WORLD FLIGHT

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22367, 2 April 1938, Page 18

WORLD FLIGHT

AMELIA EARHART’S FAREWELL

Last Flight. By Amelia Earhart, Arranged by George Palmer Putnam. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 253 pp. (9s net.)

Amelia Earhart intended to write a book, when she had completed her last project. It was to be -called “World Flight.” “Last Flight” takes its place, a memorial substitute. Amelia Earhart’s husband, Mr George Putnam, has arranged everything that she left—letters, telephone messages, cablegrams, log-books—as a record of the world flight which reached its terminus in the vague ocean east of New Guinea; but she had. besides, well advanced the book she designed, s.o that Mr Putnam, with a little material from other sources, has been able to arrange, almost entirely in his wife’s words, the full story of her flying life, to the last take-off. It was a life Of brilliant achievement, which Amelia Earhart records with something like casual gaiety. What she had done she could dismiss lightly; it was the task in hand or the task ahead that was important to her. There are only a few, slight pages here about her first Atlantic flight—when she landed in Ireland, near Londonderry, “after scaring most of the cows in the neighbourhood.” (She pulled up in a farmer’s backyard. Three people came out to see “what was in the aeroplane.” She pushed the hatch back and stuck out her head: “I’m from America,”, she said, at a loss for “the proper phrase for the situation.”) And her first Pacific flight she recalls almost as coolly. But though she makes no fuss, hers are not bald, uncommunicative stories: There is no doubt that the last hour of any flight is the hardest. If there are any clouds about to make shadows, one is likely to see much imaginary land. I saw considerable territory in the Pacific which California should annex!

When I actually first sighted land I was flying about 1800 feet off the surface of the water, considerably below the summits of the coastal hills. As I approached shore I strained my eyes to see something recognisable, but there was nothing. However, 1 noticed a low place in the hills, and I thought, like the bear, I would go over the mountains to see what ‘ I could see.

Drawing nearer, I pulled the nose of the ’plane up, eagerly peering ahead as we floated gently over those hospitable hills. And there lay San Francisco Bay in front of me. All 1 had to do was to go across and sit down.

This was a brave and cheerful and level-headed woman. “The time to worry,” she said, “is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard.” Why did she try her last risk? She told her husband:

It just seems that I must try this flight. I’ve weighed 'it all carefully. With it behind me life will be fuller and richer. I can be content. Afterwards it will be fun to grow old-

Few adventurers have emerged from their own records as characters so completely likeable.

It is announced that the biography of Arthur Henderson has been written by Mary Agnes Hamilton and will shortly appear. Mrs Hamilton is already the biographer of Margaret Bondfield, Ramsay Mac Donald, and Mary Macarthur. She sat in the House of Commons as member for Blackburn between 1929 and 1931.