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Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 and was just shy of her 40th birthday when she was lost. Fred Noonan, meanwhile, was 44. Earhart was first exposed to aviation in 1920 when she was given a ride by an air racer and became immediately entranced by flying. She soon began lessons from another female aviation pioneer named Neta Snook and purchased her own plane. Despite stalling and crashing her first aircraft during one takeoff attempt, Earhart became just the sixteenth woman in the world to be issued a pilots license by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) in May 1923.
Even before earning her license, Earhart was already striving to set the aviation records that would make her famous. In 1922, she reached a world record altitude for a woman pilot of 14,000 ft (4,265 m). Health troubles curtailed her flying during the next few years but she was a passenger on a famous transatlantic flight in 1927. Her involvement in the event was extensively promoted by the press, including a publisher named George Putnam whom she would later marry. The exposure also earned Amelia a number of lucrative endorsement deals that financed further flights. Earhart was soon competing in air races, setting new altitude records, and promoting greater freedoms for female pilots.
Earhart's fame continued to boom when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. She also completed several record solo flights in 1935 as the first person to fly from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, the first from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and the first from Mexico City to New York. She planned to top all of these successes with her biggest challenge yet of flying around the world in 1937.
Earhart retired the Lockheed L-5B Vega she had used on earlier flights in favor of a new Lockheed L-10E Electra capable of longer distances. Though her flight would not be the first to circle the Earth, hers would be the longest since she planned to follow a path near the equator. During the flight, she would also collect photos and information for publication in a book about her adventure. Given the distance and difficulty of the journey, Earhart needed a navigator to help chart her course. She eventually chose Fred Noonan who had extensive experience both in ship and aircraft navigation. Noonan had previously worked for the airline Pan Am where he charted the routes used by the company's flying boats across the Pacific.
The journey was originally intended to leave California and head west across the Pacific. Only one leg of the flight was completed from Oakland to Hawaii when Earhart made an emergency landing due to problems with the engine propellers. Following repairs, Earhart attempted to takeoff but the plane went into a ground loop either because of a tire blowout or pilot error. The Electra suffered extensive damage forcing Earhart to abandon the attempt and ship the plane back to the factory for major repairs.
While Earhart and her husband George Putnam collected additional money to fund a second attempt, the route was reversed to fly eastward and take advantage of winds expected along the way. Aboard their newly repaired Lockheed Electra, Earhart and Noonan departed Oakland on 20 May 1937 for Miami where the world flight was officially announced to the public. The pair departed Miami on 1 June covering some 22,000 miles (35,400 km) while making stops in South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia before arriving at Lae, New Guinea, on 29 June. The remaining 7,000 miles (11,300 km) of the flight would cross the Pacific with refueling stops on tiny Howland Island and Oahu before returning to Oakland.
Earhart and Noonan left Lae at midnight on 2 July headed east to uninhabited Howland Island where they were to meet with the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca for fuel and rest. Howland is only 6,500 ft (2,000 m) long by 1,600 ft (500 m) wide and difficult to spot from the air, so Earhart and the Itasca had prearranged to communicate by radio for guidance. Unfortunately, two-way communication was never successfully established. The Itasca could receive Earhart but she was apparently unable to hear the vessel. Either her radio gear had failed, and there is some indication that an antenna fell off her plane as it departed New Guinea, or she did not understand how to operate the plane's direction finding antenna, which was a very new technology.
Further compounding the problem was the fact that Earhart and the Itasca were using clocks that differed by a half hour throwing off the communication schedule that had been agreed upon. Earhart may not have been listening at all during some periods when the ship was transmitting and, during other instances, the two may have been transmitting at the same time preventing them from hearing each other. The Itasca crew also indicated that Earhart changed frequencies often making it difficult for her to receive the ship's replies.
Frustrated by the lack of success and with her radio transmissions too short and too weak to get a fix on Earhart's location, the ship requested she switch to more powerful Morse code better suited to direction finding. Unknown to the cutter, Earhart had removed her Morse radio and its antennas from the Electra in Miami since she disliked using the equipment and neither she nor Noonan could read Morse code. Itasca also attempted to create a plume of smoke for the aviators, but winds caused it to dissipate quickly and the flyers apparently never saw it.
As radio transmissions faded, the Itasca lost contact with Earhart and Noonan and it became clear the Electra was flying away from the vessel. The pair should have landed on Howland between 6:30 and 8:00 AM but their final transmission was received at 8:45, nearly 40 minutes after the plane should have run out of fuel. Earhart indicated, "We are on line of position 157/337, will repeat message... we are running north and south..."
The Itasca continued to transmit for another hour before concluding that Earhart and Noonan must have ditched at sea. Search procedures began, and it was estimated the plane had gone down 35 to 100 miles (55 to 160 km) northwest of Howland Island. President Franklin Roosevelt authorized a search effort costing over $4 million and involving ten ships, 66 aircraft, and over 3,000 Navy personnel. The search covered 262,280 square miles (679,300 sq km) but was unable to find any trace of Earhart, Noonan, or their plane. The effort was discontinued two weeks later on 18 July. George Putnam finally gave up hope in October and Amelia Earhart was officially declared dead on 5 January 1939. Fred Noonan had been declared dead on 20 June 1938.
Now seventy years since their disappearance, the fate of the famous flyers remains an unsolved mystery. A number of theories have emerged to explain what became of them, but these fall into three general categories. The first and most commonly accepted theory is that Earhart ditched the Electra at sea in the vicinity of Howland Island. If so, the aircraft would have most likely sunk to the bottom of the ocean within minutes. The aviators may have been able to escape, but it is believed they had left behind any rafts or other emergency gear to save weight.
A researcher named Elgen Long believes that weather systems in the region caused the pair to misjudge their course and they flew further north of Howland Island than they realized. Their charts also apparently indicated the island's position was off by about 5 nm (10 km) from its true position. Based on the Itasca's radio log that records the strength of Earhart's signals, it is believed the aviators were flying a ladder search pattern as they sought Howland Island. Fred Noonan would have used celestial navigation techniques and the angle of the Sun to locate an instrument navigation reference called the "157/337 line" that should have brought the aircraft directly over the island. Earhart's final communications indicate she was following this procedure, and Long believes she would have found the island had she not run out of fuel. Furthermore, he believes that once the engines failed, the plane probably nosedived into the ocean given the high drag produced by the windmilling propellers. The flyers most likely died on impact or drowned as they tried to flee the sinking hulk.
The only way to prove that Earhart crashed at sea is to locate the wreckage of the Electra on the ocean floor, approximately 17,000 ft (5,200 m) deep. Several attempts at such a search have already been made. The first came in 1999 when investors Dana Timmer and Guy Zajonc financed the deep sea search firm Williamson and Associates to conduct a sonar survey of 2,000 square miles (5,200 sq km) northwest of Howland Island. The search area was based on Elgen Long's research but was unsuccessful. Long himself worked with another deep sea company called Nauticos to conduct a separate search in 2002, also without success. Nauticos tried again in 2006 but no evidence of the Electra was found.
An opposing collection of theories states that Earhart and Noonan crash landed on or near another island in the south Pacific and may have survived as castaways for some length of time. One group promoting this theory is The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). TIGHAR believes that flying southeast along the 157/337 line would have brought Earhart near Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, about 350 nm (650 km) away in the Phoenix Islands. Nikumaroro would have been much easier to spot from the air than Howland given its size, large lagoon, and the wreckage of a freighter called the SS Norwich City that ran aground in 1929.
Evidence that Earhart survived includes hundreds of reports of radio transmissions received long after her plane must have ran out of fuel. While most of these reports have been discounted as hoaxes or misunderstandings, several may be legitimate. A radio station on the island of Nauru was among locations to hear the transmissions. The station dispatched a telegram to the US Secretary of State on 3 July stating it had heard Earhart's flight reports and continued to receive signals into the evening after she went down. The telegram described reception as "Fairly strong signals, speech not intelligible, no hum of plane in background, but voice similar to that emitted from plane in flight last night." The mysterious signals were detected on islands and ships throughout the Pacific, and perhaps even as far as the continental US, until at least 5 July. If they did indeed come from Earhart, they suggest the plane must have been on land since the radio could only function while the Electra's right engine was running to provide power.
Most of the reported transmissions were too weak and unintelligible to be deciphered, but a few tantalizing clues include comments like "... ship on reef... south of equator..." and "...don't hold... with us much longer... above water... shut off..." The references to a ship on a reef and being south of the equator both match Nikumaroro, but the identity of the sender could not be determined and the broadcasts were mysteriously separated by hours of silence. A possible explanation came from researchers Thomas Gannon and Thomas Willi who suspected the Electra might have landed on a reef covered by water at certain times of day making it possible to use the radio only during low tide. The two found that the broadcast times of all but one of the transmissions did indeed match low tide on Nikumaroro. Further evidence comes from Pan Am stations around the Pacific that triangulated the mysterious transmissions and suggested they emanated from the vicinity of the Phoenix Islands.
Nikumaroro was uninhabited at the time of Earhart and Noonan's disappearance but was part of the British Empire. In 1938, the British dispatched a party to survey the island, and additional settlers from the Gilbert Islands had established a thriving colony within a year. Under the oversight of British colonial officer Gerald Gallagher, settlers cleared the island to construct a village and plant coconut trees. Reports soon emerged of airplane debris found north of the shipwreck on the reef near "where the waves break." The wave action had smashed the wreckage and eventually scattered it across the reef and shoreline, pushed it into the lagoon, or pulled it over the reef's edge onto the deep ocean floor below. Pilots who overflew the island in 1937 and 1938 as well as New Zealand sailors who visited Nikumaroro during that period also describe signs of recent habitation even though no colonists had yet arrived.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from telegrams sent by Gerald Gallagher to his colonial superiors. Gallagher said that he and the settlers had found a partial human skeleton, a sextant box, a woman's shoe, an eyepiece, and a bottle near an apparent campsite under a tree on the southeast corner of the island. Curiously, this is the opposite end of the island from the shipwreck where the aircraft was supposedly found but was close to a food supply. Gallagher suspected the skeleton to be the remains of Amelia Earhart and had it transported to Fiji for study. Two medical examinations were conducted with the first concluding the skeleton belonged to an elderly Polynesian male and the second suggesting it was a short, stocky European male. The bones have since disappeared, but the detailed notes and measurements taken during the second examination survive. A 1998 review of these measurements by forensic anthropologists concluded the remains were more likely to belong to a female of northern European ancestry between 5'5" and 5'9" in height, consistent with Amelia Earhart, but the level of confidence was low given the lack of actual remains for analysis.
Undeterred, TIGHAR has conducted several expeditions to Nikumaroro since 1989. The island has been uninhabited since 1963 but the expeditions have uncovered several artifacts that may date to the 1930s. Items found by TIGHAR include a cigarette lighter (Fred Noonan was a smoker), the sole and heel and other parts of a shoe that may match a type Earhart was known to wear (though the manufacturer says the sole belongs to a size 10 shoe and Earhart wore a smaller size), parts of a man's shoe, and pieces that may be airplane debris. These parts include sections of aluminum skin, windshield Plexiglas, and some sort of metallic components that may come from the cabin of a civil aircraft. While TIGHAR has uncovered some suggestive clues that Earhart and Noonan reached Nikumaroro, none of the items found can be conclusively tied to their ill-fated flight. The group plans to make another visit to the island in summer 2007 hoping to locate human remains that can be DNA tested or debris with a serial number that can be matched to Earhart's Lockheed Electra.
Another group of researchers instead places the wreckage of the Electra much further west on an island not far from New Guinea. This theory is based on reports from Australian soldiers who stumbled across unidentified aircraft wreckage on the island of New Britain during the closing months of World War II. The island was administered by Australia at the time of the Earhart disappearance, but Japan invaded East New Britain in 1942 and held this part of the island for most of the war. It was not until 1945 that Australia launched an offensive to liberate the region. While on patrol, one group of soldiers discovered a radial engine that had nearly been swallowed up by jungle growth. Nearby, a second engine was found still attached to the wing and fuselage of an unpainted aircraft. The wreckage was in poor condition and so corroded that it was considered too old to be a World War II plane. The cockpit area was also crushed making it unlikely that anyone aboard could have survived the crash. The soldiers took an identification tag from the detached engine but otherwise left the wreck undisturbed as they continued their mission.
The engine tag and the report of its discovery were sent to higher authorities in hopes of identifying the wreckage. According to researchers, the information was passed along to the US Army Air Forces that responded the engine did not belong to any of its aircraft and may have been part of a civilian plane. A map prepared by the Australian unit that found the wreckage also contains notes referring to "600H/P S3H/1 C/N1055" that are believed to be details taken off the tag. These somewhat cryptic comments are suggestive of Earhart's Lockheed Electra that had the construction number C/N 1055 and was powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-1340-S3H1 Wasp engines rated at 600 horsepower. The tag has since been lost, but it is nevertheless an intriguing clue since no twin-engine plane using Wasp engines is known to have been lost in that part of the world except Amelia Earhart's.
Based on this evidence, the group Electra Search Project on New Britain believes the soldiers accidentally found the wreck of Amelia Earhart's plane and possibly her final resting place. The group further speculates that Earhart and Noonan, having failed to locate Howland Island, followed a contingency plan to reverse course and fly back towards New Guinea. This route would have brought them over several islands of the Gilbert and Solomon Islands. The aviators apparently passed these by and may have believed they had enough fuel to reach a runway further west. Landing the plane would have surely been preferable to reduce the risk of injury or aircraft damage, but the closest airfield was rather distant at Rabaul on New Britain.
If this theory holds true, the aviators obviously did not reach Rabaul but crashed some 50 miles (80 km) away on a hillside in the Marvello River Valley according to the Australian map. The Electra Search Project has led several expeditions into the jungles of East New Britain since 1993 trying to locate the mysterious wreck and determine its true identity. Success has been elusive and the search has been frustrated by thick jungle nearly impossible to penetrate. If able to raise sufficient funding, plans for the next attempt include using a helicopter equipped with a magnetometer to find large metallic objects in the dense growth.
Yet another set of theories about the fate of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan became popular during World War II and speculates the two were taken prisoner by Japan. The Japanese government has strongly denied any involvement in the Earhart disappearance, but several variations of the theory continue to persist. The stories begin with the suggestion that Earhart and Noonan landed on a Japanese island, were shot down by the Japanese, or were purposefully spying on the Japanese at the request of the Roosevelt administration. This last theory was popularized by the 1943 movie Flight for Freedom that starred Rosalind Russell as a female pilot making a flight around the world. The pilot was instructed to "disappear" over Japanese territory to give the US Navy an excuse to search the area and observe the pre-war build up at Japanese military installations.
No evidence has ever been found to substantiate the claim that Earhart was working for the US government, but her friend Jackie Cochran visited Japan after the war where she reportedly found files discussing Earhart. These files were said to mysteriously disappear but a variety of theories have suggested that Earhart was captured as a spy and may have been used for propaganda purposes. One of the more extreme notions is that Earhart became the infamous Tokyo Rose whose English radio broadcasts were used for psychological warfare against American military personnel. Another bizarre theory was promoted by a retired Air Force officer named Joseph Gervias who concluded that Jackie Cochran had discovered Earhart alive in Japan and smuggled her back to the US. Earhart was given a new identity for reasons of national security and she became a New Jersey housewife named Irene Bolam. Bolam vehemently denied the tale and Earhart's relatives found it to be "absurd," but Mrs. Bolam became somewhat of a media sensation after Joe Klaas and Gervias wrote a book in the 1970s. The publisher eventually pulled the book from stores after Bolam sued the authors.
Other evidence that Earhart and Noonan ended up as Japanese prisoners comes from residents of various islands administered by Japan and US servicemen who served in the Pacific during the war. Many researchers have maintained that if Earhart could not find Howland Island, a contingency plan was to fly northwest to the Marshall Islands held by Japan. Natives of the Marshalls and the island of Saipan in the Marianas much further west have told tales of two American aviators, a man and a woman, being held there around 1937 to 1939. While it is virtually impossible the Electra could have flown all the way to Saipan, it is conceivable that Earhart and Noonan landed on or near the Marshalls and were brought to Saipan.
One of the most popular of these theories claims the Electra crash-landed at the Mili Atoll where, after several days, its crew was picked up by a Japanese fishing boat. The flyers were then taken to another island, probably Jaluit, where Noonan received medical treatment for cuts received in the crash. The two were moved again to Kwajalein and ultimately imprisoned at Saipan. In 1960, a woman named Josephine Akiyama who had lived on Saipan came forward suggesting she had seen two Americans being held on the island in 1937. Four other native women also told stories of a thin foreign woman with short hair cut like that of a man who was on Saipan around the time. They said the woman had been a pilot who was captured spying after her plane crashed to the south. Additionally, some of the women remembered excitement about an aircraft with a broken wing being transported aboard a Japanese ship. The natives also said the foreigner was kept under guard and looked sickly. They went on to suggest that the woman was either killed or died of illness and was buried on the island.
These stories caught the interest of a CBS Radio correspondent named Fred Goerner who traveled to Saipan in the 1960s looking for evidence to solve the Earhart mystery. While some 50 residents claimed to remember two American aviators, no official documentation of their presence could be located. Goerner hired divers to search Saipan's harbor for aircraft wreckage, and although some was found, it was from a Japanese plane and not the Electra. Goerner also looked into rumors from a US serviceman who said he was shown graves of the two flyers while stationed on Saipan in 1945. Although bodies were uncovered, they did not match those of Earhart or Noonan. Another US soldier who served on the island even claimed that he watched as fellow Americans destroyed a Lockheed Electra stored in a Japanese hanger at Saipan's airfield. Perhaps Goerner's most extreme contention is that US servicemen recovered the pair's bodies which may still be in the possession of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He also maintained that some of his theories were confirmed by no less than Admiral Chester Nimitz who commanded the US Pacific Fleet during the war.
Despite the lack of success finding compelling evidence placing Earhart and Noonan on these islands, at least ten other expeditions to the Marshalls and Marianas have continued to seek clues to the fate of the famous flyers. One of the most recent was to the island of Tinian just south of Saipan. A US Marine named Saint John Naftel who was stationed on the island in 1945 says he was shown two graves where the Japanese had supposedly executed and buried Earhart and Noonan. Archaeologist Jennings Bunn tested the theory by organizing an excavation of the site, but no remains of any kind were found. Additional excavations have been conducted elsewhere on Saipan near locations where rumors suggest the aviators were held, but no trace of their remains have been found. Still other rumors place the pair on the island of Truk (now called Chuuk) or at a prisoner of war camp in the Philippines, China, or mainland Japan.
While some of these theories may appear more likely than others, the lack of any conclusive evidence makes it impossible to completely eliminate any of them. Variations of the three main types of theories all sound plausible. Ditching at sea seems the simplest and easiest possibility to accept, but what of the evidence of aircraft wreckage or the possible radio transmissions received days after the plane went down? A crash landing on Nikumaroro to the south, New Britain to the west, or the Marshall Islands to the north could be possible given the fuel capacity of the Electra, and there is plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting Earhart and Noonan might have survived after their disappearance. Unfortunately, the mystery will be impossible to solve until irrefutable human remains or aircraft parts are found that can be unquestionably linked to the aviators or their plane. Given the length of time that has passed since Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific, the question remains whether any such evidence still exists.
The mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart has been the subject of countless books, films, and even an episode
of Star Trek:
Voyager. A few of the more popular works promoting the three primary theories about her fate include
Amelia Earhart: The
Mystery Solved by Elgen and Marie Long supporting the ditching at sea theory,
Amelia Earhart's
Shoes: Is the Mystery Solved? by Thomas King describing the Nikumaroro theory, and
With Our Own Eyes:
Eyewitnesses to the Disappearance of Amelia Earhart by Mike Campbell and Thomas Devine promoting the
Japan connection. A final recommendation is Ric Gilespie's
Finding Amelia: The
True Story of the Earhart Disappearance that includes a DVD containing much of the evidence used by
several of the theories.
- answer by Molly Swanson
- answer by Jeff Scott, 25 March 2007
Update!
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) completed its 2007 expedition to the island of
Nikumaroro on 6 August. The research team reportedly found additional evidence suggestive of a castaway including
parts of a zipper and snap, pieces of mirror like that found in a woman's compact, and a broken pocket knife of
American manufacture. While the new findings are reportedly consistent with the 1930s, none of the items can yet
be conclusively connected to Amelia Earhart. Further information may become available as the expedition's evidence
is studied.
- answer by Jeff Scott, 24 September 2007
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