At 3:12 p.m. on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 28, 1939, Clara Adams took off from an airport on Long Island on the first leg of her planned flight around the world. She would not be following the ill-fated itinerary of her friend Amelia Earhart, who had, two years earlier, attempted to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe by air. Earhart had traced a course east from Oakland, California, along the equator until she disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific. Adams’s flight path would take her on…
