Wow, up till her last flight, she still needed a male navigator.
Pretty much anyone flying the pacific then badly needed a navigator. It was basically still a stunt to fly out there then.
Noonan was one of the few people on planet earth who understood navigating trans-pacific by air. He pioneered it.
As to the other glittering jewel of ignorance you gave us to minimize this flight, consider something else. No solo flight crossed the Pacific until after WWII. In 46 some guys did it in a couple of planes across the Aleutians. In 51 a guy did the Japan to Wake to Hawaii route. And the basic route Amelia was on wasn’t done solo until 59.
The Pacific is not the Atlantic. Lindberg could not have done Amelias flight solo. The Pacific is very big.
Everybody needed a navigator then. Unless you were flying in circles. Remember commercial planes had navigators until the 70s.
:)
I get the joke, but she did have a male navigator - but it was a different one than she had flown with for years. He wasn’t as experienced. Lots of compounding problems with her last flight - one being the set times to use the radio, and the other to use the telegraph. But the radio(?) on the island wasn’t working, and the ships in the harbor were on different time zones, all still using the time zone of whatever port was home for them! And the time zones weren’t even on the hour. One ship might have 1145 on the clock, and the next one over had 1200. And the island was at 0930.
After the investigation of her disapperance, a time standard was created (Greenwich Mean Time) for international use.