FRAGMENT OF HISTORY

Air Classics, Apr 2004 by Kaufman, Ben L

UNIQUE SOUVENIR OF A FAMOUS LOCKHEED VEGA

It was a beautiful sunshine-filled Saturday in 1974. I was rummaging through my favorite old Pasadena, California, antique store looking for bargains and unusual items to add to my memorabilia collection. I wasn't looking for anything in particular - but I'd know what I wanted if I saw it. I always preferred to look in the shadows and the hard-to-reach places for pieces of memorabilia that might have been just hard enough to find by others and escape purchase. That's when I spotted a little piece of history that caught my eye.

There, in the shadows of the bottom shelf in a poorly-lit display, I found one of my most cherished acquisitions. It wasn't very big. just a jagged-edged 2-in × 3-in piece of 1/8th-in spruce veneer painted a shiny cherry red on the outside surface with clear lacquer covering the reverse side where it had been inscribed, signed, and dated. But, this piece of wood was special and the newspaper clipping and letter that came with it told me the story. Now, let me, tell it to you...

It was a Thursday afternoon in late September. The year was 1930. The sky had cleared up from its earlier showers. A single-engine Lockheed Vega 5B out of Washington, DC, circled the Naval Air Station at Hampton Roads, Virginia, at 1000-ft. It was a little after 3 pm as the Vega lined up to land on the wet field. The aircraft quickly lost altitude for landing and onlookers estimated the plane's speed at 75-80-mph as the wheels touched down. The landing speed should have been closer to 55-mph.

The speed, combined with the field conditions, appeared too much for the 33-year-old pilot to handle. The beautiful cherry red Vega, with its pilot and passenger, slid uncontrollably as she over-applied the brakes, fighting for control. The tail was still too high and the field quickly turned into a rough cinder road. Those watching kept waiting for the tail skid to touch down. Only 400-ft away was a wall separating the field from the churning Little Bay. Suddenly, the tires dug into the loose cinder and the Vega abruptly flipped over - stopping just 300-ft from the cold and unforgiving Atlantic inlet.

One of the bystanders who rushed to help those in the plane was a Navy blue jacket by the name of Van Sternbearer. He helped pull out the pilot who was still strapped upside down in her seat - bleeding from a big gash on her forehead. Others assisted in extricating her male passenger, Carl Harper, who suffered a broken finger. Both were rushed to the Navy sickbay for treatment of their injuries.

Five days after the crash, in a brief letter to his mother, dated 30 September 1930, Van casually told her about his purchase of a big Federal console cabinet radio for $97 that he bought with his roommate, Coffey. It had been $418 before the store caught fire, he wrote. They had put $5 down and for only $3.75 apiece in payments each month, they could listen to their favorite radio shows. As he composed his letter, four of his friends were listening to the radio while gluing together model airplanes. He then wrote about Lura. He told his mother they had made up and he was probably going to send her the ring he had just gotten. The once-folded letter contained a newspaper clipping from the Virginian Pilot with its accompanying photo that told of the plane crash. Van drew a small arrow pointing to himself standing with a group of men near the seveivseat Vega to let his mother know it was him in the photo.

Buried in the middle of the letter, Van told his mother about the pilot he helped pull out of the plane on that wet September day in 1930, and he enclosed a jagged-edge souvenir from the top of the vertical stabilizer from the heavily-damaged plane.

"Oh, yeah," Van wrote, the pilot's name was Amelia Earhart.

History records that Earhart, who had bought the plane for $12,500 on 17 March 1930, contended that the crash was due to a faulty latch on her backrest which gave way on landing - causing her to be thrown backward into the cabin during the landing. Her version appears at conflict with Van's eyewitness account. This would not have been her first crash on takeoff or landing, nor her last.

Was her story a cover-up to preserve precious sponsorships? Interestingly, her speech that night in front of 200 guests at a dinner function held by the NorfolkPortsmouth Traffic Club in her honor, was that air travel in the future would be the safest form of transportation. She gave the speech wearing a large bandage that covered her entire forehead.

The 1650-lb Vega was sent to Detroit Aircraft Corp. for repairs. In general, the wings, landing gear, and tail surfaces were all in repairable condition but the fuselage had to be totally replaced. It took over one year to rebuild the Vega. It was originally manufactured on 4 December 1928 in Burbank and was one of 28 Vega 5Bs. It had a 450-hp P&W Wasp and a top speed of 175-mph. Earhart sold the Vega for $7500 in june 1933, after using the craft to set records for being the first woman to fly solo across the North Atlantic in May 1932, and the first woman to fly solo non-stop transcontinental in August 1932, along with other records. Since 1966, the Vega has resided in the National Air and Space Museum.