LONDON, May 21, 1932 (UP) - Amelia Earhart Putnam today became the first of her sex to make a solo flight of the Atlantic when she put her red monoplane down in a pasture near Londonderry, Ireland, after an adventurous flight from Harbor Grace, N.F.
By telephone from Londonderry, a city on the northern tip of Ireland, and about 50 miles from the coast line, she said:
"I had to land in a pasture outside of Londonderry. I am not hurt, and I think the plane is all right."
She revealed the hazards of the long transatlantic venture which she had come through, five years to the day after Col. Charles A. Lindbergh completed his successful flight to Paris.
For about 10 hours she flew with the exhaust manifold of her engine burned out, she said. Added to her dangers were rain and a little fog.
As the red monoplane roared out of the storm over Ireland, she noticed that her gasoline gauge was broken - "probably having been shattered by the storm through which I had flown. There was beginning to be a gasoline leakage and I decided to land," she said.
From the moment Mrs. Putnam's plane cleared the waters off Newfoundland there was no report of the adventurous woman flier. She had told friends they would hear from her in 18 hours.
Through the night her plane rolled steadily onward, completely out of vision of the many steamers dotting the Great Circle route which she had planned to fly. Before leaving she had warned this might be true, as she planned to go to an altitude of 8,000 feet to make the flying safer.
Mrs. Putnam said she planned to call her husband, George Palmer Putnam in New York and ask him what to do next.
"I think I may come to London," she said, "but I have only my flying suit with me and not much money."
The sky was cloudy and a light southeast wind was blowing when she left Harbor Grace. The ship carried its capacity load of 420 gallons of fuel. It has a cruising speed of 140 miles an hour and a top speed of 180 mph.
Lindbergh required 33 1/2 hours for the entire flight from New York to Paris.
Mrs. Putnam was the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, when she flew from Newfoundland to Wales in the plane Friendship in 1928.
