The “Babe of the Sky” was the nickname given by many to the beloved Amelia Earhart.
Born July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia would go on to become one of the most famous
aviation pilots in America, if not the world.
She would become the first female to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, both as a passenger and
later solo pilot as only two of her many accomplishments and records set throughout her legendary life.
But with a legendary life, often comes a legendary fall…
In July of 1937, in the midst of her second attempt to become the first female pilot to
circumnavigate the globe, Amelia Earhart disappeared from the face of the Earth…
Rewind a few months to March 17, 1937.
Amelia Earhart made her first attempt to fly around the world, in this instance accompanied
by navigators Fred Noonan and Harry Manning, who also happened to be a highly skilled radio
operator.
The trip was short-lived and seemed plagued by troubles from the get-go.
The trio managed to fly from Oakland, California to Honolulu, Hawaii, but upon attempted takeoff
from the latter, bystanders claimed that either pilot error or a blown tire brought the journey
to an abrupt halt.
The entire kerfuffle was apparently so bad that when Earhart and Noonan wanted to try
again 2 months later, Manning declined to join, specifically citing the fact that too
much had gone wrong in the first attempt.
Nevertheless, Earhart was not so eager to give up.
On May 21, 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan boarded their twin-engine Lockheed 10-Electra
packed with 1,000 pounds of fuel and readied for takeoff…
Leaving Oakland, CA just as before, this time the duo was heading in the direction of Miami,
FL.
The first few weeks of the journey went quite smoothly as they sailed over and stopped to
refuel in South America, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and even Southeast Asia.
One of these stops would take Earhart and Noonan to Lae, New Guinea 42 days into the
record-setting trip.
With 22,000 miles already traversed and a mere 7,000 to go, they could nearly taste
victory by now as they refueled the Electra.
All was well on the morning of July 2 as Earhart and Noonan retook their seats in the plane
and began their departure.
The plan as the aircraft rejoined the clouds was to head another 8 hours, or 2,556 miles,
toward Howland Island where another refueling stop would be made.
The next leg of the trip was supposed to be fairly simple and safe.
Back in New Guinea, a man by the name of Harry Belfour was put in charge of radio operations
and maintaining hourly transmissions with Earhart and Noonan.
Shortly after takeoff, Harry began with 3 transmissions attempting to warn Earhart that
the current headwinds were much stronger than anyone had anticipated, and thus she should
keep in mind its effects on fuel consumption and flight speed.
Earhart failed to respond to these transmissions and it's unknown if she ever even got them,
but, finally, around 2:18 PM, transmissions from Amelia that had previously been blocked
came through to Belfour.
The first brought no sign of concern.
The pilot stated that she was going at a speed of 140 knots, flying at an altitude of 7,000
feet, and had otherwise no relevant updates.
An hour later, however, another transmission came through, where Earhart stated that she
was now at the uneconomical altitude of 10,000 feet.
It’s unclear exactly why this climb was made, and the transmission itself was likely
delayed as the previous one had been, but it is known that Earhart had remarked that
day on how thick the cloud coverage was.
It’s very possible that this 3,000-foot increase in altitude was simply an attempt
to avoid such dense cloud cover.
And by now two things are assumed: one, that Earhart and Noonan had realized the problem
of the stronger headwinds and thus accommodated.
And two, that the Electra was growing near Howland Island with around 100 gallons of
fuel left in its tank.
As the hours ticked by, transmissions from Earhart began to make their way through to
the Coast Guard’s Itasca, which was awaiting Electra’s arrival just off of Howland Island.
The crew believes the aircraft must have been getting increasingly closer as the transmissions
were becoming stronger over time and at one point, the radio operator was so convinced
that Earhart was near that he actually went outside to look for the plane.
This, though, is when everything began to fall apart…
One glaring issue that arose at this time was the fact that Amelia nor Noonan was able
to hear any communications from the Itasca.
They subsequently requested for the crew to use morse code, but this also failed, and
both aviators were struggling to pin down Howland Island’s exact location.
At one point the Itasca received a jarring transmission from Earhart:
“Itasca, we must be on you but cannot see you…gas is running low…been unable to
reach you by radio…we are flying at 1,000 feet.”
The smooth and exciting journey had now taken a startling turn, and Earhart and Noonan both
seemed starkly aware of the fact that they were running out of time to make a landing.
The Coast Guard was fumbling to find the Electra and its pilots were no better off.
At 8:43 AM, Amelia Earhart sent her final, frantic transmission…
“We are on the line 157, 337.
We will repeat message.
We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles.
Wait.”
The message was never repeated…
…
Earhart’s attempt to set a world record had now become a desperate search and rescue
mission.
The Itasca jumped into action, searching the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean around the
northwest of Howland. 5 days later they were joined by the U.S. battleship Colorado as
it searched the southeast.
The U.S.S.
Lexington soon made its way from San Diego to scour the waves as well, staying on the
search until July 18.
The U.S. Navy went as far as to fly over the nearby Gardner Island shortly after the disappearance,
where they spotted signs of recent inhabitants, but nothing to point to the Electra making
a crash landing in the area.
In fact, the plane, nor Noonan or Earhart were ever found…
So what happened?
How did Earhart’s final flight end?...
The most straightforward answer, and the one believed by many, is that the aircraft simply
ran out of fuel.
As depressing of an ending as this may be, it’s a highly plausible one.
Earhart told the Itasca in one of her final communications that gas was low.
So, in spite of debate from skeptics who say that the plane should have had 24 hours of
flight time left in the gas tank, not 20 as it seems to have lasted for, Earhart’s transmission
seems to prove otherwise.
Additionally, the Jet Propulsion Center, or JPS, at Cal Tech asserts that due to the existing
headwinds plus the altitude climb made by Amelia, the Electra would have run out of
gas at the time of its disappearance.
Thus, it remains easy to believe that the lost and discombobulated Earhart and Noonan
flew their plane until its fuel tank hit empty and plummeted into the Pacific Ocean, killing
them and sending the remains of the craft sinking into the 18,000 feet deep sea…
But here’s the problem with that theory: Earhart and Noonan knew they were low on fuel.
So why wouldn’t they find a place to land before it was too late?
Well, some believe that they did.
What the U.S. Navy crew didn’t know when they flew over Gardner Island, now called
Nikumaroro and positioned only 350 nautical miles south of Howland, also along the 157,
337, was that the island hadn’t been inhabited…for decades.
But they spotted signs of recent inhabitants…
The next theory is then that as Electra’s fuel tanks were draining, Earhart made the
decision to fly away from Howland Island and instead make an emergency landing on Gardner
Island.
Supporters of this theory claim that she and/or Noonan could have spotted the island at low
tide and thus made the decision.
The problem is that, to this day, we have no definitive evidence of a plane crash on
Nikumaroro.
But, that’s not the end of the theory.
There is a lagoon on Nikumaroro that is now believed to potentially have been Electra’s
crash-landing sight, and that was even acknowledged as a possibility at the time of the initial
search.
It’s true then that Earhart and Noonan could have smacked down into the waters of Gardner
Island, made their way on shore, and thus lived as castaways for an unknown period of
time.
This would explain why the Navy saw signs of human life on an uninhabited island, but
it doesn’t quite explain why they wouldn’t see the aircraft.
However, for the following week, thousands of people claimed to have heard radio transmissions
from Earhart pleading for help and speaking at times with a disoriented male voice in
the background.
All of these communications seem to have come at what was low tide at Nikumaroro, which
would make sense given the fact that the aircraft’s radio wouldn’t have been usable if fully
submerged in water.
While the Coast Guard dismissed these reports as all false, triangulation of these transmissions
traces back to Gardner Island.
And as if that wasn’t coincidental enough, the castaway theory was taken to a whole new
level when in 1939 or 1940, British Colonial Officer Gerald Gallagher found the remains
of a campsite and a partial human skeleton on Nikumaroro.
The skeleton, seemingly a smoking gun in proving Gardner Island as Earhart’s final resting
place…was quickly debunked.
Physician D.W.
Hoodless examined the bones and determined them to belong to a short, stocky, European-descent
male.
Asserting that the skeleton belonged neither to Earhart nor Noonan, Hoodless horrifyingly
discarded the bones…
In the face of such bizarre investigative practices, somehow, all was not lost for the
skeleton evidence.
Years later, the International Group for Historical Aircraft Recovery, also known as Tighar, decided
to analyze Hoodless’s findings.
With more modern knowledge and updated databases, they used his work to come to a starkly different
conclusion: maybe the skeleton belonged to a short male…or maybe it belonged to a tall
woman…and Earhart was a tall woman.
Tighar’s director, Ric Gillespie, thus theorized that the bones could surely belong to Amelia
Earhart and that the lack of a full skeleton could be due to the existence of Coconut Crabs
on Nikumaroro.
Having the potential to grow up to around 3 feet long and having the strength to crack
coconuts, Gillespie subsequently posits that these crabs would have likely either moved
some of the bones upon finding them, or, more gruesomely, eaten the rest of Amelia Earhart,
and maybe all of Fred Noonan…
But on that note, it’s important to remember that there are more than two theories as to
what happened to the Babe of the Sky and her navigator, and we have no definitive proof
to back any of them.
All we know is that Amelia Earhart was less than 7,000 miles away from being the first
woman to circumnavigate the globe.
And those few thousand miles will forever be an unsurpassable roadblock for America’s
aviation queen…