AERONAUTICS: Broken Dawn

"All my life Christmas has been the same. The same friends, the same gifts that didn't mean anything. Telling people things you didn't mean.

"But this will be different."

Thus spoke Mrs. Frances Wilson Grayson, as she shut up her Long Island real estate office and climbed into the Dawn to fly for Newfoundland and thence across the sea. Of her "different" Christmas the world gleaned only one descriptive detail: Her Christmas message to the world was a faint whisper out of the air, caught by the ear of the radio station at Sable Island, off Nova Scotia: "Something gone wrong."

Authorities knew that the message came from a tiny emergency radio set aboard the Dawn. So many hours had she been missing that they knew she was down at sea. Rising, falling somewhere on the winter waves were Mrs. Grayson, Norwegian Pilot Oskar Omdal, Navigator Brice Goldsborough, Fred Keohler, Wright engine expert.

Only the briefest reports from Massachusetts lookouts had told of the plane's earliest progress. The Dawn's regular radio set had evidently expired shortly after starting. The landing field at Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, lay white with Christmas snow uncut by the Dawn's landing wheels.

Mrs. Grayson existed in all comfort contributed by her real estate activities. She sold a million dollars' worth of property a year. Her bid to bridge the seas was not for contracts in movie houses. Last fall she twice tried the trip, and failed. Said she:

"There is nothing behind the project but my ambition to be the first woman to fly over the ocean.

"Am I a little nobody, or am I a great dynamic force?

"Can it be that I am wrong? Wrong after all these months of hard preparations, or listening to the still, small voice?

"I will win.

"I must not quit too soon."