ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 18, 1997 TAG: 9703180076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: OAKLAND, CALIF.
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
Linda Finch's focus is not the mystery, but the lesson she says Earhart taught: ``You do not have to live a small life.''
It was a stunt Monday, but then, it was a stunt the first time, a romantic and sad and mysterious adventure that saw Amelia Earhart attempt to fly around the world along the equator, then vanish without a trace.
Sixty years ago on St. Patrick's Day, the pioneering aviatrix left Oakland Airport in her bid to be the first pilot to circumnavigate the globe around its widest girth. Somewhere near Howland Island, a tiny coral atoll in the western Pacific, Earhart and her navigator disappeared.
Monday, a Texas pilot and businesswoman named Linda Finch stepped onto the silver wing of a restored Lockheed Electra 10-E, the model Earhart flew. Dressed in sneakers and a khaki flight suit, Finch beamed and waved to a crowd of schoolchildren, wiggled into the cramped cockpit and turned the antique 550-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines over. She taxied down the tarmac, turned the twin-engine, dual-tailed monoplane around and lifted free from the earth.
And in a bit of showmanship that would have pleased Earhart, a wily promoter herself, Finch brought the Electra back and buzzed the cheering crowds. Three times.
Finch is not the first to retrace Earhart's journey; an Iowa teacher named Ann Pellegrano circled the Earth at the equator in 1967. Finch is the first to attempt it in the same exceedingly rare Lockheed Electra, one of two still in existence. It is powered by the same engines, but loaded with modern avionics, flight control computers, communications and Global Positioning System navigational gear.
Why is Finch doing it? The 46-year-old, thrice-divorced aviation buff and nursing-home mogul, who reads her Bible every morning, is not the kind of woman given to public self-reflection, particularly on the dawn of her flight.
When Earhart was repeatedly asked the same question, she often answered: ``For the fun of it.'' But Earhart also used her international fame and record-breaking aviation to teach what Finch calls the forgotten message: ``You do not have to live a small life.''
With more than $4 million in sponsorship from Pratt & Whitney, Finch hopes to reteach the lesson, especially to those in the nation's poor communities. Hundreds of schoolchildren from Oakland and San Francisco came out to the air field Monday. There are lesson books and a web page (http:worldflight.org/youcansoar).
``Amelia was more stubborn than me, and her flight was much more dangerous,'' Finch said Monday as she wandered the hangar during the plane's final preparations. ``But I can be pretty stubborn, too.''
Jennifer Riggs, Pratt & Whitney's representative for World Flight 1997, as the adventure is dubbed, said of Finch: ``She's very determined, and you could even call it pushy. If you don't get it right, she throws it back at you. But she is also a very caring, spiritual person. And intense. Very intense.''
Finch does not want to get into the mystery of Earhart's vanishing, which launched one of the largest sea search and rescue missions of the modern era, dominated front pages and newsreels for months in 1937 and spawned a dozen books.
``I think the mystery detracts,'' Finch said. ``Most people do not recall all the marvelous things she did in life, all their records she broke, all the challenges she faced.''
Earhart, like Finch, had a rocky life. Earhart's father was an alcoholic. She, like Finch, scrimped and saved to pay for her flight lessons and airplanes. Finch, a single mother divorced from a Vietnam serviceman, worked as a bookkeeper and used grocery money to get her pilot's license.
``I didn't know a lot about Amelia before I started,'' Finch said. ``And as a woman and a pilot, I should have known more.''
Finch eventually became a successful businesswoman, owning nursing and retirement homes in Texas. She was also a nut about aviation history, buying and restoring vintage warplanes and barnstorming at aerial shows and air races.
She found an ancient Lockheed Electra in Wisconsin. Birds were living inside. It had no wings or engines or instruments. ``We crated it back to Texas in boxes.''
Monday morning, the Electra sat on the tarmac, riveted aluminum glistening, announcing itself a thing from another era.
But times have changed. When Earhart attempted her flight, her navigator was a hard-drinking Irishman named Fred Noonan who went to sea in the last days of the square-rigged sailing ships and during World War I had three ships torpedoed out from under him. Flying with Earhart, he navigated by the stars, with a sextant. He and his pilot communicated by written messages on a bamboo fishing pole that ran down the center of the plane.
``One of the big differences in the two flights is this: We won't ever be lost,'' Finch said. She will have not only the most modern avionics but weather faxes, satellites and constant communications. When Earhart flew across the oceans, it was more Columbus than John Glenn.
Still, the re-creation has its dangers. The Electra is a slow but very powerful plane. Because of its age, Finch must keep below 12,500 feet, beyond which she would need the oxygen and pressurized cabin the plane does not have. She and her four rotating navigators will have to fly around and through tropical thunderstorms and just barely over the mountains of Burma. She plans to touch down in 34 cities in 20 countries in a flight scheduled to take almost three months.
Finch plans to drop a wreath, presented to her Monday by the mayor of Atchison, Kan., where Earhart was born, somewhere near Howland Island.
LENGTH: Long : 103 linesby CNB