 | 
 | Friday, October 5th, 2001
?Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.? Amelia Earhart
This quotation appears on the front page of our inch thick ?Westbound Flight Planning Book?
Now that the flight has been completed all of us who were involved are getting back into the daily routine of life, with many great memories in our minds and hearts. What a great experience it was! Frankly, the flight surpassed all of our expectations.
It is difficult to describe the emotions we felt on the trip and perhaps even harder to describe what we feel now that it is completed. To have the chance to honor Amelia Earhart?s life, to see America as she saw it from coast to coast and back from a thousand feet in the air, to meet thousands of wonderful people on the way ? it was a spectacular experience.
The ?Amelia Earhart Flight Across America: Rediscovering a Legend? was, for those of us involved in the project, a once in a lifetime experience that we will never forget. Going forward we will re-cap some of those experiences here on the site and share some of our thoughts with you. Hopefully it will help give you a little additional flavor of the trip.
We were very fortunate in so many ways. First and foremost, the trip came off without a hitch and this alone surprised many people, not the least of which were other airplane buffs that were quietly questioning our sanity, or at least our optimism. Remember, we were flying in a 1927 open cockpit bi-plane and we were on a down-to-the-minute schedule to be able to share the experience with as many people as we could. Thrown into the mix was the potential for weather delays. At about 90 miles an hour across 5,500 miles, there existed the chance to run into some weather and or wind related delays. To say that we were very fortunate might well be an understatement!
No one could have predicted the tragic events of September 11th. We were at the airport in Hobbs, New Mexico only five minutes from departure when the airspace system was shut down. We were grounded and saddened. The terrorists galvanized our will however, to complete the trip as soon as we were able. To do otherwise would have been to play into their hands. Thus, the one-week we had allotted for a California ?rest? was consumed in New Mexico. As soon as the skies were opened up again we continued our journey from Hobbs.
This resulted in our arriving in California the day before we had been originally scheduled to depart eastbound so we carried on. We needed to continue straight through from Hobbs to California and then back right back on our original schedule to New York.
When we originally developed the schedule we did not think it would be easy. There would be delays we thought but then, one does need something to shoot for. We did indeed have one weather ?delay?, but it so happened to be on the only day we actually planned to arrive a day before an event. As we approached Muskogee, Oklahoma we were forced by rain to land twenty miles early. We were scheduled to arrive at Air Show Oklahoma on Sunday and we landed at Tahlequah, Oklahoma on Saturday evening. After borrowing the airport car we returned to get the Avro the next morning and arrived at the Air Show precisely on time.
The front page or our "Westbound Flight Planning Book"
While we considered ourselves adequate planners and pilots, we can only conjecture at the spirit of good that was helping us along. After nearly three weeks of flying we arrived back in New York five minutes ahead of the schedule established six months earlier. Amelia herself must have been looking over our shoulder guiding us, as our guardian angel, assisting us with good winds, good weather and good luck!
We will be posting more thoughts and pictures of the trip here, so please keep checking in! Also, check our earlier posting for information on how to get your own copy of our flignt video.
[Return back to log archive list] | |
|
