She’s one of the most famous aviators in history.
But on July 2nd, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over
the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen or heard from again.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what happened
to Amelia Earhart?
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During her career, Earhart clocked up a long list of incredible achievements; like becoming
the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and setting a world record for altitude
in 1931 - when she flew at 18,415 feet.
Her highly anticipated circumnavigation of the globe, planned for the summer of 1937,
was reportedly going to be her last big aviation stunt, with claims that she had plans to stop
flying.
As we know, it was her last flight, but not in the way anybody wanted it to be.
The now infamous trip actually wasn’t Earhart’s first attempt at flying around the world,
though… that came three months before her disappearance, in March 1937, when she set
off in a team of four.
Noonan was there this time as well, but the pair were also accompanied by another pilot,
Paul Mantz, and another navigator, Harry Manning, who was the best radio operator of them all.
Notably, perhaps fatefully, it’s thought Earhart and Noonan weren’t so good with
radios.
This first attempt was supposed to see the team travel from east to west around the globe,
but they ran into early difficulty during just the second leg from Hawaii to Howland
Island in the Pacific Ocean.
The attempt was swiftly abandoned, and Earhart and Noonan parted ways with Mantz and Manning.
The second attempt, though, was when things really went wrong.
But not straight away.
With Earhart and Noonan deciding to go it alone, they headed in the opposite direction,
this time flying from west to east, successfully completing their first leg across the US from
Oakland to Miami.
From there, they executed successful flight after successful flight, making various planned
stop offs to cross the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Asia before landing in Lae, Papua New
Guinea, on June 29th - a month after they first set off.
At a time when long distance flying was still in its infancy, Earhart’s journey to that
point was truly a ground-breaking one, and she and Noonan now had just three flights
left to finish their “round the world” trip; one from Lae to Howland Island, one
from there to Hawaii, and then one from there back to California.
They were just days away from home, then, when tragedy struck….
They did depart for Howland Island, but they never arrived, vanishing forever somewhere
over the Pacific.
The circumstances surrounding Earhart’s disappearance, though, are more than a little
weird, and the mystery regarding her fate is still debated today.
A crucial aspect to the story is how generally unreliable the communications between Earhart’s
plane and a supporting US Coast Guard ship, the Itasca, apparently were.
The Itasca was fitted with plenty of comms equipment, but transmissions between it and
Earhart were reportedly scarce, delayed or even non-existent.
In the days immediately after the disappearance, and in the years since, there emerged conflicting
reports on exactly what was and wasn’t radioed through.
Earhart’s plane, a Lockheed Electra, may have had some communications failures, while
it’s thought that the Itasca wasn’t successfully radioing back to the flight, either.
One line of argument, though, says that the plane might’ve reached its destination had
there been a dedicated radio operator on board; someone like Harry Manning, the guy who had
accompanied Earhart on her first around the world attempt.
Radio problems or not, the content of some transmissions has been more widely reported
than others.
It’s said that Earhart mentioned running low on fuel multiple times, for example, and
also that in her last message, received at 8:43 AM on July 2nd, she was noticeably panicked.
Amidst the confusion in those crucial final hours, it’s thought that the crew at Howland
Island were at one time extremely confident that Earhart was nearby - so much so that
they were literally scanning the skies outside.
But her plane never appeared on the horizon and, when she failed to show, a search effort
was swiftly launched by the Coast Guard and Navy, scouring the surrounding ocean.
Famously, though, that search was a failure.
It included multiple US ships and cost around $250,000 a day (about $4.4 million in today’s
money) but yielded nothing.
No sign of Earhart, Noonan or their plane.
There are plenty of theories as to what happened to them, but the most common (and arguably
most plausible) is that Earhart’s plane ran out of fuel, crashed into the sea, and
the pair died.
Weather records indicate that Earhart did encounter much stronger than expected headwinds
during her final flight, which could well have slowed the plane, potentially causing
navigation issues and eventually draining the tank of fuel….
Significantly, though, the wreckage of Earhart’s plane was never found, prompting “other”
explanations wherein the pilot and her navigator actually survived.
One of the most popular Earhart theories says that she and Noonan did manage to land, just
not on Howland Island as was intended, but on the Marshall Islands around 800 miles away,
instead.
In most versions of this story, Earhart and Noonan were then captured by Imperial Japan.
In some versions of the story, though, they were sent into Japanese territory on purpose,
as both were really working as US spies.
Either way, theories tend to split into two camps as to what happened next.
Some say that Earhart and Noonan were promptly executed by their captors; others think that
they lived on the Marshall Islands for the duration of World War Two, before eventually
returning to the United States and living out the rest of their lives under new identities.
Remember, though, that Earhart’s plane went down in 1937, two years before war broke out
and more than four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The dates aren’t a perfect fit for the capture theory, plus there aren’t any Japanese naval
records that Earhart, Noonan and the Japanese forces ever crossed paths… but this idea
still captures attention.
In 2017, for example, a photograph emerged allegedly showing Earhart and Noonan at a
dock on the Marshall Islands, seemingly safe and well.
The photo was ultimately debunked, however, when another researcher found it had been
published elsewhere in 1935, two years before the disappearance.
But the Marshall Islands aren’t the only proposed final destination for Earhart and
Noonan.
Another theory argues that they actually found their way to Nikumaroro, another island in
the Pacific, then known as Gardner Island.
It’s said that at least one of Earhart’s patchy transmissions reported a flightpath
which did fly over Gardner Island, and also that there were some transmissions that could
have been from her traced to this tiny coral atoll.
It’s thought Earhart would’ve had enough fuel to reach this makeshift landing spot
and, interestingly, human bones were found there in 1940, as well as paraphernalia that
may have come from Earhart’s plane.
Upon discovery, though, the bones were analysed and determined to have most likely come from
a shorter than average man of European descent - so, not Earhart or Noonan.
Frustratingly, the bones were then lost, so despite later suggestions that they could
just as easily have been from a woman of above-average height, which Earhart was, nothing has been
definitively proven.
Nikumaroro was searched in the days immediately after Earhart’s disappearance, too, by a
squadron of US planes flying over it… while modern searches of the surrounding waters
have also found nothing.
If she and Noonan did wind up as castaways on Gardner Island, then it’s thought they
perished there, seemingly again without a trace.
It’s a riddle which remains unsolved, then, largely because of two significant aspects
to it; the unreliable communications record, and the miles and miles and miles of ocean
beneath which Earhart’s plane might today lay.
Just because we haven’t found the Electra yet doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
It took more than seventy years to locate the wreckage of the Titanic, after all, and
that was a far bigger vessel found thanks in part to the accounts given by survivors
of the disaster.
In comparison, Earhart’s plane was small, and there are precious few leads to work from.
We’ve now been searching for it for more than eight decades, but technology is always
improving and perhaps one day we’ll be able to map the seafloor so extensively that many
wrecks, including Earhart’s Electra, will finally be put to rest.
But, until then, the theories still abound, because what if her doomed flight was actually
an untold story of survival?
And what if she and Noonan weren’t lost to the Pacific?
Low on fuel, battling the elements and struggling to communicate with the Coast Guard, it is
more likely than not that Earhart crashed, and her plane sank to the bottom of the sea…
but her fate remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time.
And that’s what happened to Amelia Earhart.
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