Thursday, March 4, 2010

American Experience Amelia Earhart

I watched this yesterday as I was finishing up work. I felt a little odd about the rush of biographical data jammed together to make the story, on the other hand there has to be a compelling narrative to pull the viewer in. There were irritating threads, the idea that she was simply lucky and not a very good pilot is one. I know that many have made this argument but the woman did some amazing and daring things and walked away alive at a time when many did not. She must have been pretty good at flying a plane. I think what moved me most were other themes/ threads; there was much made of her fame, some interesting interviews with Gore Vidal who obviously kept the best for later, (his insistence that she had an affair with his father), but still talks with assurance about what fame meant to her, and what the cost of it was. The other thread that worked for me was the idea of loneliness and separation. Certainly being that famous meant you had to experience a remove.

Of course, everything is always skewed to fit with the overarching idea that a writer or producer has in mind. I noted a small flaw, they said that she had trouble in boarding school because she tried daring stunts. . . then showed a photo of her atop Columbia's library. In fact, she had issues in boarding school because of her strong moral beliefs, not because of stunts she pulled.

I guess what made me sad was the cost of everything, physically and emotionally and how it ended. I have no idea what happened to Amelia, although I don't buy into the wildest notions of her being a spy and captured and shot, I think it likely that she crashed at sea, or crash landed on an atoll and died there later . . . what this show does is set up a sense of fatalism. I'm not sure she felt it, but it worked on a basic, emotionally charged level. However, I would argue that it isn't the mystery of Amelia's ending that matters as much as the rest. She believed that women should try everything and anything, that they could do whatever a man could do. I had my mother for an example, but being my mother she was all too flawed, Amelia's example gave me courage to try to do what I love most. And recreating her, living with her every day continues to help me believe I can do this, I can finally write the book I've always wanted to write, and be the best writer I can be. So thank you Amelia.

10 comments:

  1. I also feel that what matters most about Amelia is not how she died but how she lived. She models an incredible daring and courage that is contagious to me and to all women. I remember as a kid there were few famous women in history to look up to, and it's a heart ache to think of all the creativity and genius of women over millenia that was largely denied expression or fruition. What a waste! Thanks to people like Amelia we are feeling emboldened to believe in ourselves and live more fully.

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  2. I'm with you and wish I could remember this more than for a few minutes every day, daily life is so full of needless anxiety. To see the big picture and push forward, instead of getting stuck, that's my goal.

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  3. I'm with you on that irritating thread -- the idea that she was simply lucky. Although there is always an element of luck in any major, envelope-pushing flight, luck alone won't get you to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific alive. In order to do ocean flying, she had to acquire a number of skills and areas of knowledge that went above and beyond those required for ordinary flight. Most especially instrument or "blind" flying, which is a particularly difficult skill to acquire but absolutely necessary for getting through the extensive areas of cloudy and/or stormy weather over oceans. Not many pilots in her day knew how to do it.

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  4. So your thoughts about the planning as a pilot? What is your take about the radio issues?

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  5. Just to make sure we're on the same page: my point in the previous comment was that her 1932 Atlantic solo and 1935 Pacific solo proved she was an exceptionally good pilot. As to the radio issues on the Lae-Howland flight, that's an enormously complicated topic that's still not entirely sorted out 70+ years on. Briefly, it looks like her below-fuselage antennae was torn off during the takeoff from Lae, thus preventing reception of transmissions from the Itasca though not affecting her transmissions.

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  6. Yes, I'm aware of that, but there's commentary about her inability to transmit code and her decision not to bring a morse code transmitter along, or am I wrong about that?

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  7. She wasn't proficient in Morse code because there's not much point in a pilot learning Morse. It's not practical to fly and send/receive Morse code at the same time -- think texting while driving, only much worse. Nor was Noonan proficient, because he wasn't a radio specialist and in any case celestial navigation would keep him too busy to keep up with radio. So there wasn't any point in bringing the Morse key, either. What they needed was a dedicated radio operator for Morse communications. That's what commercial and military flights had, and that's why their original plan had Harry Manning on board as radio operator.

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  8. Right, but they make a point about this in the American Experience doc, as if she was somehow fatalistic in not providing necessary backup.
    Thoughts on that one? I don't buy it from what I've read, but they sure do push it in the documentary.

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  9. No, she wasn't being fatalistic or sloughing off the problem. She'd worked out what should have been a do-able alternative to the use of Morse: use voice for communications and have her radio equipment configured to allow direction-finding on voice frequencies. That should allow her to do these tasks herself and eliminate the need for a dedicated radio operator. Why not replace Manning with someone else after he bailed? I think probably because it wasn't desirable to have 3 people on board for the Lae-Howland leg. The more weight you carry in personnel and equipment, the less fuel you can carry because there's an upper limit to how much total weight (people-equipment-fuel) the plane is capable of lifting off the ground. On the Lae-Howland leg, longest and most navigationally challenging, it was imperative to carry as much fuel reserve as possible to allow for unforecast headwinds etc. In the original east-west plan, in fact, Manning would have been dropped off at Howland, leaving Noonan to navigate to Lae.

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  10. That confirms my own thoughts on it, thank you as always.

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