Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved

• The final answer on Amelia Earhart: Amelia Earhart puts to rest the speculation and rumors surrounding Earhart’s disappearance. The Longs prove that she was pushing the limits of technology and simply pushed too far. With the primitive conditions Earhart was flying under—no radar, unreliable communication—she missed Howland Island, her next stop..

• An expert author and pilot: Elgen Long has more than forty years of combat and civilian flying experience. During World War II, he flew planes virtually identical to the Electra that Earhart flew, making him one of the few living pilots who understands the conditions she flew under. Elgen and his wife, Marie, spent more than twenty-five years, interviewed more than 100 witnesses, and traveled more than 100,000 miles researching this book. .

• A new movie: Amelia , starring Hilary Swank, will be released by Fox Searchlight in fall 2009. The screenplay is based on three books, including Elgen and Marie Long’s Amelia Earhart , and Elgen Long served as a technical advisor to the film..

When Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, she was flying the longest leg of her around-the-world flight and was only days away from completing her journey. Her plane was never found, and for more than sixty years rumors have persisted about what happened to her.

Now, with the recent discovery of long-lost radio messages from Earhart's final flight, we can say with confidence that she ran out of gas just short of her destination of Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. From the beginning of her flight, a series of tragic circumstances all but doomed her and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

Authors Elgen M. and Marie K. Long spent more than twenty-five years researching the mystery surrounding Earhart's final flight before finally determining what happened. They traveled over one hundred thousand miles to interview more than one hundred people who knew some part of the Earhart story. They draw on authoritative sources to take us inside the cockpit of the Electra plane that Earhart flew and recreate the final flight itself. Because Elgen Long began his own flying career not long after Earhart's disappearance, he can describe the equipment and conditions of the time with a vivid first-hand accuracy. As a result, this book brings to life the primitive conditions under which Earhart flew, in an era before radar, with unreliable communications, grass landing strips, and poorly mapped islands.

Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved does more than just answer the question, What happened to Amelia Earhart? It reminds us how daring early aviators such as Earhart were as they risked their lives to push the technology of the day to its limits — and beyond.

Publishers Weekly

The mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart--who disappeared in the Pacific along with her navigator while attempting to fly around the world in June 1937--has long haunted the popular imagination. Myth and investigative reporting have variously claimed that she became a housewife in suburban New Jersey or a spy for the Defense Department who was captured by the Japanese. In this new investigation, which draws upon 25 years of research and recently rediscovered logs of Earhart's last radio transmissions, the Longs claim to have solved the mystery of her disappearance. The information that they present is convincing but less than startling--essentially, Earhart and her navigator, after hitting a lot of bad weather, ran out of gas. In this respect, the book will appeal only to die-hard Earhart fans. The "mystery" aside, the Longs' detailed look at Earhart's career and the history of early aviation affords a host of other pleasures, chief among them a nearly moment-by-moment description of the fatal flight itself. Communicating their love of flying and the sheer sense of adventure early flyers experienced, the Longs create a tense and at times hair-raising narrative out of the simple routines and extraordinary perils of piloting the primitive aircraft of the early 20th century. While their attention to detail may not grip casual readers who are uninterested in minute descriptions of the mechanics of early planes, the authors present a complete picture of Earhart's fate and offer a tribute to her bravery and risk taking. 4-city author tour; 20-city radio satellite tour. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Elgen M. Long is a retired Boeing 747 captain with more than 40,000 hours of worldwide airline flying spanning 50 years as a radioman and navigator, including over 100 U.S. Navy combat missions during World War II, and patrols over Howland Island, where Amelia Earhart disappeared. He is the holder of 15 world records and/or firsts, most notably as the first person to fly around the world solo, touching down on seven continents and flying over both the North and South Poles, in 1971.  Mr. Long lives in Reno, Nevada.

Marie K. Long, a former public relations consultant with the Western Aerospace Museum (now the Oakland Aviation Museum) in Oakland, CA., and wife of Elgen Long, passed away in 2003.