The Lost Pilots Read online

  She first approached the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, pitching them on the idea of setting a coast-to-coast record. The company readily agreed to give her a six-month loan on their powerful, 165-horsepower J-6 Whirlwind engine. The day after her meeting with Wright, Jessie caught wind of an obtainable airframe, the Alexander Bullet, out in Denver, Colorado. The Bullet was a low-wing cabin monoplane that featured a retractable landing gear, and while it wasn’t anyone’s ideal choice, this only worked in Jessie’s favor in procuring it. The Bullet’s 125-mile cruising speed was more than sufficient for her plans. With her usual capacity to inspire confidence in others, she persuaded the company’s owner, J. Don Alexander, to lend her the model. The company’s mechanics even mounted the Whirlwind engine and refurbished the Bullet’s frame.

  When Jessie returned from her time in Colorado, she was confronted once again with the strain of living with her mother, Ethelwyn. “Frankly,” she admitted later, “it was getting a little wearing having mother, as she disapproved of everything.” Foremost on that list, of course, was Lancaster, whom Ethelwyn continued to treat with barely concealed disdain.

  As an added stress, Jessie learned, as her Alexander Bullet was being renovated, that she was not alone in planning a record-setting coast-to-coast flight. The celebrated Brooklyn-born aviatrix Laura Ingalls, who during World War II would be sent to prison as a Nazi spy, had got the jump on Jessie, flying from New York to Los Angeles in just over thirty hours—a new record. The media celebrated Ingalls’s achievement, but Jessie, rather than being discouraged, decided this was a positive: her own attempt would receive all the more exposure due to Ingalls’s publicity. On October 12, 1930, she departed New York in the restored Bullet, navigating a series of storm systems that stretched from Pennsylvania across the Midwestern states. And yet her pace did not slow. Five stops and four days later, she arrived in Los Angeles, having set a new record of twenty-five hours and forty-four minutes.

  But such was the nature of competitive flight in that heady era that even as Jessie flew westward at an unprecedented rate, Laura Ingalls was flying eastward even faster. Ingalls immediately usurped Jessie’s record with a flight time to New York of twenty-four hours and fifty-five minutes—forty-nine minutes faster than Jessie’s dash to the West Coast. Not to be outdone, Jessie retaliated a few days later with a twenty-one-hour, forty-seven-minute flight from Los Angeles to New York, a decisive new record. Jessie’s triumph was complete: she now held the record for both westward and eastward flights.

  There wasn’t a cash purse attached to Jessie’s achievement, but the money flowed in anyway, with advertisers and the media paying generous fees for interviews and photographs. Lancaster, sidelined as a pilot, took on the role of Jessie’s agent and manager, operating as her go-between when it came to drawing up contracts.

  Jessie’s track record was now such that other aircraft companies came knocking at her door. She soon accepted a $1,000 offer from the president of Aerial Enterprises Incorporated to fly round-trip, all expenses paid, from Pittsburgh to Havana. In late November her Bullet departed chilly Pittsburgh for the warmer environs of Miami and Cuba.

  Jessie’s flight down the eastern seaboard proved rougher than expected, with vicious headwinds battering the Bullet, severely slowing her progress. What Jessie had planned as a one-day hop to Miami doubled in length when her plane ran out of fuel. After spending the night in Charleston, she made it to Miami in time for lunch, then departed for Havana, which she reached in time for dinner. The Cuban government gave her an effusive welcome.

  Aerial Enterprises Incorporated had urged a quick return to Pittsburgh, but nasty weather kept Jessie grounded in Havana for the next several days. Aerial’s president proved less than sympathetic, however, pressuring Jessie on a daily basis to hustle back to Pennsylvania before the media’s attention completely waned. With the president’s words in her ear, Jessie decided to leave Cuba on November 28, although the weather remained poor.

  Though aviation enthusiasts in Colorado Springs referred to the Bullet as a “jinx craft,” Jessie placed great faith in her plane, despite the ominous warnings that had attended her initial use of it. Whatever the Bullet’s spin test pilots had encountered, she had personally found the aircraft dependable, despite her joking comment in Havana that it was an “un-airworthy crate.” Nor did she profess worry that her Bullet lacked a radio set and bank and turn dials. Jessie knew the Florida coast well, and she felt sure that she would be able to locate it. She would only be two hours in the air! She did take one precaution in deference to the projected thirty-mile-an-hour winds: she filled her reserve fuel tanks, despite the extra time this took. Now the Bullet would fly nine hours before it needed refueling.

  Despite her brave facade, Jessie, in a moment of raw candor in Havana, confessed the truth of her emotions: “Everybody gives me credit for being brave . . . and I never let them think otherwise. But really I am afraid, desperately afraid, when I’m over water or mountains or rough country. . . . I feel many times like giving up because I know it’s eventually going to get me. But I can’t—people would think me a coward. I guess I’ve just got to keep on until it does get me. Life at its best is short anyway, so I guess I have no complaint coming.”

  Shortly before she took off for Miami, Jessie told the press of a disturbing premonition: “I don’t why it is but something tells me I’m going down. I’ve had the feeling ever since I crossed on the way over from Florida and somehow or other I can’t shake it off.”

  Where was Jessie? Her projected arrival time of 11 a.m. in Miami had come and gone, but there had been no glimpse of her since a Pan American pilot had spotted her Bullet over the Florida Straits. That afternoon the Cuban government sent two planes on a search mission, joined by Curtiss Air Station seaplanes from the marine base in Miami, but all were forced to return once night fell. From its tropical radio station, the Key West Naval Station sent hourly announcements of Jessie’s disappearance to all ships in Gulf and Atlantic waters, but this proved equally fruitless; there was nothing to report. The coast guard station at Fort Lauderdale also heard nothing from local picket boats. The New York Times reported the common sentiment: “As nightfall obscured the waters of the Florida Straits, hope for the safety of Mrs. J. M. Keith-Miller, Australian aviatrix, faded until searchers here conceded her no more than a thousand-to-one chance of a safe landing.”

  In New York City, Jessie’s mother gave a statement to the press. “I am very anxious about my daughter, but I shall not give up hope that she is safe,” Mrs. Beveridge said. “It’s the sea I am worried about, of course. I am sure that if my daughter was able to bring her plane to a point over land she would manage somehow to get down in safety and probably has done so at some isolated place where she has been unable to get word to me of her safety.”

  Lancaster, meanwhile, expressed his fear that Jessie had been forced down at sea, and that she was now afloat somewhere between Cuba and Florida in the collapsible rubber boat she carried in her plane. Lancaster had been holed up in Pittsburgh awaiting Jessie’s return, but now he rushed to Washington, D.C., intent on convincing the Department of the Navy to help find her. He also tried contacting the famous speed flier Captain Frank Hawks to request assistance. As Jessie remained missing for a second day, seaplanes scoured the Florida Keys in search of clues, and commercial and private pilots between Miami and Havana hunted for signs of her whereabouts. But as night came on with no additional information, nearly everyone accepted that Jessie was dead, her Bullet crashed in the ocean.

  Lancaster, however, insisted that the search for Jessie should continue. He was backed in this opinion by none other than Laura Ingalls, who declared, from Miami, that it “would be a grievous mistake to give up the hunt” for Jessie. “It is possible she was forced to land on some isolated key or spot on the mainland with no communications facilities,” Ingalls pointed out. Lancaster spent the day making the rounds of the Navy Department, pleading for help, despite protests from officials that the
weather was too foul to fly in, with high-speed winds thrashing the Atlantic from the eastern seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico. Nonetheless, the navy finally agreed to supply Lancaster with a plane. He left immediately for Miami, his aircraft whipped by the same powerful winds that pilots in Florida now assumed had downed Jessie’s plane. It was two days after Jessie’s disappearance, and the reports were conclusive: “Aviation officials today agreed in expressing the belief that Mrs. J. M. Keith-Miller perished in an attempted flight in adverse weather conditions from Havana to Miami,” wrote The Baltimore Sun.

  Soon after takeoff from Havana, Jessie had realized she was in trouble. She’d just reached her cruising altitude when the Bullet was assaulted by intense crosswinds that spun and tossed it like a rag doll, battering Jessie until her body was black-and-blue. Because the Bullet lacked instruments for flying blind, Jessie didn’t know whether the prevailing winds were pushing her west, but she knew the Florida Keys, no matter her progress, were an hour away at best. She thought she might be drawing near when her view was suddenly arrested by a thick black line on the horizon, the sign of a massive approaching storm. She hardly had time to steel her body before the temperature dropped precipitously and the wind’s fury intensified. Then a swarming black cloudbank consumed everything around her, flinging the Bullet into the storm’s turbulent vortex.

  Her muscles straining, Jessie tried to push the Bullet above the storm, but she couldn’t escape the wind’s roiling currents. Though she had enough fuel in her reserve tanks to return to Havana, she realized she was entirely without bearings. Terror lodged in her throat. She no more knew in which direction Cuba lay than she knew how to locate the American mainland. Jessie’s panic increased to the point that it subsumed all hope. “I thought it was all over for me,” she later recounted, “and I contemplated diving with the ship headfirst into the sea to get the agony over with quickly.”

  At last, off to the right, the ocean took on a greenish hue, the sign of approaching land. Within minutes Jessie spotted the coastline in front of her, though her maps proved unhelpful in determining her exact location. All she could see through her window were the thick trees and vines of a tropical forest. Maybe, she thought, she could trace the bottom of the coast until Miami appeared on the other side. And yet she didn’t think Florida’s western coast was so jungle-like. Was she mistaken in her bearings? She spotted a village down below. Her fuel was close to gone; there was no more time to gamble on Miami. The area around the village was her only hope, though every inch appeared covered in trees and shrubs. She aimed for the section that most resembled scrubland, the plane slowed by strong winds. After seven hours aloft, the Bullet skidded to a halt among the rough and tangled brush. Aside from a few bumps, Jessie, amazingly, was uninjured.

  She sat in her cockpit, gathering her thoughts and nerves. She hadn’t been there long when a line of village residents snaked around the plane. As they spoke to her in English, Jessie began to gain her bearings. She had landed on Andros Island, which lay east of Florida, in the Bahamas. She had been convinced the storm had blown her into the Gulf of Mexico, but her calculations were off by 180 degrees. Without her reserve fuel tanks, Jessie would have died in the Atlantic’s frigid waters. The sympathetic locals guided her on a fifteen-mile hike through the jungle to where, much to her shock and delight, a fellow Australian, the world-champion swimmer Percy Cavill, had his residence.

  Jessie was well aware that a major search for her whereabouts was likely under way, and she was desperate to contact the United States in case pilots were needlessly risking their lives to find her. She knew Lancaster, too, would be frantic at her disappearance. But the lack of a ready communications system on the island meant that two full days passed before she was finally able to reach, via Percy Cavill’s fishing boat, the nearby island of Nassau, which had a working radio station. Jessie’s mother, in New York, received the first telegram, which read simply, “I am at Nassau. Safe. Notify friends. Love. Jessie.” In Miami, an immensely relieved Lancaster immediately jumped in a chartered seaplane to go meet Jessie. The two of them patched up the Bullet as best they could and sped back to Miami. Jessie was deluged with admiring telegrams, one of which, to her great pleasure, proposed a $1,500 payment for the tale of her treacherous flight.

  Jessie had little time to relax in celebration. She needed to fly the Bullet back to Pittsburgh if she wanted to heal her wounded pride and also collect the $1,000 prize from Aerial Enterprises Incorporated. On December 12, two full weeks after she’d first set off from Havana, Jessie departed Miami. But the prize money was not to be hers. As she took off from a stopover in Jacksonville, a broken fuel pump killed the Bullet’s engine. Jessie tried frantically to veer away from a clump of trees in front of her, but the plane went down hard. The airframe was destroyed. Jessie was badly shaken but once again, rather miraculously, unhurt. Still, the flight was officially over. In a few unceremonious instants Jessie’s fortunes had dramatically changed.

  8

  TO MIAMI

  The next twelve months—all of 1931—proved an unsatisfying grind, though both Lancaster and Jessie found paid work. In aviation, the big news centered on Wiley Post and Harold Gatty’s attainment of the first round-the-world flight in a single-engine plane, along with Clyde Edward Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr.’s record-setting nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean. Lancaster and Jessie’s old acquaintance Bert Hinkler received acclaim, as well, for being the first person to fly solo across the South Atlantic. But these were exceptions; far fewer aviation records were being set or broken than in previous years, and most available jobs proved a far cry from the media’s glamorous portrayal of the world of flight.

  As a case in point, Lancaster headed to Los Angeles to work as personal assistant to Jack Maddux, the president of Transcontinental Air Transport, a precursor to TWA. Desk-bound work was not Lancaster’s forte, and his carelessness and absentmindedness made him a hapless secretary. Not that Maddux was surprised: he had hired Lancaster as an act of generosity for a down-on-his-luck aviator, not because of his administrative skills.

  In June, Jessie began the lengthy process of applying for American citizenship, hoping that it would increase her chances of finding employment. “America gave me an opportunity in aviation that I was unable to get in England,” she informed the press. “I want to become an American because I really want to get somewhere before I die.” As it happened, her greatest success that year was a three-month contract with the Redpath Chautauqua lecture bureau in New York. Though initially a reluctant public speaker, Jessie had grown over time to relish the experience of regaling audiences with tales of her aerial adventures, and she was happy to lease her Upper West Side apartment and head out on the road, hopscotching to a new town every day.

  Her most memorable incident that summer occurred at the end of July, in the small town of Fort Plain, New York, when she awoke to the smell of smoke seeping beneath her hotel room door. Jessie ran into the hallway and discovered that her floor’s storeroom was on fire. Still in her nightgown, she sprinted down the hallway, banging on every door to awaken the other guests. She also roused the night clerk, who rang the fire alarm and then dashed outside to clang the town’s alarm bell. Jessie’s quick-thinking actions ensured that everyone in the hotel escaped safely, and she was afterward hailed for her bravery by the local fire department.

  But lifesaving heroics and her fondness for public speaking aside, by the tour’s end Jessie was utterly depleted, the frenetic pace having wreaked havoc on her health. Yet there was little time for rest, as her financial needs overwhelmed any personal concerns. Hardly had she settled back in New York City to recuperate before the next potential moneymaking enterprise presented itself.

  While she had been crisscrossing the country, Lancaster and Maddux had dreamed up a promotional scheme in which Jessie would fly the actress Mary Adams and her dog from California to New York. Now, despite Jessie’s fatigue, Maddux flew her out to Los Angeles to discuss the plan. But the p
romotion was not to be: Jessie had barely touched down in the city when her appendix ruptured. Coupled with her already-weakened state, the resulting difficult operation forced her into a long period of convalescence, during which she stayed in Adams’s Spanish-style villa.

  The hard luck didn’t end there. Not long after Jessie’s operation, Maddux was forced to fire Lancaster, whose administrative incompetence had finally proved too great a liability given Transcontinental Air Transport’s declining fortunes, another effect of the continuing Depression. As a sign that there were no hard feelings, Maddux gave Lancaster a large black Lincoln car as a parting gift.

  Lancaster and Jessie were now broke, with no immediate financial prospects, just two of thousands of unemployed pilots trapped in the throes of the Depression. They agonized over whether they would ever be able to fly again. “I spent days discussing impossible plans with Bill,” Jessie later recalled, “until my head ached with the futility of it all.”

  Just when matters seemed at their bleakest, a possible solution arrived in the form of aviator William Gentry Shelton, Jr., whom Lancaster knew from his Ford Reliability Tour days. The ruddy-cheeked, pudgy Shelton, a thirty-five-year-old St. Louis native with an aquiline nose and thick wavy hair, was known in aviation circles for his attempted endurance flight above Lambert–St. Louis Field, during which he and a copilot had remained aloft for five days. Shelton hailed from a privileged background, and he was driven by an enthusiasm for adventure, which had often led him into scrapes—breaking a leg during a parachute jumping contest, being slapped with a thousand-dollar fine for buzzing too low over Garden City, New York—from which his wealthy father, the owner of a company that produced beauty shop electrical equipment, had rescued him. But while Shelton may have been irresponsible, with the broken marriage to show for it, his charm, humor, and intelligence were as genuine as they were refreshing. It was only an added bonus that Shelton, courtesy of his father, owned a Lockheed monoplane.