French West Africa | This Day in Aviation

Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E NR16020 at Gao, French Sudan (Purdue) — Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E Special, NR16020, at Gao, French Sudan (Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections)

10 June 1937: Leg 12. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan flew their Lockheed Electra 10E Special, NR16020, from Dakar, French West Africa, to Gao, French Sudan, a distance of 1,016 nautical miles (1,169 miles/1,882 kilometers), in 7 hours, 55 minutes. They landed at 14:50 GMT. They informed local officials that they would remain over night and continue on their Around-the-World flight the following day.

“Weather reports at the Dakar air field were not altogether encouraging. There were barometric lows threatening tornadoes, or their local equivalent, in the Sudanese region through which our route lay. So, instead of going to Niamey as at first planned, on the advice of Colonel Tabera, I decided to shift the course slightly to the north, making our objective Gao on the upper reaches of the River Niger. Just before six o’clock we were in the air and seven hours and fifty minutes later came down at Gao in the French Sudan. . . Our course from the coast inland over the Senegal and Niger districts lay almost exactly due east. Loafing along at a trifle under 150 miles an hour, the 1,140 mile journey ended pleasantly in the early afternoon.”

—Amelia Earhart

Great Circle route from Dakar, Senegal, to Gao, Mali, 1,016 nautical miles (1,169 statute miles/1,882 kilometers) (Great Circle Mapper)

8 June 1937: Leg 11. After landing at Saint-Louis, French West Africa, the previous evening, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan reposition the Lockheed Electra 10E, NR16020, to Dakar, their intended destination. They lay over until 10 June for rest and maintenance on the airplane.

“On the morning of June 8 we flew the 163 miles from St. Louis. The chief reason I decided to lay over a day at Dakar instead of proceeding east was because my fuelmeter gave out two hours after we left Natal. The very efficient chief mechanic at Dakar discovered that a piece of the shaft was broken. While he worked on that – a difficult job to manage from a blueprint printed in English, which he did not understand, in an aeroplane he did not know – I had a forty-hour check of the engines, probably all they would need until we reached Karachi.”

—Amelia Earhart

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10 June 1937

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