By girdling the globe, Amelia could achieve not only the record for distance, but also fly around the world. She would like to do it alone. It would be fun to be the first to fly the equator.
AE made her plans, the most elaborate and time consuming of her career. The details that had to be worked out, she found, were formidable. But she began simply, almost casually, to map out the 27,000 miles of the flight.
One day early in the winter of 1936 she walked across the living room in her home at Rye. She picked up the globe from the long table behind the sofa. She turned the globe to the Pacific, placed her thumb on Oakland, and spanned her hand to Honolulu; then from Honolulu her long, slender fingers reached easily to two little islands just above the equator. In another stretch of the hand she reached New Guinea. Seven thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean were easy to cross by a span of the hand, but those two little islands, Howland and Baker, were mere specks on the globe.
She looked closely at Howland, and wondered if she could find it flying alone after nearly 2,000 miles out from Hawaii. She swept her hand quickly over her hair and grinned. This was the most exact kind of flying. She would need the best of navigation equipment. She would need a navigator to make it.
When GP came home she told him of her need for a navigator; not for the whole flight, but just for the long over-water legs across the Pacific. George picked up the phone. He always knew whom to call.
GP first telephoned Bradford Washburn, a young Harvard professor who had done some distinguished ground navigation and exploration. Washburn agreed to come to New York for an interview.
AE was sprawled on the living-room floor with her maps when the young professor came into the house. She liked his cut: he was slim, wiry, handsome. She liked the set of his jaw and the look of his clear eyes. She got up from the floor, smiled, and reached out a hand in welcome.
Pilot and prospective navigator sat on the floor and discussed the problems involved. Amelia traced the itinerary she had marked on the map, mentioning, as she moved her finger, the distances between points.
Bradford Washburn examined the first two proposed legs of the flight. He was familiar with the Electra and felt it could easily make the distance from California to Hawaii. The long stretch over the vast Pacific to the tiny dot that was Howland Island: that was an immediate difficulty to overcome.
“How far did you say it was to Howland?” he asked.