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he year is 1937. The day is July 2nd. Lockheed Electra tail number NR 16020 fights its way through towering  cumulus in the Central Pacific. Over open water, the oceans are alive with weather pouring in from all directions. It is almost as if a spigot had been released containing tropical rain showers, squalls, and gigantic thunderheads all colliding in the same amount of space along a line tracking through the Pacific. The airspace the airplane is flying through is called the tropical convergence zone, and it is hot and humid the way it is hot and humid on the Texas Gulf Coast in the summer months with the temperature in the 100’s. Clothing sticks to your skin like glue. At 8,000 feet there is some relief from the elements, but the heat and the humidity is still there only waiting for the moment of descent when the weather gremlins will play their irritating tune once again. It’s always a hot summer day on the equator where the hemispheres divide. Explorers have discovered that at the exact point of the equator, water doesn’t go down a drain circulating clockwise or counter clockwise, it goes straight down. If you move only a few yards to the north or a few yards to the south of that imaginary line, the rotation will begin again.

          Earlier the previous day at 10:00 in the morning, 0000 Greenwich Control Time, 0000 Greenwich, England, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed L-10 barely missed a disaster from an overloaded takeoff at Lae, New Guinea. It was a hair raising one mile climb from the end of the runway. Both propellers of the engines kicked up ocean spray the entire distance. Slowly, very slowly, the airplane began to gain altitude as onlookers from the shore gasped a sigh of relief. At the controls, in the left seat, is Amelia Earhart.

          After flying all day and late into the night it is now 4:00 A.M. Howland time the next morning, the second day, and sixteen hours into the flight. Earhart is tired and on edge. The roar of the engines in her ears is deafening. The interior of the cabin and its walls contain no sound proofing, no means of relief from the pounding of the two 550 horsepower radial engines. Both Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, are partially deaf from the constant vibration and the roar of the Pratt and Whitneys. The two fliers talk to each other by written messages attached to a broomstick from the navigator’s station in the rear of the cabin.