Kelly Read online

  About 20 miles west of our home in Encino was undeveloped ranch land, where Althea and I pastured our horses. Several years after building our home, we had the opportunity to buy the Lindero Ranch, 226 acres of rolling country with a stream bordering its west side. Lindero means line or boundary and was the northwest corner of an original Spanish land grant.

  We built a small house on a mountain top with a view of the Pacific Ocean to the southwest and a range of mountains in the other direction.

  My early experience in construction was invaluable. With no utilities in the area at the time, we had to provide our own water, light, and power.

  The house we built ourselves was of concrete block, about 900 square feet. A large living room with six-foot high windows across about 30 feet of the front provided a magnificent view. A huge fireplace heated the entire structure.

  For electricity, we installed a small power plant that ran on cheap propane and also powered our stove and refrigerator. We had all the comforts.

  Other jobs were to dig a septic tank and put in a water tank. That was challenging because I had to move by tractor a 1,000-pound water tank slung on a boom downhill to a position above the house. Before I began this operation, I carefully computed tilt angle of tractor and tank, to keep the whole setup from tumbling downhill and through the new house. With a windmill at the bottom of the hill pumping up to the tank, we had a fine water system.

  Althea and I ran the ranch by ourselves. She did as much work as I—such as driving tractors and taking care of the horses. She became very skilled at operating the tractor and often would mow or rake hay while I was at work. It was a real partnership.

  We planted 110 acres of oat hay, plowing and discing the fields ourselves. We harvested the baled hay, too.

  Althea loved animals and convinced me that we should buy a herd of registered cattle, so we invested in about 20 Herefords. She enjoyed keeping the breeding records and everything else about ranch life. We both loved Lindero. As a pet we had a scrawny calf we called “Hardly Nothing” and renamed “Almost Something” as it grew.

  One day I forgot that Althea and I were equal partners! We were discing in preparation for planting oat hay. I didn’t think she was handling the C-2 caterpillar tractor properly, dragging the brakes and making hard use of the clutch. I hate to see any kind of machinery not treated very gently. So I corrected her in what I considered to be my most constructive manner.

  “If you don’t shut up,” she responded, “I’m going to run over you with this thing!” And she headed for me at full speed—about four miles an hour. I quickly departed the scene to let things cool down and she finished her discing.

  One great joy was riding horseback over our own land and surveying our crops. While we bought more horses for the ranch, we still had our first two, Prince and Mac. Both lived long lives, each more than 27 years, although we quit riding them long before that age, of course.

  Althea and I never had children, but it was not from lack of desire. We were very compatible and had a good and happy life together.

  6

  Wiley, Amelia, and Others

  NEWSPAPER HEADLINES IN AUGUST, 1935, saddened a nation that had loved a famed humorist-philosopher and admired a brave, pioneering aviator.

  “WILL ROGERS AND POST DIE IN AIRPLANE CRASH,” bannered the New York World-Telegram. “Pair Forced Down by Faulty Motor; Fall in Takeoff.”

  “ROGERS-POST ARCTIC DEATH CRASH RELATED” read the headline across the front page of the Los Angeles Times. “Plane Hits River as Engine Falters While Taking Off.” A separate story related, “Fog Blamed for Death.”

  Wiley Post was one of the first of the early famed flyers I met when I began to work at Lockheed in 1933. He already had flown around the world once, with Harold Gatty, in 1931. He became the first man to make the flight twice in a challenging solo effort in July of 1933. Both flights were made in a Lockheed Vega, the famed Winnie Mae. Wiley earlier had been a Lockheed test pilot. And, before that, a roustabout in the oil fields of Oklahoma. That’s where he lost an eye, resulting in that identifying black eye patch.

  It always was a mystery to the rest of us how anyone could fly so well and seem to have depth perception with just one eye. But he could, and he demonstrated his courage and excellence as a pilot many times.

  When I met him, Wiley wanted to attempt high-altitude flying, convinced that there was a future in the stratosphere where higher speed would be possible because of less air resistance and good tail winds.

  He had persuaded the Bendix company to furnish a very high-pressure supercharger for his Vega’s engine. He planned that it would furnish not only engine air but also air for a pilot’s pressure suit he had developed—it looked like a deep-sea diver’s outfit. This was to make possible flights at high altitude where there was little oxygen. He wanted to reach 40,000 feet and fly across the country at 400 miles per hour, from west to east.

  To do this, he wanted a special skid installed under the belly so that he could drop the landing gear after takeoff to save weight and improve the aerodynamic performance.

  With Jimmy Gerschler, then assistant chief engineer, I worked on the droppable gear, on the skid, on the air intake, and on bettering performance. But the best I could calculate for cruising speed in level flight was nearer 260 miles an hour.

  After work, Wiley and I would assemble at Neil’s drugstore across from the Lockheed factory, a popular meeting place. Wiley would have a beer and I’d have a sherry. He kept after me to prove that he could exceed 400 miles an hour average cruising speed. I managed to get close to 300 mph, but never better than that.

  “Kelly,” he promised, “if I do get across and average 400 mph, you’re going to have to buy me a case of whiskey. And if you’re right, I’m going to buy you a 20-inch slide rule to replace that little 12-inch one you use, so you’ll get better numbers.”

  I never got the slide rule. And he didn’t get across country.

  He tried three times. You’d think after once or twice he’d have given up, but not Wiley. He would take off from the Burbank airport and drop his gear at the end of the runway. But after being airborne he’d have trouble with the engine and have to make a forced, unprepared landing on the skid. He’d reach the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert, which made good emergency landing fields. This required all his pilot’s skill and depth perception. Once, he got as far as Cleveland. He had averaged 253 miles an hour at an altitude of 30,000 feet, but was forced down again. He couldn’t use all the power he had without over-boosting the engine.

  But it was a very good plan; and if the engine had held up Wiley would have been all alone, way ahead of everyone else. No one could have broken that record. He had a cleaner airplane than the Orion, last of the old Lockheed plywood aircraft and the fastest commercial ship of that day. It was capable of 226 miles an hour top speed and was faster than some military models. Wiley had a thinner wing, lighter weight without the landing gear, more powerful engine, and twice the cruising altitude—in thinner air offering less resistance.

  Wiley pursued yet another project. He had modified an Orion, substituted wings from another Lockheed plane, the Sirius, and had floats attached for water landings. He and his friend, Will Rogers, planned to tour the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Alaska to do some hunting and take a leisurely vacation. Post had a passport for Siberia and there was talk of taking the plane around the world.

  But Wiley also had put on this airplane the biggest engine he could get, with the biggest propeller and a different gearbox.

  “Wiley, you’d better watch this,” I cautioned. Gerschler warned him too, “You’re getting out of balance; the airplane is too nose-heavy with this big prop.”

  “Oh, I’ll handle it, I’ll handle it,” Wiley countered.

  I persisted. So did Gerschler.

  “You’ll have trouble on takeoff,” I argued, “because I doubt that there is enough elevator power to get the nose up.”

  But he got the plane certificated
by the CAA and flew off.

  He managed to get the nose up for takeoff by rocking the airplane fore and aft on its floats with power on until finally it would bounce up into the air, and he was airborne.

  In the very poor visibility in which he and Will Rogers attempted that last takeoff, it is doubtful he actually had a horizon visible. Under those conditions, a pilot can lose his sense of reference, cannot tell his angle of attack. And then to pull up at too high an angle and stall or have the engine fail …

  Wiley was an exceptional pilot who had overcome many obstacles. He and Rogers had covered a lot of territory to the northernmost point of Alaska, 300 miles within the Arctic Circle, before the fatal crash. According to newspaper reports, they had stopped for three hours at an Eskimo encampment to repair a faltering engine. The engine failed again on takeoff and they crashed on the frozen tundra. Wiley’s wristwatch stopped on impact: 8:18 p.m. An Eskimo ran the 15 miles to Point Barrow to report the tragedy. Famed bush pilot Joe Crosson flew the bodies to Fairbanks, where Col. Charles Lindbergh, as a director of Pan American Airways, personally directed their return home.

  Tragic headlines of another day—these in 1937—recounted the story of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance on an around-the-world flight.

  “MISS EARHART MISSING OVER PACIFIC: ONLY A HALF-HOUR’S FUEL, NO LAND IN SIGHT, SHE RADIOS—THEN SILENCE.” Four columns with photo, maps, Earhart’s last dispatch to the paper, and the news story covered the front page of the New York Herald Tribune.

  “AMELIA EARHART LOST IN PACIFIC; RADIO FLASHES FAINT SOS,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Plane Joins Ship Hunt for Flyers.” Ironically, in light of later speculation about Amelia’s disappearance, that same front page of July 3 reported, “Russian-Japanese Crisis Eased by Troop Withdrawal.”

  America’s most famed woman pilot of that time, Amelia Earhart, and her navigator, Capt. Fred Noonan, were not heard from by Pacific area listening posts after their radio went silent at 11:12 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on July 2. Faint signals were picked up at 1 a.m. the next morning by a ham operator in Los Angeles and by a steamship several hundred miles too far away to give assistance.

  The flight around the world, begun “just for fun,” in Earhart’s words, ended in silence that day.

  Amelia already had established a distinguished career by the time I met her. She was the first woman to fly the Atlantic— as a passenger in 1928, solo in 1932—and the Pacific—Honolulu to Oakland, Calif., in 1935. She set three other impressive records in her Vega during 1935: Burbank to Mexico City in 13 hours, 32 minutes; first non-stop flight from Mexico City to Newark, N.J., in 14 hours, 19 minutes; and a transcontinental record for women, Burbank to Newark, 13 hours, 34 minutes, 5 seconds.

  In her book, The Fun of It published in 1932, she wrote of her solo transatlantic flight: “It was clear in my mind that I was undertaking the flight merely for the fun of it. I chose to fly the Atlantic because I wanted to. It was, in a measure, a self-justification—a proving to me, and to anyone else interested, that a woman with adequate experience could do it.” And in helping to “put the theories to practical use … (toward) efficient flight,” this early feminist wrote: “That women will share in these endeavors even more than they have in the past, is my wish—and prophecy.”

  When I met her, she had a Lockheed Model 10E; the original Electra with slightly more powerful engines—550 horsepower Wasps instead of the original 420 horsepower Wasps. Her ambition was to fly around the world.

  The work I did with her basically was to find out how to get the absolute maximum mileage out of the plane for the around-the-world flight. The two of us, she as pilot and I as flight engineer, would fly her Electra with different weights, different balance conditions, different engine power settings, different altitudes.

  We had in those days a gadget known as a Cambridge analyzer to analyze exhaust gas; you used it repeatedly, resetting mixture control and leaning out engine fuel to get maximum miles per gallon. Amelia learned how to do this, too. She also had the advice of another aviation veteran, the famous racing pilot Paul Mantz, on installation of fuel tanks, instruments, and other special provisions for the flight.

  Her original intention was to fly around the world to the west, and I listed fuel loads recommended for the first six long hops in a letter to her dated February 17, 1937.

  “Dear Miss Earhart,” my letter began. “The following fuel loads are recommended for the flights noted. These figures are subject to change depending on actual fuel consumption tests which you are going to make, as I discussed with Paul Mantz. A 25% margin (assuming zero wind) for range is included in the following figures.”

  Then I listed distance, fuel load, and gross weight for each leg of the trip, from San Francisco to Natal.

  “The use of 10° to 30° of wingflap with takeoff power will reduce the takeoff run about 20%. If a normal, good runway is available, with a length of 3000 feet (for the heavier loads), no wingflap is required or recommended as the ship will take off in 2000 feet with a load of 14,000#. The greatest danger in using wingflaps on takeoff lies in the reduction of directional control at the beginning of the run, and in retracting the wingflaps after takeoff. The flaps must not be raised unless an airspeed of 120 m.p.h. is reached, in order to prevent losing altitude as the flaps retract.

  “If the runway is rough, so that the landing gear must take a terrific beating during takeoff, some flap (15°) should be used.

  “During all takeoffs, the airplane should be held with the tail up in approximately level position in order to get the best possible takeoff. Lift the airplane from the ground as soon as it is safe to do so, to relieve the load on the landing gear. After leaving the ground, hold the ship low until a good margin of speed is obtained before starting the climb. This procedure makes use of the ground effect on lift and drag in the best manner.

  “When a takeoff is made with flaps down, the procedure after leaving the ground should be to retract the landing gear first (soon as possible) and then climb to a safe height with flaps down, level off and accelerate to a speed of 120 m.p.h. Retract the flaps, maintaining an air speed of 100 m.p.h. or more. Resume climb at normal power when flaps are up.

  “The above procedure is fairly complicated; so it is generally recommended that no flap be used on takeoff unless necessary.

  With her famed Electra—Lockheed’s first all-metal aircraft—as backdrop, aviatrix Amelia Earhart discusses coming flight with Kelly Johnson.

  “Yours very truly, Clarence L. Johnson.”

  On her first attempt at the around-the-world tour, she ground-looped the plane in Hawaii and stripped off the landing gear. The plane had to be returned to the factory by boat. We had more discussions, of course, about how to prevent ground looping; and it did not happen again.

  But she changed her direction for the second attempt, flying instead toward the east. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she expected more favorable winds. She almost made it. Leaving Oakland on May 30, she flew across country to Miami, then to Puerto Rico, down the coast to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Africa, to India, Australia, and Lae, New Guinea. The next to the last leg, the longest was Lae-Howland. Then it would be Honolulu and on home to Oakland.

  With Howland Island, Earhart and Noonan were trying to hit a very, very small speck in the broad Pacific Ocean, an island one and a half to two miles long and rising only about two feet above water. Fred Noonan was a very good navigator, but it became apparent from radio conversations recorded by the U.S. Navy and others that the sky was so overcast that they could not get down to see any checkpoints nor high enough—above 20,000 feet—to get “sun shots” to check their navigation.

  They had been in the air for 23 hours and, so help me, that’s all the time they had fuel for. They did not know their location when they sent their SOS. The Navy mounted a tremendous search effort and attempted to locate them with direction finders but couldn’t. The two had a rubber dinghy with them, and, if undamaged, the plane could have
floated with its gas tanks emptied. I am convinced that they attempted to ditch the airplane and didn’t get away with it.

  There has been speculation since that Amelia was on a spy mission to overfly the Japanese and photograph buildups of military facilities and operations. I doubt this. The only camera she had to my knowledge was a Brownie. And there were no openings in the aircraft that would have permitted good aerial photographs.

  Also, it has been implied that Amelia may have been a poor pilot. She was a good one when I knew her. She was very sensible, very studious, and paid attention to what she was told. In person, Amelia was kind, gentle, quiet in speech and manner. She was the “Lady Lindy” she was called.

  I have always had a great admiration for Amelia Earhart as a lady and as a pilot.

  Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, the Australian, was another pilot I got to know well. I worked closely with him, as I did with Amelia, on the optimum way to get the most miles per gallon for his Lockheed Altair. He already had set distance records in Australia and internationally—Oakland to Brisbane in 1934. In 1935 he wanted to fly from England to Australia. We were preparing for that project.

  His little Altair didn’t have an opening in the bottom of the fuselage through which I could drop instrumentation, so I would stand up in the rear cockpit, letting an airspeed “bomb” trail below. This was a heavy lead weight with a pitot tube on it—to measure airspeed—which we let down some 100 feet below us, out of the wake of the airplane. It gave a very accurate reading. We made a number of such flights from Burbank out over the Pacific, calibrating airspeed and determining best operating details for maximum range.

  On November 6 of that year he and his copilot-navigator, Thomas Pethybridge, left London for Sidney. On November 8, they disappeared en route to Singapore. We theorized that they had struck a cliff or mountain while at low altitude, damaged the plane, but were able to continue flying a short distance.