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a few cuts and bruises. But she had never attempted a dead-engine landing in the dim half light of a sandstorm. Gripping the control stick tightly in one hand, Kitty pulled on a pair of goggles with the other, dropped the side window, and tilted her head out.
    Down she flew, unseeing and trying desperately to imagine what the ground was like. Though she was certain most of the desert was reasonably flat, she also knew there were hidden gullies and high sand dunes waiting to smash the falling Fairchild and its female pilot. It seemed to Kitty that she aged five years before the barren terrain finally flashed into view little more than 30 feet below her undercarriage.
    The ground was sandy but looked firm enough for her wheels to roll over it. But best of all, it looked invitingly smooth. She flattened her glide and touched down. The Fairchild’s big tires struck, bounced twice, three times, and then rolled effortlessly through the sand as the airspeed fell off. Kitty had sucked in her breath to give a cry of joy as the tailwheel settled down, when all of a sudden the ground fell away in front of her.
    The Fairchild sailed off the sharp edge of a bluff and dropped like a rock into a deep, narrow dry wash. The wheels crunched into sand and the undercarriage collapsed. The forward momentum threw the plane into the far wall of the wash in a splintering thud of collapsing spars and tearing fabric. The propeller shattered as the engine was shoved back, breaking one of Kitty’s ankles and twisting her knee. She was jerked forward. Her safety straps should have held her upright, but she had forgotten to tighten the buckles and her upper body was thrown forward. Her head slammed against the frame of the windshield and she was swept into darkness.
    The news of Kitty Mannock’s disappearance flashed around the world a few hours after she was reported overdue for her fuel stop at Niamey. A large-scale search and rescue operation was impossible. It was to be a meager effort. The region of the desert where Kitty went missing was mostly uninhabited and rarely seen by humans. There were no aircraft within a thousand miles. An army of men and equipment simply did not exist in the desert in 1931.
    A search was launched the following morning by a small mechanized unit of the French Foreign Legion stationed in what was then the French Sudan at the oasis of Takaldebey. Assuming she came down somewhere along the Trans-Sahara motor track, they worked north, while a few men and two autos from a French trading company at Tessalit worked south.
    The two search parties met on the motor track two days later without sighting wreckage or flares in the night. They fanned 20 miles on either side of the track and tried again. After ten days of finding no sign of the lost pilot, the commander of the Legion detachment was not optimistic. No man or woman could have lived that long without food and water in the sun-scorched desert, he reported. By now Kitty would have surely died of exposure.
    Memorial services were conducted for one of aviation’s most beloved fliers in every major city. Considered one of the three greatest women pilots along with Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, Kitty was mourned by a world that had thrilled to her exploits. A lovely woman with deep blue eyes and black flowing hair that fell to her waist when released, she was the daughter of wealthy sheep ranchers outside of Canberra, Australia. After graduating from an advanced girls school, she had taken flying lessons. Surprisingly, her mother and father supported her urge to fly and bought her a second-hand Avro Avian biplane with an open cockpit and 80-horsepower Cirrus engine.
    Six months later, against all pleas to stay home, she had island hopped across the Pacific to Hawaii and landed to the cheers of a huge crowd who had waited anxiously for her arrival. With sunburned face and oil-stained khaki shirt and shorts, Kitty wearily smiled and waved, stunned at the unexpected reception.