University Times

Donald Goldstein hopes his new biography of Amelia Earhart won't follow its subject's example and vanish without a trace.

"I just hope we sell some copies of the damn thing," Goldstein growled during an interview at Pitt's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where he is a professor.

Contemplating the unlit Phillies Titan cigar that he was gradually chewing to tatters, Goldstein added: "I think it's a pretty good book, to tell you the truth. The problem is, it doesn't have a sensational hook." "Amelia: The Centennial Biography of an Aviation Pioneer" (Brassey's, Inc., $24.95), co-authored by Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, certainly doesn't reveal any sensational dirt about Earhart's personal life.

By all accounts, Earhart — nicknamed "Lady Lindy" by the press because she looked uncannily like her contemporary, Charles A. Lindbergh, and duplicated his solo flight across the Atlantic — shared all of her fellow aviator's better traits but none of his ugly ones. She was brave, adventurous, intelligent, well-read, hard-working, modest, honest and preternaturally poised. But unlike Lindbergh, Earhart also was charming, good-humored enough to take fame in stride, and absolutely lacking in racial or religious prejudice.

She was generous with her money and time, and indifferent to honors and official recognition; she didn't even bother to pick up her high school diploma, and left college on the verge of graduating in order to volunteer as a Red Cross nurse during World War I.

Earhart also was a loyal daughter, sister and friend, and in her own way a good wife to publisher-promoter George Putnam, according to Goldstein.

"I think she and George truly liked and respected each other," the Virginia-born Goldstein drawled. "I don't think they had sex, for what that's worth. She may have been gay, and if she wasn't, she was [sexually] neutral. But I think their marriage worked." "Amelia was a feminist without being a man-hater," Goldstein said. "Not even a chauvinist pig could dislike her." If Earhart's sterling character isn't enough to turn off sensation-seekers (the unusual nature of her marriage to Putnam was widely known or suspected among their contemporaries), Goldstein and co-author Dillon also draw prosaic conclusions about Earhart's ill-fated final flight in 1937.

Unlike the authors of some earlier, best-selling books about Earhart, Goldstein and Dillon don't believe she was shot down and/or captured while flying an espionage mission over Japanese territory.

They doubt that she crashed on the islands of Saipan or Nikumaroru, on Winslow Reef or on Mili Atoll, to name just four sites popular among Earhart buffs.

They dismiss reports that Earhart was picked up by a fishing boat and survived to a ripe old age as an amnesiac South Seas prostitute.

They demolish the once-popular legend that Earhart was actually spying for Japan and enjoyed a second career as Tokyo Rose, the notorious English-language radio propagandist of World War II.

And they definitely don't buy the theory that a UFO transported Earhart to another planet or space-time dimension.

"Look, it's pretty obvious she got lost, ran out of gas and either crashed or ditched her plane," Goldstein said. "And I believe it happened in the ocean, not on any island. Maybe Earhart and [navigator Frederick J.] Noonan were killed on impact. Or maybe one or both of them survived for a couple of days in the water, if it wasn't too rough. Their plane could remain afloat for a week in calm seas.

"But the Japanese didn't capture her, that's for sure. There's absolutely nothing in the Japanese archives" to indicate they had a hand in her disappearance, he said.

In 1937 — four years before their attack on Pearl Harbor — Japanese authorities would have been at least as likely to assist or rescue Earhart as attack her, Goldstein argued. Helping the famous American flier might have countered some of the growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S. Congress and the American press, he pointed out.

As for a possible U.S. government cover-up, the book offers persuasive, mundane explanations for enigmatic comments made by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. following Earhart's disappearance — quotes that conspiracy theorists have manipulated to suggest that the American military collaborated with Earhart on a spy mission, or that a Coast Guard cutter killed Earhart and her navigator by accidently plowing into their plane during a rescue search.

Goldstein laughs off portrayals of Earhart as a spy. The real Amelia, he and Dillon wrote, was a near-pacifist "who had never had an hour's training in intelligence gathering, had no experience in photography beyond wielding the equivalent of a Brownie, and who would not have recognized a military objective worth photographing if she tripped over it." Radar and long-distance electronic snooping did not exist in 1937. Smuggling an aerial camera aboard Earhart's plane would have required the complicity of dozens of foreign mechanics and customs inspectors, including some from fascist Italy and several neutral countries, the book points out.

Moreover, Earhart's aircraft held just enough gasoline to complete her scheduled flight from New Guinea to Howland Island, a path that did not fly over any Japanese territories. Detouring would have been suicidal, the authors maintain.

If Earhart was not on a government mission, why did the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy go to so much trouble and expense to assist her? She was merely a civilian (albeit an internationally famous one) on a privately funded journey. Yet the military improved Howland's aircraft facilities, monitored and tried to assist Earhart's flight, and launched an extensive search following her disappearance.

According to Goldstein and Dillon, the Coast Guard was only doing its job in preparing for, and participating in, a rescue at sea. The two Navy ships that joined the Earhart project were already in the area and stood to benefit from on-the-spot training and favorable publicity. In addition, the Department of the Interior "wanted to establish U.S. sovereignty over Howland Island beyond cavil, so the opportunity to improve the facilities and reap a harvest of publicity attesting to the U.S. presence there could only be welcome," the authors wrote.

"Amelia" is the 18th book that Goldstein has co-authored with Dillon or other collaborators since 1981. The first of those books was "At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor," which has sold more than 1 million copies in hardback and paperback.

Goldstein and Dillon, a retired Air Force chief warrant officer, co-authored "At Dawn We Slept" and eight other books with the late Gordon W. Prange, doing original research and making use of thousands of manuscript pages and documents that Prange amassed about the American-Japanese conflict in World War II. As the civilian chief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's historical section in Tokyo from 1946 to 1951, Prange had virtually unlimited access to Japanese archives and to former Imperial Army and Navy officers, many of whom he interviewed extensively.

In researching "Amelia," Goldstein and Dillon also had access to unpublished material by the late Capt. Laurence F. Safford, who was chief of U.S. Naval Communications Security during World War II, and by Georgia businessman John F. Luttrell.

Safford was a brilliant code-breaker and communications expert who analyzed radio wavelengths, fuel capacity, air routes, weather, flight preparations and other technical factors related to Earhart's disappearance. Luttrell, in contrast, was a romantic who explored various Earhart conspiracy theories and gathered material that, ironically, was useful in disproving those theories.

July 24 marks the centennial of Earhart's birth, and last week was the 60th anniversary of her disappearance. Searchers have yet to find a single bone fragment, scrap of clothing, personal effect or piece of wreckage that can definitely be linked to Earhart, Noonan or their Lockheed Electra airplane, Goldstein noted.

Most of what has been offered as Earhart artifacts either could have come from other planes or pilots or is of questionable value, he said — for example, a part of a size 9 woman's shoe found on Nikumaroru in 1991. Earhart wore a size 6 1/2.

Nor have self-proclaimed eyewitnesses provided proof that they saw the plane go down or encountered Earhart or Noonan after July 3, 1937, Goldstein said.

And yet, the search goes on. Since the late 1980s, the well-financed International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has been pursuing its theory that Earhart came down on McKean or Nikumaroru islands, hundreds of miles south of her destination of Howland Island. Besides turning up the size 9 1/2 shoe fragment, the TIGHAR team has found several artifacts that may or may not have come from Earhart, Noonan or their plane.

The team's prize piece of evidence is a 18 x 24 inch sheet of aluminum aircraft skin. According to an Alcoa analyst whom Goldstein interviewed, the aluminum fragment may have come from an aircraft manufactured between 1930 and 1944 but there is no way to prove it came from Earhart's plane "unless Amelia signed it somewhere." A Lockheed foreman told Goldstein the fragment isn't even close to matching the dimensions and shape of a duplicate of Earhart's plane at the Western Aerospace Museum.

In their book, Goldstein and Dillon wrote restrainedly that they "cannot be optimistic" about the TIGHAR group's chances for success. "Searching for hard evidence of a specific aircraft that went down in the vastness of the Pacific is a task that makes the proverbial hunt for a needle in a haystack seem easy by comparison. Identifying bits and pieces would be almost impossible, as aircraft of that period were made of the same materials, and such items as flight jackets and briefcases were fairly standardized," they wrote.

Still, Goldstein and Dillon wished the TIGHAR team "the best of luck" — to the dismay of their publishers.

Brassey's, a small publishing house based in New York and London, "wanted us to come out and say that these guys [TIGHAR] will never find Amelia or her plane," Goldstein said. "That was going to be their hook in marketing our book. But as historians, we had to reserve judgment, just a little bit. I mean, how the hell do I know, absolutely, that the TIGHAR people aren't going to find her? If they did, it would be great. It's not impossible, after all, that she crashed on land. There's still a lot that we don't know." The following, at least, is certain: On the morning of July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan coaxed their heavily laden monoplane off a dirt runway in Lae, New Guinea, en route to Howland, a tiny coral island midway between New Guinea and Hawaii. Earhart had told reporters that the 2,400-mile leg from Lae to Howland would be the worst section of the around-the-world flight she had begun six weeks earlier, "but with Freddy Noonan navigating I'm confident we'll make it." But, of course, they didn't make it.

At 7:42 a.m. Howland time on July 3, Earhart radioed an anxious message to the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been assigned to monitor her progress: "WE MUST BE ON YOU BUT CANNOT SEE YOU. RUNNING OUT OF GAS. ONLY ONE HALF HOUR LEFT. BEEN UNABLE TO REACH YOU BY RADIO. WE ARE FLYING AT ONE THOUSAND FEET." At 7:58 a.m., Earhart asked the ship to send a homing signal. The Itasca complied, as Earhart acknowledged at 8 a.m. But unfortunately, she couldn't get even a minimum bearing from the signal and requested a voice reply. Apparently she never received it. At 8:44 a.m., the Itasca heard from Earhart one last time, still seeking a voice reply from the ship.

Between 9:01 and 9:24 a.m., a radio station on the neighboring island of Nauru picked up three more, apparently authentic, broadcasts from Earhart. Radio Nauru reported: "SPEECH NOT INTERPRETED OWING BAD MODULATION OR SPEAKER SHOUTING INTO MICROPHONE BUT VOICE SIMILAR TO THAT EMITTED IN FLIGHT LAST NIGHT WITH EXCEPTION NO HUM OF PLANE IN BACKGROUND." Given the absence of flight sounds, these broadcasts — if indeed Earhart sent them — could have come after her plane was forced to land.

She and Noonan would have been better off dying instantly in a crash, Goldstein said. A few hours of intense equatorial sunlight would have turned the all-metal body of Earhart's plane into an oversized oven. The plane carried no reserve supply of drinking water. Survivors could not have lasted long in or outside the plane, Goldstein said.

The Lae-to-Howland flight was doomed from the start, he believes, for the following reasons:

* Earhart and Noonan were physically and mentally exhausted going into the last days of their around-the-world journey.

* Even with their Lockheed Electra sagging under the weight of nearly full gasoline and oil tanks (at full fuel capacity, the plane probably could not have gotten off the ground), Earhart and Noonan left New Guinea with just enough fuel to complete their flight.

* Flying over open seas, much of the time at night, with a tiny coral island as their destination, Earhart and Noonan had virtually no margin for error in navigating. In her most celebrated previous flights — the first solo flight across the Atlantic by a woman, and the first solo flight by any pilot from Hawaii to the U.S. West Coast — Earhart had been aiming for entire continents. On her flight to Europe, she had failed to reach her intended destination of Paris, landing in Ireland instead.

* Radio communications between Earhart's plane and the Itasca and other U.S. Coast Guard and Navy ships were "so inept as virtually to ensure disaster," Goldstein and Dillon wrote. Radio frequencies had not been coordinated between the ships and Earhart's plane. She apparently received just one of the 41 voice messages the Itasca sent to her on various frequencies during the flight. Nor was the plane equipped to transmit a homing signal to potential rescuers. And neither Earhart nor Noonan knew Morse code.

Goldstein said: "If Earhart had taken along an experienced radio man as a third member of her team, which she was considering doing at one point, her plane probably would have crashed anyway, in my opinion. But at least the Coast Guard and the Navy would have known where she went down." In their book, Goldstein and Dillon propose the following scenario: Earhart and Noonan were proceeding on course, several hundred miles from Howland, when they flew into towering black storm clouds (as reported by a U.S. Navy ship) and became disoriented about their location.

Unable to see the sun and stars because of the clouds, and with only empty seas below, Noonan could not get a visual fix on the plane's location. Unable to receive radio signals, lacking accurate wind velocity estimates, running out of gas and still too far from Howland to home in on the island's direction finder, Noonan and Earhart could not find Howland in time.

Based on documented ship sightings of the plane, its radio transmissions to the Itasca, wind and weather conditions and other factors, analyst Laurence Safford estimated that the plane crashed somewhere in the vast stretch of open ocean between Howland and the Gilbert Islands.

"Amelia Earhart wasn't a great pilot," said Goldstein, who is a former U.S. Air Force officer. "She was very intelligent and brave, but she could be sloppy. She crashed her planes five or six times. Among the women pilots of her time, she ranked maybe in the top 20, and that's being generous. "The difference was," he continued, "she had a certain charisma those other women lacked. Also, the others didn't have a George Putnam [Earhart's husband and promoter] behind them, shoving them into the limelight.

"On the other hand, Amelia couldn't have accomplished all that she did if she hadn't been a skilled pilot. It would be unfair to say her last flight ended in disaster because she wasn't good enough. Under the circumstances she had — with the same equipment and technology and conditions — I don't believe that any pilot, then or now, could have completed that flight." — Bruce Steele