What happens if a flipped coin comes up tails instead of heads? What happens if an airplane lost over the Pacific Ocean zigs left instead of right? In this alternate history, one of the most famous lost pilots in history, Amelia Earhart, manages to find land and goes on to write a very different chapter in the history of human flight.

First published in By Any Other Fame
DAW Books, Jan. 1994

The Defiant Disaster

Kate Daniel

“Sixty-five miles altitude and you’re looking good, Defiant.”

“Rodger, Ground Base.” The static didn’t disguise the southern drawl. “This is one hot airplane.”

“Not much air left at that altitude, Defiant. Seventy miles.”

The director of NSEA stood near the back of the crowded control room that was Ground Base. Her fingernails dug holes in her palms. She had nothing to do at this point, except wish she were flying the rocket plane herself.

“Seventy-five miles.” The atmosphere had no clear boundary. Their goal for this mission was an even one hundred miles altitude. At that point, the question would be academic. They would be in space.

There was an unusually loud burst of static from the loudspeaker. The single word, “control”, cut through the noise, then the speaker settled to a steady hiss. Simultaneously, the radar man raised his voice. “We’ve lost the trace.”

“Engine temperature trace spiked, then zeroed out.”

“Fuel pressure’s gone crazy, there’s no reading.”

“Still no radar trace.”

“We’ve lost him.”

The director pushed her way outside and looked up, straining her eyes for something she knew she’d never be able to see. The harsh blue Mojave sky was empty. Inside, tightly controlled voices confirmed one after another that all trace of the Defiant had been lost. A loudspeaker on the outside of the small building echoed the hissing static that was all the radio was receiving now. She listened to the empty radio until someone inside the building shut it off. Her eyes searched the sky again, knowing someplace, miles above, a brief star had blossomed. But its light was lost in the brilliance of the desert sky.

oOo

“I would remind the witness that the United States Congress is not on trial here!” The Senator glared at the slim woman seated across from him.

“This is a Congressional inquiry, not a court; no one is on trial. Neither the Congress or the witness.” The committee chairman spoke sharply, and the Senator leaned back in his chair.

“Please answer the question, Miss Earhart, and without the lectures, if you don’t mind. I think we’ve had enough of those for one day. This isn’t the time to play politics.”

As though the junior senator from Wisconsin ever had anything else on his mind. Amelia Earhart gave McCarthy another of the level looks newsreels had made famous and said, “To repeat what I have said many times before, then, no, Senator, I do not consider the risks excessive. Nor...” For a moment, she hesitated, then continued. “Nor did Colonel Yeager. And he would still agree with that assessment, even if another had piloted the Defiant.”

Eyes turned to the black-clad figure of Glennis Yeager sitting near the head of the National Space Exploration Administration. The Senator cleared his throat; he had no desire for the papers to show him mocking America’s first space hero in front of his widow.

“Colonel Yeager was a brave American, of course,” he said. His tone was properly respectful, shifting to a sharper edge as he continued, “But that’s hardly the point, is it, Miss Earhart? You have yet to prove to the satisfaction of this committee” --which meant to his satisfaction-- “that the benefits are worth the risk to these brave young American men.” He flushed slightly. “And women.”

That sticks in his craw, she thought with grim satisfaction. A.E. had been head of NSEA since its formation during the last administration. The new agency had taken over many of the functions and much of the personnel of the older National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, but with the advent of Amelia Earhart as boss, the closed fraternity of male test pilots had been opened to a few women. There had been fights over that, the first major ones of her administration, and she’d won.

“Senator McCarthy, the dream of space is more than numbers on a chart...” The carefully scripted speech was delivered with the ease of a polished speaker. The words sounded impromptu, but they were anything but spontaneous, and the intended audience wasn’t here in the Senate Hearing Room. She lifted her chin slightly, looking steadily into the television camera and making sure her voice was clear enough to be understood over the air.

The hearing adjourned shortly after that, and she made her way through the cyclone of reporters thrusting microphones at her. “No...no comment...NSEA will be releasing a position statement shortly...” The journalistic wall parted abruptly and Glennis Yeager joined her, wrapped in a bubble of silence. The widow’s face was under rigid control, but it looked as though she’d make it out the door without breaking. The two women walked out of the Capitol building together. As they passed, microphones withdrew and voices and questions died away. Once they were outside, they parted with only a few words.

“Take me back to the agency, Janice,” Amelia directed her driver. This particular perk of bureaucratic Washington made sense. As much as she loved driving, traffic got worse in this city every year, and she had too much on her mind to navigate the streets safely.

She had opposed the war for as long as she could, right up until Pearl Harbor. But aviation had jumped forward during the war, its progress fueled by blood. German rockets and British jets convinced her that rocket planes soon would be able to fly faster and higher than she had dreamed of back at Kinner Field. Amelia had spent her life promoting commercial air travel; rocket planes were just another step. She had pushed the idea in Washington while working as a consultant for the government, and her words had gone higher than she’d realized. When Truman asked her to head the new agency after the war, she’d been surprised. But she was a natural, and it reinforced the civilian nature of the agency.

Truman was no pacifist, but she pointed out the damage done by German rockets falling on London and the incredible power of the atom bomb. Any American agency joining those awesome forces needed to be non-military, for the world’s peace of mind. Korea had brought demands that the Air Force be put in charge, but inter-service rivalry had left NSEA intact with Amelia still at the helm.

“You know what Chuck would have said.” That was all Glennis had said, and it echoed in Amelia’s mind. Chuck would have been madder than hell at those vultures. The program wasn’t dead yet.

But losing Chuck, having him blow up right on the edge of true space flight--it wasn’t just the blow to the agency. He was a flier, a good one. She had the fatalism of all pilots and had had her share of close calls, but this one hurt.

Once she got back to her office, she plunged into a whirlwind of papers. The number had doubled since Defiant had exploded on the threshold of space four days earlier. There were reports to sign, projections of new budgets, press releases, press releases, and more press releases. She delegated as much as she could but it was too much, always too much. Why had she let President Truman talk her into flying this desk in the first place? She took her time over one folder: Preliminary Analysis of Defiant Flight 17. Seventeen wasn’t supposed to be an unlucky number.

Figuring out what had happened was going to be rough; when a rocket plane explodes 78 miles up, not many pieces make it to the ground intact. From the instrument charts, it looked as though there’d been a sudden spike in the temperature of the main engine. Their best guess was that the lining had burned through, throwing the FH-1 out of control and flashing back to the main tanks in an explosion. The agency’s engineers were working overtime with the people from Bell, trying to pinpoint what could have caused it, but the sequence of events had taken less than a minute. At least Chuck hadn’t had more than a few seconds to realize something was wrong.

And it hadn’t been pilot error. He would have been glad of that. The equipment might have failed, but he hadn’t.

She had just laid the folder back on her desk when the door opened and Jack Ridley, head of Flight Test Operations, strode in. He dropped into the chair across from Amelia.

“Jack, do you know what happened yet?” she asked.

He ignored the question. “A.E., what are them sumbiches planning on doing?”

“Grounding us.”

He started swearing and she cut him off. “Jack, we all feel that way, but we haven’t got time for it now. Have you got anything I can throw at McCarthy tomorrow to convince him the ship isn’t a flying bomb?”

“Hell, no, A.E., it is one, you know that. A controlled one. This time it didn’t stay under control.” His face twisted.

Hers was impassive. “Then we’d better think of something to do, or there won’t be an American space program.”

oOo

“...your known opposition to the military.” McCarthy’s voice was taking on a familiar rhythm. Any moment now, he’d reach in his pocket and pull out a list with her name on it, A.E. thought. She shifted in her seat.

“I am a pacifist, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “That has nothing whatsoever to do with the safety of Far Horizons.” She glanced over at the chairman, but he said nothing. Up for re-election this fall, she recalled, and running scared of McCarthy like everyone else in Washington.

“Safety. That...that bomb you call a rocket plane has cost the life of a fine young American.” Senator McCarthy leaned forward, his eyebrows lowering dramatically. “We expect our men in uniform to take risks. But he wasn’t in uniform, was he, Miss Earhart? He had to leave the Air Force to fly for NSEA.”

“NSEA was established by Congress as a civilian agency,” she said. He knew that, of course; she was speaking for the cameras again. That was the heart of his opposition: a civilian agency headed by a pacifist had to be suspect. He’d fought against the bill establishing the agency. It had been a close vote, and McCarthy had lost it. He didn’t like losing. “I’d like to ask Mr. Jack Ridley, who is in charge of our Flight Test Operations, to give a brief summary of the reasons for this, and the history of the Far Horizons project.”

Jack cleared his throat as the cameras turned his way. His delivery wasn’t as polished as A.E.’s, but it gave her a change to watch the rest of the committee and judge how they were reacting. It didn’t look good. They were politicians, looking ahead no farther than the next election. Her thoughts drifted as Jack spoke, gaining confidence as he went.

They weren’t talking about shutting down NSEA. Not even the Far Horizons flight test program. But grounding the planes while they waited for perfect engineering would be the beginning of the end. Jack was pointing out the risks inherent in any new advance now, reviewing the old NACA X-1 program. It was a shrewd example; Colonel Yeager had broken the sound barrier in that plane, the direct ancestor of the FH-1, before joining NSEA. And Jack’s point was obvious: if you worry too much about crashing, you never take off. But the committee wasn’t buying it.

“...pending a complete investigation of the cause of this tragedy, the National Space Exploration Administration is hereby directed to suspend all testing, in particular high altitude flights, of the Far Horizons rocket plane.” The chairman banged his gavel. “This hearing is adjourned.”

oOo

The cruciform shadow of the place raced ahead over the cloud-tops. She banked slightly, positioning the sun directly behind the plane so the shadow was leading her towards the western horizon. The twin engine Aereo-Commander responded perfectly, unlike the committee. She shut off that line of thought, choking it before it could progress to the unending, repeated list of If onlys. If only McCarthy had lost to La Follette. If only Chuck had been in Defiant’s sister ship, American Eagle. If only maintenance had caught the weak spot. If only, if only, if only. None of it changed what was. Chuck Yeager was gone, and with him Far Horizons.

The planning meeting in her office had lasted almost as long as the hearings. Wake would be a more honest term; there was nothing left to plan. There would be a prolonged investigation. A few newspapers would call for vision; more would question the need for rocket planes. Lindbergh would testify, but McCarthy would sneer at him once more for his pre-war isolationism. Some in Congress would never forgive his sin of being right about German air-power, and the rest would applaud politely, look at McCarthy’s following, and say nothing.

She dropped lower, closer to the clouds. The shadow still led her toward the horizon. She loved this plane; it was a distance plane, with more speed and power than the Vega which had carried her over the Atlantic twenty-two years earlier. The changes in two decades...If Congress grounded Far Horizons, the next two might show far less improvement in aircraft. If they could push ahead, actual space planes would be possible.

The one thing that might save the program was a public outcry, but not that many people understood or cared about aviation. Most of the excitement of the early days was gone; people no longer gawked at the sight of a plane, any more than they did at the sight of an automobile. The difference was, most of them owned a car, and almost every person in the country had ridden in one. Even counting the military, less than a quarter of the population had ever been airborne. As for flying beyond the atmosphere, most people thought of that as something out of Buck Rodgers, not the next logical step in aviation.

It was a shame G.P. wasn’t around, Amelia thought. The divorce, two years after her almost-fatal crash off Howland Island during her round-the-world flight, had garnered almost as many headlines as her first Atlantic crossing, but it had been amicable enough. Sometimes she thought they would have separated sooner if it hadn’t been for the crash. Even after George’s remarriage, they’d remained friends. He would have helped, and no one could promote like George Palmer Putnam. But G.P. had died four years earlier.

Thoughts of G.P., of her early record-setting flights, of the impending ruin of Far Horizons, all faded to a background ache in her mind as she concentrated on flying, racing the Commander’s shadow as though this were the National Air Races instead of one lone woman flying to forget. The sound of wings hypnotized her.

The idea, born of memories and frustration and flying, hit hard. Alone in her cockpit, Amelia grinned at the horizon.

“Barnstorming.”

She stood the wings of the Commander on edge in a side slip and the plane quietly slid down the sky, cutting through the clouds and its own shadow.

oOo

“Barnstorming? A.E., have you gone loco?”

“I don’t think so, Jack,” she said. Her face was calm, with only a slight smile and no trace of excitement. Her eyes betrayed her; they sparkled, for the first time since the explosion. “What’s wrong with the idea?”

“What’s wrong with...Look, first of all, we’ve only got one rocket plane left. And that sumbich is too damned hot to play hop scotch round the country. And anyways, them bastids said we can’t fly her till they finish their damned ‘investigation’. And...”

Amelia waved the objections aside. “Barnstorming is just an easy thing to call it. I know we can’t land American Eagle in a corn field. But we can fly it around to the bigger airports. Or at least a few of them.” She pointed to the map she’d laid out on her desk, with half a dozen cities ringed in red. “We were ordered not to do any more testing. They didn’t say we couldn’t fly it at all. All we’ll do is cut it loose from the mother ship and have Jackie land at those airports. That’s not testing.”

“Even with television, that’s not going to reach many people, A.E.” Jackie Cochran raised an eyebrow, inviting more. With Yeager gone, she was the senior pilot. Jackie was Amelia’s closest friend; she knew there had to be more involved than a few landings.

“It will be a start. For the rest of it, we’re hitting the road. All of us, every person in this agency who can manage to say two words in a row. The lecture circuit.”

The landing of American Eagle two weeks later at Idlewild Airport drew crowds of New Yorkers, fascinated by the boom when the Eagle broke the sound barrier. Amelia was waiting on the ground.

The rolling echoes made her think of Chuck, who had made that first clap of artificial thunder just seven years before. They won’t ground us, she promised him mentally. We’re going to keep flying higher, faster, farther.

She used that theme in her first lecture that night. The hall was only three-quarters full, but the television cameras were there. With television, the newest town crier, Amelia would reach far more people than could crowd into a lecture hall.

“The oxcart is safer than the automobile,” she said. “But I saw no oxcarts drawn up in front of the hall tonight. Every advance exacts a price, and all aviators know this. We lost Colonel Yeager. He wasn’t the first, nor the last. I brushed by death more than once in the past. The Atlantic solo could have killed me, as it did so many pilots back then. Now two decades later, hundreds of passengers cross daily in safety. When a great adventure is offered to you, you don’t refuse it. And our country must not refuse this one.”

The next night, crowds packed the hall. Amelia Earhart was still America’s “First Lady of Flying”. During the day, people pushed and shoved in lines passing by the twin planes, the FH-1 American Eagle, its fuel exhausted in the brief flight, and the modified B-29 that served as the mother ship. After landing the Eagle, Jackie had taken off with her husband for Washington and more speeches. Her husband lent his clout to the effort, and as head of General Dynamics, Floyd Odlum had plenty. Politicians listened to his money; the crowds listened to her descriptions of flying a plane that could punch through the sky and reach space.

Jack Ridley kept saying he was no good at talking, but his reminiscences about Chuck and the X-1 were better than any stiff presentation of goals. Life did an issue on the future of aviation, interviewing Jack. The writer caught the enthusiasm of the NSEA people, and he portrayed the X-1 and the FH-1 as linked steps along the way, not a final goal. Lindbergh wrote articles, measured, rational, and filled with the poetry of flight. Each dead-stick landing of the rocket plane drew larger crowds, and more coverage from the newspapers and radio. Television cameras were everywhere. The shape of the American Eagle was imprinted on the national mind, along with the words “Far Horizons” and “space.” America had reached the Pacific; now politicians started to talk about Manifest Destiny reaching to the sky.

And letters began to land on Congressional desks.

oOo

“...Three...Two...One...Drop.”

“Separated from the mother ship. Lighting first chamber in twenty seconds.”

The second voice sounded calm over the loudspeaker. Amelia kept herself still with an effort. After all these years, she still had never gotten used to being the one on the ground. She wanted to be up there with Jackie. As a flyer, bad radio discipline had almost killed her off Howland Island. Now she was linked to the FH-1 only by the radio waves broadcast from Jackie’s mike and the instruments on the rocket plane.

“Ignition.” There was a cheer in the control room at Edwards as the instruments echoed the successful firing of the first rocket motor. They were flying again, the whole agency. Flying faster, and higher, and farther. As the rocket plane climbed, so did the tension in the control room. The Bell engineers had assured NSEA that the American Eagle was safe, but there were still a dozen ways it could kill.

“Rodger, Eagle, everything looks good from here.” The radio operator sounded calm, as though the Defiant had never flown. But his posture was rigid, betraying the tension he was keeping from his voice.

Once they’d captured the imaginations and hopes of the nation, the temporary freeze on flight test had been removed by Congress. It helped that the Army had at long last managed to discredit McCarthy. The Tail-Gunner had been shot down. But support from the public was what had saved Far Horizons.

“Chase plane Able on station. She looks good from here.” The Air Force had loaned them two of their hottest fighter jets this time, along with a couple of Korean War aces. They’d follow the rocket plane as high as they could, tracking from high altitude in case anything went wrong again. But if they lost this one, the program would be dead. NSEA had no more rocket planes.

The tension in the room showed in the lack of jokes and wise cracks. The strip-charts were monitored, each quiver in a line being reported almost before the pen could make the trace. The chase planes reached their maximum altitude and started to circle, still tracking visually. But Jackie was roaring away from them, and was soon lost even to their sight.

“Eagle, you’re halfway there.” There was a suspicion of a break in the radioman’s voice. “Fifty miles altitude.”

As she passed the seventy mile mark, then the seventy-five, everyone in the room fell silent, except for the steady voice of the radio operator. Jackie’s voice over the loudspeaker held the professional calm of the pilot.

“Seventy-five miles altitude....eighty miles altitude...”

There was another cheer, this one louder, but it quickly choked off. Jackie was now flying higher than any human before her, higher than Chuck had reached, but the flight wasn’t over yet. The minutes crept by, until the words came, “Approaching the one hundred mile mark...ninety-eight...ninety-nine...one hundred miles altitude. You’re in space, Eagle.” This time the cheering didn’t die down.

Amelia picked up the telephone. The connection had already been made. Strange, her hands were shaking. That had never happened before.

“Mr. President? At 10:37 Pacific time, Jacqueline Cochran achieved one hundred miles altitude in the Far Horizons rocket plane.” She took a deep breath to steady herself, then went on. This was just the beginning; they’d fly farther and faster yet. And higher. “The Eagle is flying.”

The End

Copyright © 1994 by Kate Daniel