Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved

Marie K. Long · Elgen M. Long

Jan 2000 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

When Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, she was flying the longest leg of her around-the-world flight and was only days away from completing her journey. Her plane was never found, and for more than sixty years rumors have persisted about what happened to her.
Now, with the recent discovery of long-lost radio messages from Earhart's final flight, we can say with confidence that she ran out of gas just short of her destination of Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. From the beginning of her flight, a series of tragic circumstances all but doomed her and her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Authors Elgen M. and Marie K. Long spent more than twenty-five years researching the mystery surrounding Earhart's final flight before finally determining what happened. They traveled over one hundred thousand miles to interview more than one hundred people who knew some part of the Earhart story. They draw on authoritative sources to take us inside the cockpit of the Electra plane that Earhart flew and recreate the final flight itself. Because Elgen Long began his own flying career not long after Earhart's disappearance, he can describe the equipment and conditions of the time with a vivid first-hand accuracy. As a result, this book brings to life the primitive conditions under which Earhart flew, in an era before radar, with unreliable communications, grass landing strips, and poorly mapped islands.
Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved does more than just answer the question, What happened to Amelia Earhart? It reminds us how daring early aviators such as Earhart were as they risked their lives to push the technology of the day to its limits -- and beyond.

Ratings and reviews

When Amelia Earhart disappeared off the New Guinea coast in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world, she flew straight into our modern mythology. The truth of what happened to this most famous aviatrix has never been discovered, and the not-knowing fuels our continuing fascination. In her first novel, Jane Mendelsohn imagines what might have happened, crafting an hypnotic fictional memoir. The Amelia Earhart presented here is fiercely independent and unconventional, a heroine who is sympathetic without being the least bit sentimental. Earhart muses on her childhood, her marriage to G.P. Putnam, her love of flying, on herself, examining her own motives and desires with a somehow passionate dispassion, a satisfied calm belying a great deal of potential energy. Before the round-the-world flight attempt begins, Earhart frankly describes her relationship with her navigator, Fred Noonan, with whom she will shortly be marooned. In so doing, she reveals as much about herself: I had to take Noonan with me because we had run out of money and he was the cheapest navigator we could find. G.P. said he was the best, and that may have been true, but he was definitely the cheapest. He was cheap because he'd been fired from Pan Am for drinking and he couldn't find another job. I didn't want to take him. I didn't want to take anybody...We are not lovers. We have never been lovers. We could not have been further from being lovers unless we had never met. Neither one of us finds the other attractive...He is persnickety, easily frightened, and irresponsible. To him I embody the most unfeminine qualities...I have not one self-sacrificing, maternal bone in my unwomanly, muscular body. When the flight goes wrong and Earhart disappears from the historical record, it is with this man she must survive. On the island they name Heaven, Earhart embarks upon a different journey, toward self- acceptance and understanding: When I was very young, six or seven, I already wanted to die. I already had the dream. I wanted to escape, to go higher, to leave my body, and this made me seem ambitious, greedy for life. When I was young, people hated my greediness, but they enjoyed it too. A little girl filled with desire is a beautiful sight, ugly, but very beautiful...Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away...Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. What I know is that the life I've lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before...Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. Time, isolation, and the basic struggle to survive bring about an inevitable-seeming love between Earhart and Noonan. When they believe that their crashed Electra has been spotted by a plane, they prepare the Electra for one final flight. Not knowing whether the plane that appears to have spotted them is Japanese or American, they make the decision to hold on to the life that they, and fate, have made for themselves. As they make their way to the Electra, the revelation becomes clear: The navigator feels so alone at the thought of losing her. The pleasure he takes in her, in being with her, is the only pleasure he knows anymore...He realizes that without doing anything he has fallen in love, beyond love, out of love into life...In the jungle, in the dirty heat, he kisses her, and she kisses him, and they lie down together. They take each other on the floor of the jungle, and they know now that there is no difference between being rescued and being captured. What could have been just an academic exercise in "what-ifs" becomes, in Mendelsohn's capable hands, an arresting portrait of a life at last lived to the fullest

i like this book it helps a lot NHD national history day hope other people read this to.

About the author

Marie K. Long, a former public relations consultant with the Western Aerospace Museum (now the Oakland Aviation Museum) in Oakland, CA., and wife of Elgen Long, passed away in 2003.

Elgen M. Long is a retired Boeing 747 captain with more than 40,000 hours of worldwide airline flying spanning 50 years as a radioman and navigator, including over 100 U.S. Navy combat missions during World War II, and patrols over Howland Island, where Amelia Earhart disappeared. He is the holder of 15 world records and/or firsts, most notably as the first person to fly around the world solo, touching down on seven continents and flying over both the North and South Poles, in 1971. Mr. Long lives in Reno, Nevada.