Weather reports received at the Dakar airfield were not favorable. The Sudanese region in the heart of Africa, over which Amelia had charted her course, was littered with barometric depressions and tornadoes. After being held up for several days by bad weather, Amelia changed her next destination from Fort Niamey to Gao, but maintained the general direction of her itinerary through the center of the continent toward Lake Chad, French Equatorial Africa.
They took off just before six o'clock in the morning. Seven hours and fifty minutes later the Electra landed at Gao in the French Sudan. They crossed the River Senegal and the scattered lakes and upper reaches of the Niger River. Gao was the terminus of the Trans-Saharan motor traffic from the north. From the city southward the Niger was navigable for over one thousand miles until it emptied into the Gulf of Guinea.
The first thing a person was apt to see as the plane rolled into any hangar from Caripto to Port Darwin would have been an orderly group of "Amelia Earhart" drums, their contents waiting to be consumed by the thirsty Electra. The empty metal barrels were left behind as souvenirs. The beginning and the end of Gao for Earhart and Noonan was the airport.
