Joe Kimm Remembers Amelia Earhart
And the Northwest Transcontinental Survey Flight

As told to Robert L. (Bob) Johnson

            The two most famous flyers of the 1930s were, with little doubt, Charles A. Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. They were chronicled throughout the world as heroes, pioneers, and demi-gods. Their accomplishments are still viewed with awe today.

            Perhaps Earhart was even more of a celebrity during that critical decade of the last century. Lindbergh had done his thing but she was still doing hers. And she was breaking ground – aerial feats that no woman had yet achieved.

            In June 1928, Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane although she did not fly it. On May 21, 1932, five years to the day after Lindbergh’s epic takeoff, she flew her red Lockheed Vega solo across the Atlantic, the first woman to do so. (She landed on the James Gallagher farm near Londonderry, Ireland). Three months later, August 24-25, she set a women’s non-stop transcontinental speed record Los Angeles-to-Newark, 19 hours five minutes. Her “firsts” and her records kept piling up.

            What next? It was a record of sorts, too. She flew aboard a Northwest Airways Ford Tri-motor on our historic Northern Transcontinental Survey Flight that helped open up the vast and beckoning Pacific Northwest to commercial air transportation. It was a route never before flown by a commercial plane.

            The flight left Minneapolis-St. Paul in the dead of winter, January 28, 1933. West of Bismark, N.D., Northwest’s western terminus at that time, there was nothing. No beacons, no radio, no navigation aids of anykind. Nothing but vast expanses of cold and snow and farther on the forbidding Rocky Mountains and Washington State’s mighty Cascade Range.

            One of Northwest’s most capable pilots, Capt. Hugh Rueschenberg, commanded the flight. The co-pilot was a young man named Joe Kimm who had recently worked his way into the right seat from his former job as flight steward. That maestro of mechanics, Heine Wahlstrom, tended the plane’s needs.

             Notables in the plane’s comfortable passenger cabin included Chief Pilot Mal Freeburg (an air mail flyers Medal of Honor recipient), Northwest’s new traffic manager, a young man named Croil Hunter (Mrs. Hunter left the plane at Bismark) and – Amelia Earhart.

            Joe Kimm who, at 95, still leads an active life in the Seattle area (and regularly shoots better than his age at golf) had vivid memories of the flight. “We took six days, two extra days in Spokane because of weather,” Joe recalls. “All of the ‘experts’ said no one could establish a commercial airline route across this northern tier of states. The winter weather. Impossible. Hunter wouldn’t hear of it. That’s the big reason we did it in the middle of winter. We did it with the most rudimentary flight instruments. There was no precedence, no experience to draw on. It was seat-of-the-pants flying across the Dakota and Montana plains and through, over and around the western mountain ranges with their stomach-wrenching turbulence.”

            “I had a few words with Amelia,” continues Joe. “She’d poke her nose into the flight deck now and then. But I didn’t push myself on her, we didn’t talk flying. You have to remember I was just a 21-year-old kid lucky enough to have a flying job with a commercial airline during the depths of the great depression. I wasn’t very aggressive then, I was in awe of her. She was a very lovely person. Very pleasant, agreeable, quiet. She didn’t talk about herself and the various irritations and inconveniences of the flight didn’t seem to bother her. She was a class act.”

            Why was she on the flight? “Croil Hunter knew her and invited her along,” Joe recalls. “I think they met in the east someplace, maybe something to do with school.” (Hunter attended Yale, Amelia had a