Amelia Earhart and Lores Bonney

 

24 July 2014 was the 117th anniversary of the birth of Amelia Earhart. Amelia and Lores Bonney were almost exact contemporaries - Lores was born on 20 November 1897 - an interesting coincidence given they both took up long distance flying.

 

It had not gone unnoticed by Brisbane's Sunday Mail (9 April 1933) that ‘long fingers seem to be associated with aviation genius’ when it compared Lores' hands with those of Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart.

 

Lores' and Amelia's aerial path almost crossed.

The Australian aviatrix had arrived in Cairo during on her Australia—South Africa flight when Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left Miami, Florida on 1 June 1937. They had flown down to South America, hopping off from Natal in Brazil and arriving at Dakar in French Senegal on 9 June. Next stop was Gao, on the 10th. When Lores ‘got to Khartoum’ after an enjoyable break in Cairo, ‘they told me there that Amelia Earhart was about two days away from Khartoum. Well, it didn’t matter to me when I got to Cape Town and I waited’.

Amelia had expected to cross Africa in four or five days but, after touching down at Fort Lamy, the capital of Chad, she was delayed briefly while her Lockheed Electra’s shock absorbers were adjusted. She was expected in Khartoum on the 13th. Although Amelia, like Lores, had issued frequent despatches regarding her progress, there was ‘no word from her’. Lores waited but by the evening of 11 June, she was ‘uncertain if A. Earhart arriving whether go on or not’. She made up her mind the next morning. ‘So I felt, well, she might be months, she might have had a breakdown or something and so I went’ to Malakal on the 12th. Amelia arrived the next day.

It is doubtful if Lores would have been able to meet her as the American left 75 minutes later for Massawa, on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea. ‘She passed through, only to be lost.’ Amelia and Fred Noonan would disappear somewhere in the Pacific Ocean between Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island on 2 July 1937.