For her navigator Amelia had nothing but praise. “By uncanny powers,” she wrote later, “Fred Noonan managed to navigate us back to the airport, without being able to see anything but the waves beneath the plane.”
When they returned to Akyab, the weatherman at the airport told them that the weather would probably not improve for three months. Amelia wondered if she and Fred would not have to set up light housekeeping and wait things out. She talked things over with him. They decided that they would try again.
The next day, the nineteenth, they set out, hoping this time to reach Bangkok in Siam. Amelia, quickly realizing that yesterday’s tactics of trying to fly under the monsoon would not work again, now climbed to 8,000 feet, hoping to top the mountains and somehow plow through. She was determined to make it.
She set her eyes on her instruments and flew her plane blind. Through the tossing and pitching of the plane and the pounding of the rain she brought the Electra through. She worked her legs constantly, trying to hold the rudders. Hands gripped to the wheel, her arms pressed forward then pulled back on the control column; the plane now rolled left, now right. Her legs and arms began to ache and then to stiffen as she fought to keep the nose up, the wings straight and level.
The instruments were her only guide, her only hope. She flew the little yellow plane on the artificial horizon before her, and held the pointer on the compass heading by flying the needle and ball of the turn and bank indicator. Never far from her right hand were the engine throttles, set evenly forward and registering 150 mph in the white quadrant of the air-speed indicator. Out of the corner of her eye she kept constant check on the altimeter and the rate of climb. Again for two hours she worked and sweated and fought.
She broke out into the clear, the victor. Below her were plains, brilliant in the morning sun. She pressed back in her seat and heaved a heavy sigh. It was a blessed relief to see the earth again. Through the plains meandered the Irrawaddy River.
Clouds appeared again; and Amelia, carefully choosing the openings of light among them, skillfully skirted her plane this way and that between them for the next 50 miles.
Far in the distance, about twenty miles in from the sea and near a wide river, she saw a great golden pagoda pointing brightly above the dark shadows of a city. It was the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, AE quickly determined from her map, and that meant Rangoon. She grinned happily: she was dead on course.
They landed to refuel and with the intention of leaving immediately for Bangkok. But the Electra had not rolled to a stop when a heavy downpour engulfed the airport, making a take-off out of the question.
Amelia and Fred made the best of the delay by sight-seeing. The first tour was a short motor trip on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay. The fliers, in a sudden release from their tensions, could not restrain themselves from singing snatches of Kipling’s “The Road to Mandalay,” although they shuddered to think of the number of tourists who must have done exactly the same thing on the same road.