Diary a clue to Amelia Earhart mystery

[SoCalDem]

Diary a clue to Amelia Earhart mystery

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070401/ap_on_re_us/search_for_amelia;_ylt=Ao8Z3bO_5PTeT.NtOCq9DvlvzwcF

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer Sat Mar 31, 8:10 PM ET

It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet it keeps warming to life. Seventy years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes taken of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart...," are getting another look.


The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter reveals a new perspective. A team that has already found aircraft parts and pieces of a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll hopes to return there this year to search for more evidence, maybe even DNA. If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been found alive? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.

___

For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island. The date was July 2, 1937, and the pair were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest and most perilous leg of a much-publicized "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif.

At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart, already the most famous aviator of the decade, was to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to land, rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii. Earhart pushed the talk button on her radio mike and said, "200 miles out." Her voice — described as a "whispery drawl," evoking her Kansas roots — was heard by the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, rocking gently in calm seas off Howland. The U.S. government had built an airstrip on the treeless, 500-acre coral spit, and at the request of Earhart's husband and manager, publisher George Putnam, dispatched the cutter from Hawaii to help her find her way.


anip

[rasputin1952]

1. I had always thought that there was a problem w/the Lockheed

Electra, and they were forced to ditch; if there were any islands in the area, that would have been the logical choice if they did have to go into the sea.

The shoe, some other items and there was some talk of some locals seeing them alive. But it seems to me, that if they did see them alive, they would have done something to help.

One thing about a diary or flight log, if your going down, you don't have much time to write about it.

The whole thing is sad, not just becaue of the mystery, but because two people lost their lives through either mechanical or human error....:(

[SoCalDem]

3. The diary is by someone who was reporting on the flight

not from her or Noonan :)

[rasputin1952]

5. Oops...my bad, it was right at the begining of the OP and as I read

further, it just slipped my mind...

[nealmhughes]

2. "For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the

Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon . . ." now that's some florid Who, What, Where, When!

I think he left out "as albatrosses guided them silently eastward above the wine-dark sea, onward, ever onward sped the Electra!"!

[DearAbby]

4. very interesting read

after 70yrs, we may find out what happened...or another piece. She had probably ran out of fuel, she was well into her reserve. Possibly had to crash land it.

What interested me about the story, were the people who claimed to have heard her in 'skip' on their radios.