Amelia wanted to be home by the Fourth of July and before her thirty-ninth birthday on the twenty-fourth. She considered the 7,000 miles that lay before her and wrote in her logbook: “Whether everything to be done can be done within this time limit remains to be seen.” And before she left Lae to begin the longest leg of the world flight—the 2,556 miles to Howland, she hastily scribbled: “I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”
AE hoped that the old difficulties with the navigation instruments that they had had at Surabaya would not return now to plague them on the long over-water flight. For on the leg to Howland the aids to navigation were limited.
The vast Pacific ruled out immediately the case for pilotage: except for islands few and far between there were no landmarks she could follow. The small size of Howland, for all practical purposes, discouraged the time and distance plotting of dead reckoning. There remained celestial navigation, with radio as an aid. For Amelia to be able to hit her target, the weather would have to be clear enough for Fred to be able to take his fixes from the stars at night and from the sun during the day. Once over the ocean and more than 500 miles out she would no longer be able to contact Lae by radio.
To get a radio bearing from Howland, she would have to fly all night and never waver from her course until early the next morning. Then she could home in on signals from the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, which lay anchored off Howland. With the Electra’s loop antenna and the ability to receive from a strong sending station, she felt that her chances were good.
Nevertheless, Amelia wished now that she had not ordered the 250-foot trailing wire antenna to be removed from her plane before they left Miami. Gladly on the long over-water leg that faced her would she go through the trouble of reeling out and reeling in: if she had the long antenna she would be able to contact and to receive from the Itasca from distances much farther out than the loop antenna permitted.
And, as if in fateful conspiracy, Amelia did not know that there was yet another aid to get to Howland. She did not know because no one had told her. A high-frequency direction finder had been obtained from the Navy and installed on the island of Howland; but neither Commander W. K. Thompson of the Itasca nor Richard B. Black, the field representative of the Department of the Interior, had advised AE that the direction finder had been set up to help her.
This lack of foresight and coordination was but the beginning of a chain of incidents that linked finally to tragedy. Fred Noonan, in trying to set his chronometers, found that he could not calibrate them correctly because of radio difficulties on the Electra’s 50-watt set. With his chronometers reading slow or fast, he knew he would not be able to obtain accurate celestial fixes. An error of fifteen seconds on the precision instruments would mean a mistake of one mile in his position computations, and an error of one minute a mistake of four miles.
Such position errors, taken into account in giving AE headings to fly by, might add to the difficulties of the navigation. For a mistake of one degree in following the compass could take them one mile off course for every sixty miles flown, more than forty miles off course for the Howland leg.
Despite these serious problems, Amelia set out to find in the 7,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean the small speck of land that was Howland Island.
On July 1 the Electra stood poised several thousand feet from the edge of the cliff that marked the end of the runway. The plane was fully loaded with 1,150 gallons of gasoline, enough to fly under ideal conditions the full range of 4,000 miles. A contrary wind, however, which blew across rather than down the runway, coupled with an ominous black squall line, conspired to keep the Electra earth-bound for the day.