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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...
NOTE: Charts of the last Earhart/Noonan flight emphasize the "advanced" 157o / 337o 'sun-line' at the destination. It has no bearing on the Here Comes the Sun puzzle but will play a dramatic role in the solution to Which way, Amelia? |
