7. Land!
“Going it alone,” Amelia repeated the phrase to herself, alone in the passenger compartment of the Friendship, a lone woman, the first woman in history on a transatlantic flight. She looked up and forward to the two men flying the plane. Bill was nosing down again, and Lou was gazing intently out his side window. AE walked carefully up to the cockpit. Twenty-five hundred feet. Eight fifty A.M. Lou Gordon pointed out to the right. Two ships!
One of them was the S. S. America. Lou took over the controls as Bill Stultz went back to try to make radio contact with the ships; but the radio failed to operate. How could he get a position?
The Friendship dropped down and circled the America. Bill scribbled a note. Amelia attached it to an orange, put both in a paper bag, and aimed through the opened hatchway for the deck of the America. The combination of speed, movement of the ship, wind, and lightness of the bag made the bombing a failure. A second attempt failed.
An alternative plan was suggested: should they try to land near the ship, get a position report by voice, then try to take off again? The rough sea would make a landing difficult, a take-off impossible. Bill tried again, but in vain, to receive a message on the radio. What to do?
They decided to trust their earlier course determination, and turn back to retrace the twelve-mile detour they had made to circle the America. They had to trust their own original judgment. They had only one hour of fuel left.
At this low point of desperation Lou Gordon, smiling as if there were nothing to be alarmed about, came back for a sandwich. He tore off the wrapper—another ham sandwich—and crawled back to the cockpit. Amelia liked his easy manner. She looked out: the cloud ceiling was low and the visibility limited. Bill headed the plane down to 500 feet.
Suddenly a fishing vessel came into view, then a fleet of them. The fliers happily noticed that the course of the boats paralleled the course of the Friendship. The gasoline tanks were emptying fast. Amelia guessed that there must be land near, but where? She scanned the horizon, hoping.
Then a nebulous blue shadow appeared through the fog. Was it another mirage of fog, a deceptive cloud formation? Slim Gordon studied the shape, then threw his sandwich out the window and screamed.
“Land!”
Bill Stultz smiled. He had brought the Friendship across the Atlantic. To Ireland or England, he did not know which, but he had found land.
Soon several islands appeared, then a coast line. Bill worked the plane in close and cruised along the coast, looking for a good place to bring the Fokker down. There was not much fuel left. He decided to land. Circling a factory town, he chose a stretch of water beyond it. He landed beautifully, and taxied to a buoy a short distance away.
They had been in the air for twenty fretful hours and forty exciting minutes. Now they safely rode the waves at Burry Port, Wales, looking for a stir of recognition from the earth they had so defiantly left.