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Header: Amelia Earhart
You want to know when I really made up my mind about flying? As a career I mean?...
I went to see a stunt-flying demonstration at the county fair. I was about 20 years old. Planes were racing, flying circles and loops, and then suddenly one of them dove right for the crowd. Everybody scattered...everybody but me. I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen.
Of course, I knew the pilot would pull up at the last minute. But I was totally transfixed. After that, I couldn't stop thinking about airplanes.
I took my first flying lesson two years later. I was 23. By the time I made my first solo flight, I knew for sure I'd be an aviator. Not long after that solo flight, I flew higher than any woman had ever flown before, 14,000 feet. That was the first time I set a record, but it wasn't the last. Flying was expensive, so I worked all kinds of jobs-teacher, truck driver, photographer, secretary-whatever it took to keep flying...
Of course I didn't get to spend all my time in the air. When I was 25, my parents divorced and I had to sell the plane to help my mom. We moved to Massachusetts, and I went to work teaching English to immigrant children in Boston.
Whenever you're preparing to fly from one place to another, one of the first things you do is determine a course. Aviators call this the true course. Once you've determined your true course, the next thing you do is determine your heading, which is simply the direction in which you point your plane. The heading is measured in degrees...
Fred and I were flying from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island, a tiny scrap of land in the South Pacific. Our true course is represented by the straight line on the map. And before we took off we used a protractor to calculate a heading of 77 degrees...
If there had been absolutely no wind on that day, a heading of 77 degrees would have eventually gotten us to Howland Island just fine. But there was wind, and it blew our plane off course...
Whether it's on course or off course, your plane is always tracing a path on the land below it. This path is called your track. When you're on course, your track and your true course are exactly the same. But when you're off course, as we were, they're different. The angle between your track and your true course is your drift angle, and the more you veer off course the bigger that drift angle becomes.
Now there is a way to keep your drift angle from getting too big, and that is by changing your heading. If you change your heading correctly, you compensate for your drift and you regain your true course. Remember that the wind speed and direction will determine what your heading should be. You will need to add or subtract the drift angle from the true course. Subtract if the wind is from the north, and add if it's from the south. Make the right adjustments so Amelia doesn't go for a swim!
Unfortunately for us (or so this particular theory goes), we drifted so far off of our true course that we lost radio contact with our ground crew, and with our instruments alone we couldn't calculate a heading that would get us back on course. And that, I'm afraid, was that...
Well, we don't want Amelia to end up in the water this time, do we? We are going to play a game in which we can use what we've learned to help Amelia make it to the island safely. Remember, the direction and speed of the wind will determine what your heading should be.
Click here to go to the Drift Angle activity. Note: This game will open in a new window and only works in graphics mode. It is not accessible to screen-readers.