Late that morning she found a railroad that led her back to Texas and into Pecos. Remembering that she might have one bad tire, she circled to land. She set the Avian down gingerly. The left wheel plopped and wobbled; the tire was flat! Fortunately the plane was light and rolled clumsily, but safely, to a stop. Amelia sat in the cockpit, looking enigmatically straight ahead. Someone asked her if there was anything wrong. She looked up and smiled, then shook her head. How could she tell anyone that she had been trying to understand an inscrutable fate?
While the tire was again repaired, Amelia had lunch with the Rotary Club. That afternoon she started for El Paso, her original destination of the day before.
Tire trouble now became engine trouble. At 4,000 feet the motor coughed, then sputtered, and finally stopped. In quick reflex action, Amelia jammed the stick forward and brought the plane into gliding turns. She looked for a place to make a forced landing. Noticing a small clearing among mesquite bushes and salt hills, she nosed the plane in and landed.
She now wondered if she weren’t having a contest of wills with some higher power who was trying to keep her earth-bound, or if she weren’t being tested to see if she had yet the skill and courage to meet and overcome any danger for the privilege of continuing to fly. She liked the second possibility better. She much preferred a challenge, for the joy that lay on the other side of conquest was far superior to any she had ever known.
Fortunately, AE had landed near a road. Cars began to gather almost at once; men and women came running to the scene of her emergency landing. The men, Amelia felt, she could handle in such a situation; but the women, with their shaking heads and fluttering moments of undue concern, she dreaded.
The plane had to be towed back to Pecos, where new engine parts could be ordered from El Paso. Slowly, at a mere ten miles an hour, the Avro retraced its course, cruelly on the ground, back to the Texas city of its morning take-off. It was late and dark that night before the plane was parked behind a garage, there to await repairs.
It took three days before the parts could come the 187 miles from El Paso and before the engine trouble could be located and repaired. Amelia was impatient to be off across the mountains to the West Coast. Thankfully she arrived in Los Angeles in time to see the start of the National Air Races and to visit friends she had not seen since her early days of learning to fly in California.
On the way home across Utah, she again had to make a dead-stick landing because of engine failure. She landed in a plowed field, and again nosed over and escaped unhurt. As in Pittsburgh, as in New Mexico and Texas, she rose to fly anew, like the phoenix from its ashes. With skill and courage she had once more conquered her adversary, the challenge.
The challenge, she had often reflected upon her luck in flying, had been with her from the very beginning, and she had always, sometimes through the workings of a mysterious fate, won out.