What Happened to Amelia Earhart: Untangling the Search for Her Plane
Amelia Earhart's Plane May Have Been Found in Lagoon on Remote Island: Everything to Know About Search
Her place in the history books secure, Amelia Earhart didn't plan to push herself to such extremes ever again—for one reason or another.
"I’m getting old and want to make way for the younger generation before I’m feeble,” the 39-year-old told the New York Herald Tribune's Carl Allen in May 1937. “I have a feeling that there is just one more good flight left in my system, and I’m hoping this trip is it."
The trip she was referring to was her intent to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe—"For fun," she explained, "can you think of any better reason?"—a 29,000-mile journey that officially began when she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Miami Airport on June 1. If all had gone accordingly, they would have touched down in Oakland, Calif., on July 4, mission accomplished.
"As far as I know," Earhart said, "I’ve only got one obsession—a small and probably typical feminine fear of growing old—so I won’t feel completely cheated if I fail to come back."
The pioneering aviator famously did not come back, disappearing along with Noonan on July 2 somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, about 20 hours after her silver Lockheed Electra 10-E left Lae, in what is now Papua New Guinea.
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After the largest rescue effort ever for a single lost plane failed to find a trace of Earhart, Noonan or the Electra, naval authorities called off the search on July 19. Noonan was declared dead in absentia on June 20, 1938. The same was said of Earhart on Jan. 5, 1939.
But the search for answers as to what really happened—some preferred to believe that reports of Earhart's death were greatly exaggerated—continued, and never really stopped.
Courtesy of Purdue Research Foundation
And now, researchers have arrived on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, to investigate the Taraia Object—an unidentified shape submerged in a lagoon that the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery believes to be the wreckage of Earhart's plane.
Here's what to know about Earhart's disappearance and what happens next as the search for her plane heats up once again:
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What happened during Amelia Earhart's final flight?
Earhart and Noonan had already traveled 22,000 miles when they took off for what turned out to be the last time.
Since leaving Miami on June 1, 1937, they had spent 21 days in the air, flying for 13 hours straight on three of those days.
She and Noonan arrived in Lae on June 29 and left July 2 at 10:22 a.m. for what would be the most taxing leg of their journey yet, a 2,556-mile, 20-hour flight to Howland Island. From there, it would've been on to Honolulu, and then Oakland, their intended final destination.
Lae radioman Harry Balfour remained in touch with Earhart for seven hours, according to Doris L. Rich' 1989 biography Amelia Earhart, but she wasn't heard from again until 2:45 a.m. (still on July 2, local time) by crew aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which was sent to the Howland Island to aid with comms and navigation for Earhart's return.
She was heard over the radio again at 3:45 a.m., but did not immediately respond to a 4 a.m. request from Itasca to share her ETA.
Earhart reported back at 4:53 a.m., though all the radiomen could decipher was "partly cloudy" before her voice was swallowed by static—but then she chimed in again at 6:14 a.m., 15 minutes before Noonan had said they'd be landing on Howland.
At 6:45 a.m., Earhart said they were "about 100 miles out." Then, at 7:42 a.m., she radioed, "We must be on you but cannot see you, but gas is running low...We are flying at altitude 1,000 feet."
Finally, at 8:44 a.m., she shared the radio frequency she was trying to use to reach the Itasca, adding, "We are running north and south."
And that was it.
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What happened to Amelia Earhart?
Thousands of men aboard 10 ships and 65 aircrafts scoured 260,000 square miles. The search was called off July 19 after 16 days, leaving endless conspiracy theories and one of modern history's biggest mysteries in its wake.
The most succinct explanation at the time came from Tommy O'Hare, a radio operator on the Itasca, who said, "Earhart ran out of gas and splashed."
And that's basically the U.S. Navy's official account, that they ran out of fuel, crashed and were lost at sea.
Earhart's husband of six years, publishing heir George P. Putnam, was also her manager and publicist—and he was among those who held out hope she had survived. Remaining at the Coast Guard station for days, he said rescuers should focus their search on the Phoenix Islands, south of Howland.
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Why did the disappearance of Amelia Earhart become such a big mystery?
Since no trace of the aviator, her navigator or the plane was ever found, that left a lot of blanks for people to fill in, and countless theories have been floated in the nine decades since Earhart and Noonan vanished.
The Los Angeles Times noted in 1987 that every presidential administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt's had officially denied that her stated attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe was a cover for Earhart's true mission, to overfly a suspected Japanese military buildup in the South Pacific. The government also denied she and Noonan were captured, imprisoned or executed by enemy forces.
Courtesy of Purdue University
What's happening with the search for Amelia Earhart's plane?
Years of research led the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery to propose that Earhart and Noonan's journey ended on the uninhabited South Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro—and that a murky shape submerged in a lagoon, captured in satellite images and dubbed the Taraia Object, is the Electra wreckage.
Courtesy of Purdue Research Foundation
On Oct. 13, aided by a 17-member boat crew, 17 people from the Taraia Object expedition—a joint effort between the Archaeological Legacy Institute, Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University (set to house Electra after Earhart's flight was completed)—arrived on Nikumaroro after a five-day, 830-nautical-mile voyage from Tarawa in hopes of filling in the biggest blank of all.
Once they reached the lagoon, expedition leader Rick Pettigrew explained, per a Purdue news release, “We will start our remote sensing work using magnetometers and sonar to get a better idea of what is there before we actually uncover it. After that is all done, we will uncover it using a hydraulic dredge."
The team planned to spend five days on Nikumaroro, according to Purdue. But they would sleep off-shore on their boat, the Marin Mainiku, for various reasons, not least being the presence of giant coconut crabs "whose size and overnight activity make staying on the island impractical."
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