I don’t win.”
His mouth fell open. That possibility obviously hadn’t occurred to him.
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone this was sabotage,” she said urgently.
“But you’re in danger—”
She cut him off, saying, “We don’t know positively that this was intentional, and I surely don’t want to encourage copycats to try anything else.
” Not to mention that even if someone had tried to sabotage her plane, this race was too important to risk having the race officials call it off because someone was tampering with the planes.
She would warn the other women pilots tonight, of course.
But the public and the race officials didn’t need to know about this.
Not until the race was over and in the record books.