One in a Million

Amelia Earhart was born 39 years ago in Atchison, Kans. Her father was a lawyer and railway claim agent. She went east to study at Columbia University, then west to be with her parents, who had moved to Los Angeles. In California. Amelia saw many more airplanes than in Kansas. The idea of flying excited her. Famed Captain Frank Hawks took her up for her first flight. In 1918 she made her first solo, after ten hours of instruction. Two years later she set a woman's altitude record of 14,000 ft.

Amelia Earhart and her mother went east in a canary-colored automobile. The young girl again studied at Columbia and at Harvard Summer School. She got into social service work, teaching soiled urchins at South Boston's old Denison House. One day the telephone rang and a voice asked her if she would go along as a passenger on a transatlantic airplane flight. The sponsor of the project thought it would be good publicity to take a woman along. Amelia said at once that she would go.

Amelia Earhart thus made national headlines as the first woman to cross the Atlantic, with Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon in the Friendship. After that she settled down to learn flying as well as she could. She flew for fun, flew for publicity. While flying for Beechnut Products she made headlines by cracking up an autogiro, nearest thing to a foolproof aircraft. But she learned to fly so well that she became the world's No. i woman flyer, rolled up an impressive list of "firsts":

P: First woman to fly the Atlantic.

P: First woman to fly the Atlantic alone.

P: First person to fly the Atlantic alone twice.

P: First woman to fly an autogiro.

P: First person to cross the U. S. in an autogiro.

P: First woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross.

P: First woman to fly non-stop across the U. S.

P: First woman to fly from Hawaii to the U. S.

Amelia Earhart became a good friend of Eleanor Roosevelt who shared her belief that women should not stand in the shadow of men. In 1931 she married Publisher George Palmer Putnam, who never dissuaded her from flying wherever she wanted to go. Keynote of Mrs. Putnam's career was the title of her book, The Fun Of It. But she professed interest also in the scientific aspect of flying. She became a consulting member of Purdue University's faculty, specializing in aeronautics and careers for women, and last year acquired a Wasp-motored Lockheed Electra which was supposed to be a "flying laboratory" equipped with up-to-the-minute flying and navigating devices. The cost-- $80,000--was mostly provided by anonymous members of the Purdue Research Foundation but it was specified that the plane should be Mrs. Putnam's property.

One thing Amelia Earhart Putnam still wanted to do--for the fun of it--was to fly around the world. She started from Miami, Fla. on June i with Fred Noonan, onetime Pan American navigator. They made mostly back page news until last fortnight when they started across 2,550 miles of Pacific Ocean toward tiny Howland Island, failed to reach it. Last week the likelihood was approaching sad certainty that Amelia Earhart Putnam had made headlines for the last time.*

Several facts made it clear that much more than simple bad luck was involved. Before the hop-off, when capable Navigator Noonan inspected what he supposed was an ultra-modern "flying laboratory," he was dismayed to discover that there was nothing with which to take celestial bearings except an ordinary ship sextant. He remedied that by borrowing a modern bubble octant designed especially for airplane navigation. For estimating wind drift over the sea, he obtained two dozen aluminum powder bombs. For some reason these bombs were left behind in a storehouse. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been dispatched from San Diego to Howland Island solely as a help to the flyers, would have been able to take directional bearings on the Earhart plane if the latter could have tuned its signals to a 500-kilacycle frequency. The plane's transmitter would have been able to send such signals if it had had a trailing antenna. Miss Earhart considered all this too much bother, no trailing antenna was taken along. Finally, the Itasca's, commander would have had a better idea where to look if the plane had radioed its position at regular intervals. But not one position report was received after the plane left New Guinea. In fact only seven position reports are known to have been radioed by the flyers during their entire trip.

When word that the Earhart plane was lost reached the U. S., Husband Putnam wired an appeal for a Navy search to President Roosevelt. But even before the message reached Washington, Secretary of the Navy Swanson had ordered the Navy to start hunting. By last week the search was costing $250,000 a day. The battleship Colorado hove to off the Phoenix Islands, catapulted three planes from its deck. The flyers skimmed over Gardner and McKean Islands and Carondelet Reef, saw nothing but ruined guano works and the wreck of a tramp freighter. Thousands of startled seabirds fluttered up, menacing the propellers and forcing the flyers to climb. Some days equatorial squalls and vanishing visibility crippled the hunt, but on others the weather was perfect, visibility unlimited. By week's end the Colorado's planes had scanned more than 100,000 square miles. The Itasca, which inaugurated the search last fortnight, continued its futile patrol until fuel ran short. The minesweeper Swan put ashore a searching party at Canton Island, where last month a party of scientists viewed the | solar eclipse (TIME, June 21). Meanwhile the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 62 planes aboard (instead of 72 as first announced) and an escort of four destroyers, sped out of San Diego at forced draft, stopped in Hawaii to refuel, arrived in the search area early this week. If the Lexington's great fleet of planes could not find the lost flyers. Rear Admiral Orin G. Murfin, coordinator of the search, planned to abandon it. Meanwhile the chance of finding the flyers alive, according to the consensus of searchers, was already down to one in a million.

George Palmer Putnam clung to his belief that his wife had come down not in the sea but on land, because the radio batteries, located under the ship's wings, would have been put out of commission in the water. Dozens of amateurs continued to report messages from the lost plane's radio, but Navy and Coast Guard radio experts doubted that any of these were genuine. One amateur who excitedly announced reception of a distress call was found to have been listening to the MARCH OF TIME'S dramatization of the tragedy from a commercial station.

Navigator Noonan's wife was cheered when she received some photographs from her husband, mailed weeks ago from the Far East. There was also a letter. Excerpt: "Amelia is a grand person for such a trip. She is the only woman flyer I would care to make such a trip with because in addition to being a fine companion she can take hardship as well as a man--and work like one."

* This week another crew of Soviet flyers was winging its way from Moscow across the top of the world toward an unannounced destination on the west coast of the U. S. Near the North Pole the three flyers radioed that ''everything is in order."

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