In a borrowed car they drove up the mountain to the rim of the crater at 6,500 feet. For the first time on the long trip they felt a chill and put on their flying jackets. The sulphur fumes from the volcano were strong and sickening; they reminded Amelia of the strong gas fumes in refueling that sometimes made her ill. Nevertheless, she could not restrain herself from looking down into the crater. It was pointless to drive to the top and not see what she had come to see. She bent over the rim and looked down: a pool of bright green water glittered softly hundreds of feet below.
At 3:45 the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June, Amelia and Fred climbed into the Electra. They hoped to fly this day non-stop to Australia. AE started the engines. She watched the instruments closely as the needles moved up in response; then, as in Miami when they first started out for the world flight, one of the important engine instruments failed. Something had gone wrong; but without the instrument operating correctly there was no point in proceeding.
It was not until two o’clock that afternoon that they heard they could now move out. Because of the late start, they decided to fly only as far as Surabaya, 350 miles away. On the way, what had been failure of engine instrument for Amelia now became failure of navigation instruments for Fred Noonan. He could not get his most important long-range instruments to function properly. Reaching Surabaya, they turned around and flew back to Bandung. To go on without aids for the difficult navigation that lay ahead, especially over water, would make the rest of the world flight extremely dangerous.
Before they left Surabaya to retrace their steps, AE was called to the telephone. It was GP, calling from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his United plane was refueling before continuing on to California. George had heard from Amelia that there had been some difficulty with the plane.
“Is everything about the ship O.K. now?” he asked.
Amelia, refusing to worry her husband concerning something he could do nothing about, held back the truth.
“Yes,” she said abruptly; then softly added: “Good night, hon.”
“Good night,” GP answered. “I’ll be sitting in Oakland waiting for you.”
When the Electra landed in Bandung, Dutch technicians were hastily called to work on the faulty navigation instruments. While they worked, Amelia and Fred went sight-seeing in the close-by city of Batavia.
Pilot and navigator had made an agreement not to do any shopping; they did not want to add any weight to the plane. Six pounds, they reminded each other, equaled one gallon of fuel. But Amelia broke the pact to buy a knife. She purchased it—a handmade sheath knife at a metalworker’s shop—for her friend John Oliver La Gorce of the National Geographic Society; she wanted him to add it to his extensive knife collection. She jammed the knife under her belt. She wanted to carry it all the way to Washington, D.C., and make an official presentation of it to her friend.