[AStonesThrow]

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.