"Earhart planned to have human navigators on board with her, but she’d be the first female pilot to accomplish the feat." - What an odd statement. Could "male" have been replaced by "human"?
The strangest TIL for me this year is that Fred Noonan was indeed on board for the doomed flight, and he was just as lost/dead as Earhart was.
I've surely conflated Earhart with Lindbergh, who was known for his solo marathon flights, and somehow absorbed decades' worth of pop-culture "Amelia Earhart" legends that left Captain Noonan as a remarkably obscure footnote in history.
And even more interesting still were the accounts that a disastrous landing in Hawaii carried a crew of four, and her penultimate attempt had a crew of three, with an aborted takeoff that severely damaged her Electra, and the third man had refused/declined to continue as the odds were increasingly not in their favor.
