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Copyright ©2009 by Paul Niquette. All rights reserved. The title is appropriated from a favorite song in the Beatles' album Abbey Road, released in 1969, fully 32 years after the incident in this puzzle, which occurred five years before songwriter George Harrison was born. |
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 Her
round-the-world flying adventure ended tragically on
July 2, 1937. That morning at 10:00 AM (0000 GCT), Amelia
Earhart took off in her customized Lockheed
Electra on the longest leg, an over-water flight along
the Equator from Lae, New
Guinea to Howland
Island for a landing on an unlighted runway. The
route is depicted below. Navigator for the 18-hour
flight, Fred
Noonan, intended to use dead
reckoning in the daylight and celestial
navigation at night. Was he able to do both?
Sophisticated solvers have everything
they need to answer the question -- everything except
the hours of sunlight along the route during the
flight. The Sunrise
and
Sunset Calculator will instantly do that job for
any place on earth and for any date, past or
future. So, then...
Nota bene, charts of the last Earhart/Noonan flight emphasize the advanced sun line-of-position (LOP) 157o/337o destination as if it were a fixed geographical. It is not. The LOP of the sun is always racing westward along the equator at more than 1,000 mph. Thus the 157/337 LOP has no bearing on the Here Comes the Sun puzzle but will play a dramatic rôle in the solution to Which way, Amelia? |
