Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights

Sparks flew, a wing bent, and the landing gear snapped off as the silver Lockheed Electra 10-E plane smashed into the runway at Luke Field, outside Honolulu. The pilot’s only stroke of luck was that the aircraft, which contained nearly a thousand gallons of fuel, didn’t explode. The thirty-nine-year-old Amelia Earhart and her crew of two navigators, Fred Noonan and Harry Manning, crawled out of the wreckage, unsettled but otherwise unhurt. They had meant to depart on the second leg of a gruelling voyage: a round-the-world flight that had begun in Oakland, California, and would continue westward, with two dozen or so stops, before ending up back in Oakland. People close to Earhart knew that she wasn’t fully ready for a challenge of this magnitude, and so a work-around had been devised. An extra crew member with extensive flight experience, Paul Mantz, had joined the flight to Hawaii. On the runway in Oakland, he switched places with Earhart and assumed the throttles during takeoff. She ... Read full article.