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Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

The Wikipedia account of Morrow-Tait's “circumnavigation” is passing strange, particularly the way it was interrupted for 5 months but “resumed” with a completely different aircraft and navigator?

I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.

And concerns/mockery of “the flying housewife” alone in close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that child... bonkers!

And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they “reached Japan [having flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the Soviet Union]” — so what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948?

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It’s easier and safer to make that flight if you can stop somewhere in the Russian far far east. Most people these days take the southern route through Hawaii, but the problem is that Hawaii-California is about 2300 miles, and not that many planes of the day could do that.

The other option is through the Aeutians, but they famously have some of the worst weather in the world and there aren’t that many places to land.

Especially back then when weather reports were terrible and radionavigation wasn’t that accurate, it was extremely chancy to fly somewhere like that without a big fuel reserve, ideally enough to get back to your origin if the weather at the destination turned out to be unlandable. Stopping in the Russian far east gives you a shorter leg to the Aelutians.

> I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.

Wikipedia isn't concerned with that kind of thing.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration , where the article states "R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively", despite the facts that (1) it's not like the Latin word for right is obscure; (2) the claim was highlighted as false (in a different section of the article, where it still also appears) on the talk page in 2018.

But this is truly the correct usage, despite your original research; you (and the nobodies on Talk page) should have referred to the reliable secondary sources instead. Chemists are better at Latin than you gave them credit for.

https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/z1ms9-63w28

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recto_and_verso#Etymology

> what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948

As it says she flew from Japan to the Aleutian islands, it would have probably been safer to fly via the Kamchatka peninsular instead of direct.

That's kind of like the story of Annie Londonderry, who made a bizarre round-the-world bicycle trip.

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