Dakar

On the tenth leg of the second attempt, Earhart and Noonan crossed the Atlantic (7 June). They landed in St. Louis rather than Dakar.

Earhart claimed that she turned north when Noonan had told her to turn south: "Crossing the Atlantic, heading for Dakar, Noonan had advised her to turn south, as she was north of her course. She nevertheless turned north, and landed 165 miles off course in St. Louis, Senegal."

"My navigator indicated that we should turn south. Had we done so, a half hour would have brought us to Dakar. But a 'left turn' seemed to me in order and after fifty miles of flying along the coast we found ourselves at St. Louis, Senegal. Once arrived at the airport it was wiser to sit down than retrace our track over a strange country with the sudden darkness of the tropics imminent. The elapsed time across, by the way, was thirteen hours and twelve minutes."

Ric Gillespie says that Noonan's letters and his annotated chart of the South Atlantic crossing reveal Earhart's famous turned-the-wrong-way explanation for her landing in St. Louis rather than Dakar to be a fabrication.

"The strange thing about the whole story of Earhart disregarding Noonan's advice and turning the wrong way at the African coast is that the marks and notations on the actual chart Noonan was using (now on file at Purdue) tell a rather different tale. Randy Jacobson was able to reconstruct the navigational situation which arose at the end of the flight and it appears that flight's termination at St. Louis rather than Dakar was the result of a rational decision based upon their slightly off-course location, the poor visiblity, and the impending darkness. Noonan certainly made no mention of any disagreement with Earhart in his letter to Gene Pallette. Why Earhart described the incident the way she did in her report to the Herald Tribune (later repeated and embellished in Last Flight) is a bit of a mystery. Amelia Earhart did not always tell the truth to the press when describing her adventures. This appears to be one of those times."

"The original maps and notes from the flight suggest that they hit the African coast a little south of course, Dakar was obscured in very bad haze, it was getting late in the day, and they made a wise decision to divert to St. Louis." Noonan wrote: "...to add to our woes, the African coast was enveloped in thick haze, rendering objects invisible at distances over a half mile, when we made the landfall. And our radio was out of order–-it would be, in such a jam. However, with our usual good luck, if not good guidance, we barged through okay."

"Earhart took responsibility and apparently invented a story that made the landing at St. Louis look like the result of an error on her part rather than a conscious decision to land at an unapproved airport."

http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/forum/Forum_Archives/200102.txt

How many times do we have to debunk this myth? Earhart's description of the events upon reaching the coast of Africa do not agree at all with Noonan's lines, calculations and notations on the actual chart used (now in the Purdue collection). Which do you want to believe? The tale AE cooked up for the papers or the story told by the chart?

When they were still about 600 miles out, Noonan had determined that they were well north of course and ordered a heading correction. The next time he obtained a position about three hours later he discovered that he had overdone it and they were now a bit south of course. He ordered another heading change to start angling back northward. An hour later, at 1800 GMT, as he approached the coast he fixed his position as being a little over 100 miles south and actually east of Dakar (which sits out on a peninsula). About a half hour later, at 18:36 GMT, he passed AE a note that read: "3:36 change to 36 degrees Estimate 79 miles to Dakar from 3:36 PM" (Apparently AE was using local time). AE jotted on the bottom of the note: "What put us north", apparently referring to the earlier southward correction.

They made landfall at the base of the peninsula several miles southeast of Dakar. Off to the left the city, harbor and airport were obscured by haze in the gathering dusk. It apparently seemed safer to continue up the coast to St. Louis.

None of this can be reconciled with Earhart's description of what happened in her story for the Herald Trib, repeated later in Last Flight: "When we first sighted the African coast, thick haze prevailed and for some time no position sight had been possible. My navigator indicated we should turn south. Had we done so, a half hour would have brought us to Dakar. But a 'left turn' seemed to me in order and after fifty miles of flying along the coast we found ourselves at St. Louis, Senegal. Once arrived over the airport it was wiser to sit down rather than retrace our track over a strange country with the sudden darkness of the tropics imminent."

Her description of the event is even contradicted by Noonan's note which was reproduced in Last Flight. Clearly he directed her to turn left to 36 degrees, not right as she contends. In his letter to Gene Pallette, written from Dakar two days later, Noonan said of the arrival: "To add to our woes the African coast was enveloped in thick haze, rendering objects invisible at distances over a half mile, when we made the landfall. And our radio was out of order - it would be in such a jam. However, with our usual good luck, if not good guidance, we barged through okay."

Any pilot knows that half mile visibility is no fun when you're trying to find an airport strictly by eyeball and flying into the sun in dense haze, as they would have been doing had they turned west for Dakar, means being virtually blind. It's hardly surprising that they opted to continue up the coast to St. Louis. But why would Earhart make up the story she did?

Related

• Timeline of the second round-the-world attempt