A few hours later a newsman came up to Amelia. He tried to be understanding. “Tough luck,” he said. “Anyway, you’re fortunate to be alive. By the way, I understand your husband will be greatly relieved, because now you can’t go on with the flight.”
AE showed him the telegram she had just received from GP. “So long as you and the boys are O.K.” it said, “the rest doesn’t matter. After all, it’s just one of those things. Whether you want to call it a day or keep going later is equally jake with me.”
The reporters now pressed her for a statement. “Nothing has happened,” she announced, “to change my attitude toward the original project. I feel better than ever about the ship, and I am more eager than ever to fly again.”
Amelia turned and walked to the window of the operations building. She looked up. High above the center of the field a black bird swung through the air in lazy widening circles.
2. New Route, New Preparations
“Hamlet would have been a bad aviator,” Amelia once said. “He worried too much. The time to worry,” she added, “is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit.”
Contrary to her injunction, AE, like the melancholy Dane, worried, but only for two months before she reattempted the world flight. In May the Electra would be repaired and ready again.
After the accident at Luke Field, messages offering encouragement poured in from everywhere. Loyal friends helped her to pick up the pieces and start again.
The brush with death she had taken as a fatalist. “Someday,” she told GP, “I will get bumped off. There’s so much to do, so much fun here; I don’t want to go. But when I do go, I’d like to go in my plane. Quickly.”
The old plans, most of them, would now have to be scrapped. Routes and weather conditions would have to be restudied. Where rains had been in March, there were now none; where winds had once proven favorable, they would now prove adverse; where monsoons had been predicted, there would now be dust storms.