I look to the kids, who lie on their tiny stomachs like me, brown arms paddling for Jesus, sweet little lungs screaming out delight. I do what they do, except my screaming is not delight. It’s just terror. This monster rises up behind me and gathers me up in its mighty jaws and spits me to shore in a jumble of board and bone and hair and salt water, and somewhere in the middle of it, I lose the desire to live. I just figure I’ll die, and what I know and all I’ve seen will die with me, and maybe that’s what God intended all along.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

July 1928: Hawaii

The island of Oahu lies about two thousand five hundred and sixty miles by air from Los Angeles, assuming you travel the shortest possible route over the curve of the globe. (That’s a hundred miles farther than New York, for reference, although a thousand miles shorter than Lindbergh’s historic flight to Paris.) The average cruising speed of Octavian Rofrano’s revolutionary new twin-engine Centauri was about a hundred and forty miles an hour, which represented a 30 percent improvement over the single-engine Lockheed Vega, considered the fastest plane aloft in the middle of 1928. Divide one by the other, subtract three hours to account for the rotation of the earth, and Sam and Irene could expect to arrive in Honolulu at six-thirty the next morning, or approximately eighteen and a half hours after taking off.

Eighteen and a half hours is a long time to spend in an airplane, especially without stops along the way to stretch your legs and smoke a cigarette. Moreover, the Centauri was flying over the Pacific Ocean, which presented the same featureless, mirage-inducing landscape as a desert. The monotony was not improved by the weather that day. Shreds of fog appeared about a half hour out of Burbank, which soon turned to a bank of cloud so high and thick, Sam pulled back the stick and sent the Centauri climbing all the way up to twelve thousand feet, which was as far as they could safely go without requiring additional oxygen. They now flew above the clouds, but without the ability to drop smoke bombs to measure the wind drift, Irene couldn’t rely on dead reckoning to determine their position. Instead, she tuned the radio to the frequency on which the navy broadcast its navigational beacons. As long as the pings came back in a steady rhythm—as long as Irene could still hear those pings—they were on course.

To pass the time, she wrote a note to Sam.

Radio beacon steady. Hold course.

He wrote back, Nice weather we’re having.