Amelia Read Online Free Page A

later, “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly.” Then and there, she began imploring her father to arrange flying lessons for her.
    Edwin was understandably reluctant. Flying was extremely dangerous and instruction rudimentary. Of the forty pilots hired to begin a new aerial-mail service, thirty died. The planes themselves were primitive, and aerial maps or radio contact with the ground nonexistent. But Amelia was undaunted.
The Canary Sets a Record
    Amelia did, of course, win her father’s permission to learn to fly a plane. But she didn’t want Hawks to teach her. Sensing his condescension toward women, she sought out Anita (Neta) Snook , a pilot close to her own age, who was willing to teach other women to fly.
    Snook had a reputation for sidestepping conventions. Besides being a pilot who taught others to fly and took passengers aloft, she was also a businesswoman who ran a commercial airfield. She owned her own plane and was the only woman south of San Francisco working in an aviation-related business. Like Amelia, she also loved working on engines.
Thoroughly Modern Amelia
    Later in life, Snook remembered the day in December 1920 when Earhart strode into her life: “She was wearing a brown suit, plain but a good cut. Her hair was braided and neatly coiled around her head; there was a light scarf around her neck, and she carried gloves. She would have stood out in any crowd, but she reminded me of the well-groomed and cultured young ladies at the Frances Shimer Academy back in Mount Carroll, Illinois, my childhood home. The gentleman with her was slightly gray at the temples and wore a blue serge business suit. ‘I’m Amelia Earhart and this is my father. I see you are busy, but could I have a few words with you?’”
    Snook stepped over to her, and Amelia asked, “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” The demand for flying lessons was high and allowed Snook to name her price, normally a thousand dollars. But when Earhart explained that she couldn’t afford it, Snook agreed to let her learn first and pay later.
    Earhart needed to learn everything, as Snook could see. Simple acts like checking the fuel gauge were deadly serious. Amelia also discovered that her waist-length hair was inconvenient - too much to tuck up under her cap. To avoid horrifying her mother who did not approve of short hair, Earhart started to trim it a little at a time. When she stopped, her hair was “bobbed” - at the time, a signature look for modern, independent women.
    Women pilots had problems unknown to men, such as how to dress. Planes in those days had no doors; pilots threw their legs over the cockpits, then dropped into the seat. When Amelia showed up on January 3, 1921, for her first lesson, she was wearing her riding habit, an elegant solution that Snook approved.
    Earhart loved wearing pants. They showed off her long legs and hid her chubby ankles. “In pants,” wrote biographer Susan Butler, “she walked unselfconsciously with a graceful, loose-joined stride, and as a pilot, she had a legitimate reason to wear them. So she seized the chance to wear first the breeks, as breeches were called and boots and then as flying styles evolved and ‘piloting clothes changed, ordinary trousers, until pants - beautifully tailored - became her signature outfit.”
    For Earhart, learning how to make the plane fly was not enough; always the student, she wanted to know how the plane did it. She wanted to listen to the engine and know what it was telling her, notice how the plane climbed, what different temperatures did, what the engine “liked.”
    Earhart flew in Snook’s Curtiss JN4 , a Canadian plane dubbed a Canuck, that was based at Kinner Airport, a small, one-hangar field in what was then farmland south of Los Angeles. To get there, Earhart took a bus to the end of the line and walked another four miles.
    Earhart