Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Amelia bit her lip, intent on keeping her cool. She had to be imagining things. Start from the beginning . . . think this through. In spite of trying to remain calm, she felt a burst of terror that made her heart gallop inside her chest.
The planes were taking off one minute apart. This was a critical phase of the race, with a lot of planes flying along the exact same flight path. It was lunacy. And exhilarating.
While she had relatively good forward visibility in the Vega, Amelia’s position directly between its wings meant the sideways visibility below her was terrible.
Think it through. If she burned her one-minute head start flying west and turning back late, she could very well end up at the exact same spot as the next airplane when it made the turn .
. . and at the exact same time. She ran a real risk of colliding with her competitor if she didn’t get turned east now.
She added in full right rudder. If the plane wouldn’t turn by tilting its wings, maybe she could push the tail to the side and turn that way.
Sure enough, the plane started into a level, skidding turn to the right.
There. Nothing to get worked up over. The good news was this slow turn, with its big radius, would take her wide of the next plane’s tight turn back to the east. The Vega was losing a ton of time in the race with this giant turn, but it was better than helplessly flying west out over the ocean until she ran out of gas and crashed.
Another spark flashed. This time, there was no denying the burst of light or that it originated underneath her instrument panel.
Amelia frowned, confused. How was an electrical short affecting her flight controls?
The only electrical components in her plane were the lights and gauges.
Her flight controls relied on no electricity at all.
The Vega’s ailerons and rudder were connected directly to her control stick by steel cables running along the insides of the fuselage to the wings and the tail.
When she moved her stick, she was physically pulling cables to move the flight controls.
She must be experiencing separate, simultaneous malfunctions.
While rare, it wasn’t impossible for two things to go wrong at once.
It was the only logical conclusion. The flight-control problem was by far the more serious of the two.
She could fly without most of her instruments, particularly since two of the three critical gauges weren’t electric at all.
Her airspeed indicator read air pressure directly from a metal pitot tube mounted on the nose of her plane and pneumatically converted it into an airspeed indication.
Her snazzy directional gyro was electric, but her old-fashioned Pioneer compass was magnetic.
As long as the earth’s North Pole existed, her compass would work.
As for her electrically powered altimeter, she could guesstimate her altitude by looking out the window.
Until only a few years ago, pilots had flown without accurate altimeters and been just fine eyeballing their height.
And she was an experienced pilot. She knew what a thousand feet and a hundred feet above the ground looked like.
But she was dead if she couldn’t steer her plane.
Her rudder controls seemed to be working, but her ailerons were not.
This was the more problematic flight surface to lose.
The ailerons worked by extending down to increase the curvature of the back edge of the wing, thereby increasing the lift generated by the wing.
Conversely, when raised, the ailerons decreased the lift generated by the wing.
Lower both ailerons, and the plane got more lift from the wings and began to climb.
Raise both ailerons, and the wings lost lift, making the plane descend.
Lower one aileron and lift the other, and one wing would rise while the other fell, turning the plane.
The rudder merely moved the plane’s tail left and right. Pilots used it to align the tail with the direction of flight, to help the ailerons turn the plane in a smooth, coordinated fashion, or to offset the tail to one side of the flight path while crabbing the plane to compensate for a crosswind.
In theory, if Amelia added power, the plane ought to climb. If she powered back the engine, the plane ought to descend. She was able to turn after a fashion with the rudder. It was an ugly way to fly but better than the alternative of having no altitude or directional control at all.
Her turn back to the east was taking forever, and as she passed through a northerly heading and her nose tracked ever so slowly toward the east, she looked outside apprehensively.
Another airplane should have taken off from Clover Field by now.
Sure enough, she spotted the fast-moving speck of another heavy-class plane that had just lifted off from the airstrip.
“Turn, turn!” she shouted uselessly at the other pilot, willing her fellow competitor to see her and keep her Travel Air’s turn tight and inside the Vega’s.
She lost sight of the airplane as it roared up from beneath and behind her.
She had to get out of the way of the remaining airplanes, and fast. Yet all she could do was sit here and ride along as her plane made its gradual right-hand turn.
Could she control the Vega well enough to land, using only her rudder and throttle for steering? She had no idea.
Was it time to bail out?
The race officials had made every woman in the race wear a parachute, but it wasn’t as if Amelia could simply jump out of her cockpit’s tiny windows.
She would have to let go of the control stick, crawl back past all the seats to the hatch behind them, open it, and jump out of the plane from there if she were to attempt to use the parachute.
She wasn’t very high up, maybe eight hundred feet. How long did it take for a parachute to open anyway? She’d heard of pilots dying when they jumped out of their planes too low and their parachutes didn’t have enough time to open.
She shuddered. Terrible way to die.
The ominous message in Thea’s telegram popped into her mind abruptly.
Beware of sabotage. Was she its first victim?
Whether or not she deserved it, she was unquestionably the most famous pilot in the race, thanks to her Atlantic crossing last year.
And what were the odds of two major malfunctions happening simultaneously in her generally reliable and excellently built plane?
She’d flown the Vega all the way from the East Coast to California without a single glitch. And now she had two very unusual ones?
Disgust that this was how her life might end—before the race even really got going—coursed through her.
She’d turned herself inside out to get here and show the world she was a real aviator, worthy of her fame.
There had to be something she could do besides cross her arms and ride this one into a fiery death.
Try again. And again, if need be.
She wasn’t giving up. Would never give up. No, sir. She would hit the ground fighting to save herself and her plane.
Experimentally, she returned the stick to the neutral position. The plane continued its shallow turn. Great. Just great.
She pushed the throttle forward. The nose climbed slightly in response, and she pushed forward a little on the stick.
The plane leveled out. Huh. The ailerons might be working again.
Gingerly, she eased the stick to the right.
This time, the Vega responded perfectly.
Very gently, she took out the turn input.
The wings leveled. Okay. For the moment, her flight controls were working.
But there was definitely something very wrong with her plane. Now to get it back on the ground.
Temptation to head for San Bernardino and stay in the race briefly passed through her.
All she had to do was fly straight and level for about a half hour, then make a U-turn to land into the day’s brisk westerly wind at the next race airport.
The thing was, she had no idea if or how soon she would lose complete control of her airplane.
The alternative was to head for Clover Field, right beside her, and land while her flight controls were still working.
As if weighing in on her dilemma, another spark snapped under her instrument panel.
Both her fuel gauge needles fluttered and dropped to empty.
Not ideal, but she knew she had plenty of gas in her tanks to make it to San Bernardino.
But then a flurry of sparks crackled loudly enough for her to hear it over the noise of her engine, and all her remaining electrically powered instruments abruptly failed.
Yikes.
Her entire plane was flammable, made of wood ribs, with the fuselage covered by spruce veneer and the wings covered with plywood.
If gas fumes leaked from the engine into the cockpit and contacted a spark, the whole airplane could explode.
This was no longer a decision about a race.
This was about her life. She needed to get the Vega back on the ground as soon as possible if she wanted to live to fly another day.
An emergency landing at Clover Field was the only sensible course of action.
She wiped sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse. Here goes nothing. She angled to the right as she approached Clover Field to fly east along its north side, entering the landing pattern, flying a downwind leg parallel to the wide grass runway off her right wingtip.
She pulled back the throttle and babied the Vega into a shallow turn. For now, the ailerons were responding. Envisioning a single descending arc from her current position to the end of the runway, she did her best to follow the track in her mind.