Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Amelia Flew Over A No Man's Land Of Eternal Want


On this date seventy-five years ago, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan flew from Fort Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, to El Fasher, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a distance of approximately 700 miles. According to the Atchison Daily Globe (June 12, 1937), “She got a late start this morning, due to the necessity of adjusting the shock absorbers on her plane. They were damaged when she landed at Fort Lamy.
In her logs and journals made during the flight Amelia makes no mention of the damage to the plane but, instead, marvels at the landscape.
"On this day's flying to Lamy and the next, we crossed stretches of country barren beyond words, a no-man's land of eternal want, where the natives cling tenaciously to an existence almost incomprehensible to westerners." -- Amelia Earhart
In the photograph we see the Lockheed Electra on the tarmac at El Fasher.


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