PILOT TRACING EARHART IN VINTAGE CRAFT : WOMAN TO FOLLOW ROUTE AROUND THE WORLD.

Byline: Carl Hartman Associated Press 

Sixty years after Amelia Earhart disappeared in the South Pacific on a round-the-world flight, a Texas woman will try to retrace her route in the same type of plane.

San Antonio businesswoman Linda Finch will leave March 17 from Oakland, as Earhart did, in a two-propeller Lockheed Electra, one of only two she could find. She will make 37 stops in 25 countries during the 10-week trip.

Several theories have been offered of what happened to Earhart and her navigator, Frederick J. Noonan, after they took off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island in 1937. Their Electra disappeared after they had completed 22,000 miles of the 29,000-mile trip.

``I don't think it matters much anymore what happened to her,'' Finch said Thursday in a news conference at the Air and Space Museum.

What Finch considers important is the message of inspiration that the first woman to fly the Atlantic brought to young people, especially young women.

A century after Earhart was born, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, which built the Wasp engines that powers the Electra, is putting that message into Finch's $1.5 million flight and a multimedia educational program being distributed to more than 38,000 middle schools.

July 24 is the 100th anniversary of Earhart's birth.

Finch, a divorced mother of three, said the program helps teach math, geography and other subjects as well as flying. ``They'll get the latitude and longitude of our positions on the Internet and have to figure out where we are,'' she said.

Finch found the plane she will be flying in 1994 in a hangar used for storage. Lockheed built only 15 of the Electra 10E aircraft that Earhart flew, and Finch found only one other in this country.

``The airplane had wings off, no engines, no propellers,'' she said. ``All of the tail was apart. When it was delivered, the wings were underneath it and the airplane was tilted on a trailer. . . . It was rusted. Everything had to be taken apart, every nut, bolt and rivet has been replaced.''

She said Pratt & Whitney, which now builds only jet engines, could not replace the radial engines it made 60 years ago. She found original parts and had them assembled at an overhaul shop.

The Electra flies only about 150 miles an hour and will go no higher than 14,000 feet. Finch expects it to be warm in the noisy, four-foot-square cabin, but she will have much better instruments than Earhart did. She will return in early summer, near the end of the school year.

Finch, employing various navigators, will fly east from California to Tucson, Ariz., New Orleans, Miami, then on to South America.

They will cross the Atlantic to Africa, avoiding Libya, under U.N. sanctions barring international overflights, and Sudan, where a southern civil war makes overflight dangerous. She will touch down in Karachi, Pakistan; Calcutta, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Darwin, Australia; and Lae, Earhart's last stop.

She will drop a wreath on Howland Island, a one-square-mile bit of U.S. territory in the central Pacific that Earhart never reached. It no longer has a usable airstrip, Finch said.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) Linda Finch's restored Lockheed Electra, the same model Amelia Earhart attempted her 'round-the-world flight in 60 years ago, will attempt to trace the famed aviator's course.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service

(2) Pilot Linda Finch stands at the Amelia Earhart display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where she announced her plan.

Associated Press