Amelia smoothed at the hips the dark-blue wool dress she had changed into. The press rarely saw her in “feminine” clothes. “Well,” she said, “I am going to try to fly around the globe.” She toyed with the bright scarf about her neck. “The flight will be as near to the equator as I can make it, east to west, about 27,000 miles.”
The press moved in. Reporters fired questions at her, photographers shot pictures at close range, newsreel men turned on their bright lights and rolled their cameras. Somewhat flustered by the sudden excitement she had caused, Amelia laughed. “You know,” she said to them, “I feel you men have pushed me into this. You are the ones who have kept saying that I was going to fly around the world, until finally you’ve compelled me to think seriously about doing it.”
Carl Allen, her friend from the New York Herald Tribune, would have none of it. “Oh, come now,” he protested, “nobody has pushed you into it. You know you’ve been wanting to do it all the time.”
Captain Manning, stolid and silent beside AE, smiled uneasily. Amelia quickly relinquished her ground. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I guess I didn’t get away with that, did I?”
“What are you going for?” one reporter abruptly asked.
AE thought for a moment. The question was one she had heard many times before. “Well,” she answered, “I’ve seen the North Atlantic. And I’ve seen the Pacific, too, of course; at least a part of it. But”—she hesitated—“well, just say I want to fly around the globe. And I think a round-the-world flight just now should be at the equator.”
She turned to the quiet man beside her. She looked at his thick, curly black locks. “Captain Manning is going with me part way,” she explained, “because I don’t believe the pilot on such a flight can navigate, too.”
Interview over, reporters broke for the nearest telephone. The world heard and waited.
Amelia dived again into the myriad details of preparation. She was still dissatisfied with the radio equipment. She realized that a 50-watt transmitter and receiver could reach only about five hundred miles under normal conditions. On the Hawaii-California flight the Vega radio had reached up to 2,000 miles, but only because of skipping—a radio phenomenon in which radio waves bounce up and down from the ionosphere and move forward for incredibly long distances.
But skipping was something that could not be depended upon. Some of the ground stations would be much farther than 500 miles apart. The distance between Hawaii and Howland was 1,940 miles; between Howland and New Guinea, 2,556 miles. The other navigation equipment was good, and worked well in test after test. How to strengthen the weakest link?