Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Marvel spotted Amelia Earhart’s bright-red Vega about a half mile north of the airfield.
She would start her one-eighty turn back to the west any second and line up on final approach to land behind Opal, unable to see if Opal’s plane had crashed on the runway.
Not good. Not good! Amelia could plow right into Opal, and both women could die!
By not being able to see the ground or having a proper runway to look at to gauge her height, Opal had flared and cut power way too soon. She was going to stall a good twelve feet in the air.
In fact, all airplane landings were basically controlled stalls executed a few inches or maybe a foot above the ground.
The smoother and lower the stall, the smoother the landing.
But when an airplane stalled higher than that, two things happened simultaneously.
First, the plane lost altitude rapidly. If a plane had plenty of speed, lift from the wings made it glide.
But in the absence of forward speed, the wings were of little help, and the plane would descend more like a brick than a glider.
Second, in a stall, the plane’s nose, heavy from the big radial engine mounted on it, would pitch downward precipitously.
Marvel raced back to her plane. No time to circle around to the ladder on the other side.
She took a running leap, grabbed the edge of her cockpit, and pulled herself up to lie across it on her belly.
She scrambled to throw her leg inside the cockpit, lever herself upright, and stand on her seat, searching urgently over the heads of the spectators for Opal.
The plane was just crossing the runway threshold, its nose abnormally high and the wings wobbling slightly from side to side, a sure sign it was about to stall.
Opal couldn’t possibly see how far off the ground she was.
Marvel knew from having just landed that all Opal could see out to the side would be a haze-shrouded sea of humanity.
Marvel winced as the nose of Opal’s plane pitched down, flattening the plane out relative to the ground, and the plane dropped out of the sky like a rock.
Even though the maneuver was called a pancake landing, there was nothing fluffy or airy about it.
A dozen feet might not look like far to fall, but Marvel knew how hard a three-thousand-pound object dropped off the roof of a one-story building hit the ground.
She’d done the same thing a time or two early in her flying career when she was still learning how to land a plane.
She only prayed Opal remembered to fling her head back against the headrest before the impact.
If the pilot’s head was bent forward or twisted to the side when a plane landed that hard, serious, sometimes fatal neck injuries were common.
Opal’s plane plummeted toward the ground, disappearing behind the spectators. A gasp and then a groan rippled through the crowd. Oh, no. Had Opal crashed her plane? Or, heaven forbid, lost control of it and gone into the crowd?
Leaping out of her plane once more, Marvel rejoined Pancho and Louise.
They exchanged grim looks. Powered by panic and frantic to reach Opal, who could be hurt, they shoved into the crowd.
But as soon as the spectators around them recognized them as pilots, they closed in, caging them in.
People thrust bits of paper and autograph books at them, squawking like eager seagulls around a newly opened picnic basket.
Pancho managed to break through the crowd by sheer brute force.
That, and folks probably weren’t accustomed to a woman putting her shoulder down and barreling into them like a charging bull.
Marvel waved away the autograph books in front of her and ducked under the arms holding them, dashing into the tiny opening Pancho had made through the crowd. Louise followed right behind her.
Marvel caught up to Pancho just in time to hear her yell, “Empty-headed fools! Clear the danged runway!”
She chimed in, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Another plane is coming in, and the pilot can’t see where she’s going! She’ll land blind right on top of you!” Her voice and Pancho’s didn’t carry far enough to do the slightest good.
Louise was yelling behind her, too, for all the good it did.
Of those who did hear their warnings, none of the spectators seemed interested in the threat to their safety.
Instead, some people tried to shake Marvel’s hand, and others asked for autographs.
Someone even held out a baby for her to kiss.
Pancho made like a professional football player once more, and this time Marvel helped, her hands on Pancho’s shoulder blades, shoving her friend through the dense press of people.
Hands landed on her own shoulder blades, and Marvel realized Louise was lending her strength to the effort as well.
It took their combined weight and determination, but they finally punched through the crowd and burst out onto the narrow strip of runway.
They took off running toward the approach end of the dirt corridor.
Marvel prepared, at the first sight of Opal’s plane rolling toward her, to dive into the crowd and knock out of the way as many people as she could take with her.
Pancho ran down the other side of the strip, panic clear on her face, while Louise ran between them.
The runway was so narrow the three of them could almost reach out their arms and touch fingertips as they sprinted toward Opal and whatever remained of her plane.
The dust in front of them, where the planes were landing and rolling out, became so thick they could only see a hundred feet or so ahead of them.
Coughing, Marvel pressed on grimly. She and the other two pilots would have a better idea of how to rescue Opal than a bunch of bystanders who knew nothing about planes.
The silhouette of a Travel Air took shape in the brown cloud ahead.
Marvel skidded to a stop, as did Pancho and Louise.
Opal’s plane was upright. That was good.
And the gears were still attached, which was miraculous.
Somehow, Opal had managed to keep control of her plane through a near crash-landing and had even managed to keep it pointed down the runway, which was one heck of a bit of piloting.
Marvel didn’t count the pancake against Opal’s flying skills.
There were no visual cues whatsoever to judge when to cut power and flare.
Marvel’s own dodgy landing had been much more about luck than skill.
Ahead, men in white jumpsuits waved flags at Opal to direct her to turn left and follow them through a narrower corridor between the packed spectators.
“That was too close,” Pancho huffed.
Marvel nodded, out of breath, too.
“Don’t stop now,” Louise panted. “Only way back to our planes is to follow Opal.”
She had a point. Marvel took off running with the other women and ducked into the temporary taxi corridor behind Opal.
But the dust kicked up by Opal’s propeller was so thick Marvel had to throw her arm over her mouth and breathe through her shirtsleeve not to choke.
Thankfully, the distance from the runway to the parking area was short, and the row of brightly painted airplanes came into sight soon.
Louise peeled off when they reached her airplane, then Pancho, and then Marvel.
She was dismayed to see dozens of people clustered around her plane.
A photographer had set up shop beside it, and people were eagerly posing in front of her right wings for him.
A family with three children was lining up for a picture now, and as she looked on, astonished, the father lifted the smallest child and sat her on the plane’s fragile lower wing.
“Get that kid off my wing!” Marvel insisted.
The man yanked the toddler off the wing, and the little girl started to cry.
As Marvel strode over to the photographer to tell him to vamoose, the wife waved her parasol at Marvel in agitation. “We paid good money for this picture!”
Marvel gasped as the parasol’s tip poked through the fabric of the upper wing. Looking startled, the woman tugged at it, and Marvel heard the sound of ripping cloth. “Now you’ve damaged my upper wing!” Marvel exclaimed. “Go! Get away from my plane. All of you!”
“Well, I never,” the woman huffed, herding her brood off into the crowd.
The photographer looked up from the boxy camera held in front of his chest. “This your plane, lady?”
“It is,” Marvel replied indignantly, struggling to contain her ire.
“I’ll cut you in on my haul if you’ll stand in the pictures I take with folks. Say ten percent?”
“Scram.”
“Twenty percent?”
“I said scram.”
“Aww, c’mon,” he whined. “Folks are all worked up. I’m making good money out here, and I’ve got a family to feed.”
She was distracted from dealing with the photographer when a young man’s head abruptly poked up over her cockpit. He’d obviously climbed up the ladder on the other side of the plane and was helping himself to a look inside.
Cripes. All her gear from the flight was still in the cockpit.
The moment she’d shut down her engine, she’d jumped out to try to clear the runway.
She surely didn’t need this guy helping himself to a souvenir and swiping something like her maps or spare compass that she needed to complete the race.
Marvel raced around the nose of her plane to shoo him away, but by the time she got there, Pancho was standing at the foot of Marvel’s ladder, her fists planted angrily on her hips.
“Get down from there!” Pancho hollered at him.
Surprised, the guy looked down, catching sight of them. His face lit with a smile, and his eyes glittered with excitement. “Gosh. Look at you two. All dressed up just like pilots in the movies!”
Pancho muttered under her breath, “I am the pilot in the movies.”