Electra

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What was real and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of one thousand feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that. She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Island, where they were to make a refueling stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal — a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woman, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.

Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island — probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.

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