More than a flight of fancy
Rumson pilot restoring plane in hopes of
re-creating Amelia Earhart’s journey
JERRY WOLKOWITZ Grace McGuire checks the curvature of her antique twin-engine plane at the Old Bridge Airport hanger where she is restoring it.
What Amelia Earhart started, Grace McGuire plans to finish. McGuire of Rumson spends most of her days in a large hangar at the Old Bridge Airport working on her 1935 Lockheed Electra L-10E. It’s the same model plane that Earhart was flying when she went down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, near tiny Howland Island, on her attempted 1937 around-the-world flight.
When her plane is ready, McGuire plans to finish Earhart’s trip. If all goes as planned, she will be taking off sometime next spring, she said.
Before she gets too far ahead of herself, though, McGuire has a number of problems to solve. The two main difficulties are finding a backer and a qualified mechanic.
"There were a lot of interested backers years ago when I first conceived the project," McGuire said. "But they wanted full control. They wanted to throw modern equipment in the plane so that there would be no risk for me. I won’t do that again. I am hoping to find a company that will do it my way, the old-fashioned way."
Grace McGuire became a longtime friend and correspondent of Muriel Morrissey, Amelia Earhart’s sister. Here they are pictured at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii in 1985.
McGuire said she has had offers from overseas companies wanting to back the flight, but the catch is, they want the aircraft overseas. "I said no, she belongs right here in America."
The second big issue, finding a mechanic, has two important aspects. First, the mechanic must be familiar with the plane’s radial engines. The second important thing is the person has to be able to spend a few months looking after the plane along the 29,000 mile trip from Miami to South America to Africa to Singapore and Australia and Hawaii, to name just a few of the stops.
If anyone can pull this off, it is this strong-willed, focused and resilient woman. She has racked up thousands of flying hours, studied Earhart’s trip from all angles, and has lived and breathed this project for more than 16 years. It is safe to say that McGuire is an expert on Earhart’s trip and her plane, but the project has been stalled many times since she first conceived the idea several decades ago.
Her first challenge was finding an Electra 10E. It took 2 1/2 years to find the same plane that Earhart flew, and when she did, it was a wreck.
"I was told that all of the Lockheed Electra 10Es had been scrapped," she said. "I was about to give up when I received a call from Christie’s auction house that they had one, but it was too expensive for me. They called again and said there was a wreck at a museum in Orlando that was about to be cut up. It was the saddest-looking thing I’d ever seen."
McGuire said that she was very naive about what it would take to get the plane ready. "I thought I could hire a couple of mechanics and just fix it up. Then I found out that it was impossible to get parts. Everything has to be fabricated, even some of the tools."
The mechanics who worked on these planes in the 1930s and ’40s were old men by then, but their ages didn’t matter. It was their ability and their commitment that counted.
Her first mechanic was Ward Oakly. "He was one of Amelia’s mechanics," she said. "He taught me how to use the equipment and how to rivet. I didn’t know how old he was at the time. He told me he was in his 70s, but he was actually in his 80s.
"Ward called another mechanic, Eddie Gorski, who was Amelia’s mechanic on her 1932 Atlantic flight in her single-engine Vega, but Eddie also had experience working on the twin-engine Electras. "They told me that I had to know this aircraft inside and out because they were old."
According to McGuire, Ward and Gorski taught her to do just about everything else.
"They kept telling me that I had to be in charge or I wasn’t going to get there. I’m awfully glad because I would have lost the project," she said.
Eventually she found a sheet metal expert who also has been very helpful. "Red Tweit is an artist who fabricates aircraft aluminum. He’s 86 years old, and everything has to be shipped to him in Los Angeles. It’s too bad he lives so far away because I really wanted to learn how to do that."
McGuire calls herself a grease monkey. "They taught me to be a mechanic. I worked seven days a week. Amelia loved to work in the hangar. I can’t get enough of it either. There were lots of mistakes made in the beginning. Now I supervise everything. Amelia had too many people involved."
McGuire said she was enjoying herself until health problems surfaced and she was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease. "I probably picked it up in the ’60s, but it remained dormant until 1984. At first it was mild, but it got worse," she explained.
On top of that, a slight case of childhood polio also got worse and left her with weakness in her legs.
"I collapsed 15 years ago," she said.
Then in 1987, she had a stroke and for years struggled to regain her health. "It’s hard to believe that I’ve survived. It has been a long battle, but I managed to hold on to the plane. In fact," she said, "what helped me fight was my plane."
According to McGuire, a good friend of hers, who worked at the White House, saved her project. "She found hangar space. It’s a huge plane and not the kind of thing you can put in your garage," McGuire said.
McGuire has named her Electra Muriel after Amelia Earhart’s sister, Muriel Morrissey. Morrissey passed away a few years ago.
"I met Muriel in the late ’80s at the Wings Club in New York City, the oldest aviation club in the world. We became good friends. She wrote me at least three times a week. I’ve kept her letters and plan to eventually have them published."
Eventually, she moved the plane to the Lakehurst Naval Air Station where military aircraft mechanics volunteered to work on the plane in their spare time.
"I can’t tell you how grateful I am (to the mechanics there)," McGuire said. "They worked on Muriel after working all day. The conditions in the hangar were deplorable. It was steaming hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. They saved her."
Six years ago McGuire started to feel well enough to work on her plane again and then three years ago she felt well enough to focus on flying her plane around the world. Besides completing Earhart’s trip, the Muriel will be used to get publicity for Lyme disease.
Said McGuire: "Too many people have been misdiagnosed and mistreated. If it is caught early it can be forced into remission, but not cured. Doctors don’t know how to diagnose Lyme disease, so I say to them, ‘If you can’t diagnose it, call a Lyme patient.’ "
McGuire, who declined to tell her age, says she knew she was going to be a pilot when she was 14 years old growing up in Kirn, Scotland. "I was always talking about flying," she recalled.
She was a teen-ager in the late 60s when her family moved to Rumson. "I took my first flying lesson at the former Red Bank Airport on Hance Avenue just before it closed. I knew I was in love with flying."
She has a commercial pilot’s license and was a flight instructor at Marlboro Airport where, as a young woman, she got her private pilot’s license. "I was in love with vintage planes and wasn’t actually interested in becoming a commercial pilot."
She did become a captain in the Civil Air Patrol, flew air taxis between New Jersey and South Carolina and has flown seaplanes. She’s been a barnstormer, a stunt pilot and has even flown fighter planes.
Earhart’s plane went down 2,600 miles east of New Guinea. She was looking for Howland Island, 1 1/2 miles long and 1/2 mile wide.
"The U.S. Government built a runway there in late 1935… it was a place where American airplanes could refuel.
"After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese blew up the runway on Howland Island and bombed the radio shack," she explained.
After World War II, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was sent to Howland Island to clean up the mess made during the war.
In 1986 McGuire offered to help the Army Corps map the island. "I got to see the little island, a coral reef really, right in the middle of nowhere. The trip to it was neat. No one goes there. We sailed there from the Gilbert Islands. It took 3 1/2 days.
"We camped on the island for about a week. The waters around there are unbelievably shark infested and very rough. If the crash didn’t kill Amelia and Fred (Noonan, her navigator), the sharks would have."
McGuire has two navigators. "One is a backup. My navigator worked for Pan Am for years, as did Amelia’s," she said.
The project has attracted a lot of attention over the years, according to McGuire. "The publicity was scary. In 1984, people said I resembled Amelia, so I started getting calls from air shows to dress like her and appear. Time magazine was going to put me on the cover. I was made up to look like a ’20s pilot. They did do an article but not the cover."
She also was on Good Morning America that year and other talk shows. "Offers came from all over the world to back my flight," she noted.
She has had to wait until she was well to look for a backer again. "So now, I’m looking for someone to pay for the flight. It’s such a neat project. I’m so happy that I’ve never given up."
In the book, Amelia Earhart: Last Flight, a collection of essays, letters, poems and flight records written by Earhart, the famous aviator writes: "Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization. Whatever the final outcome of the trip itself, certainly there was extraordinary interest in the months of planning for it. … There were mechanical problems of the ship and its operation and far-flung arrangements for the journey."
For McGuire, it has been years of anticipation and disappointment. The far-flung arrangements for the journey have not yet been decided, but most of the painstaking reconstruction work has been done. The cockpit is ready, and the skin (riveted aluminum squares that form the fuselage) is being scraped clean of years of neglect, and where necessary, new skin riveted to the body.
It’s getting cold in the hangar now, but McGuire says she doesn’t care. "I love being here and supervising the work or getting in there and doing the work myself. She’s so wonderful," she said, looking up at the shiny, vintage plane reflecting the autumn sun.