The Amelia Earhart story has interested me since I was in fifth grade. I spent an otherwise miserable year in the classroom with a teacher that even my mother didn’t like that year, but I was introduced to the Earhart saga when a buddy handed me his library book that he said was about a pilot.
He didn’t mention the ending.
That book sparked an interest that I haven’t lost to this day. Earhart was a remarkable person. She was courageous, intelligent, determined and sometimes lucky. A trailblazer, she was a pilot in an era when few women flew, let alone piloted. Her career is worthy of study.
Because she disappeared back in 1937, much of the attention directed toward her since then has been aimed at Earhart’s final flight. Wild theories, mostly drummed up to sell books or the like, have sprouted up in the decades since Earhart failed to show up at Howland Island in the Pacific. Obviously, I don’t have the answer. If I did, I’d call a press conference and write a book.
I have a guess as to what happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, at the end of that flight way back before World War II. I’ll get to it momentarily. But I want to make a point first.
Amelia Earhart was a record-breaking pilot. She was the first woman to solo across the Atlantic and the first pilot, regardless of gender, to fly from Hawaii to California. She set numerous other historic marks, including an altitude record in an autogyro, the forerunner to today’s helicopters. She had her share of crackups as well, but she kept flying. Rather than blow off her career and jump to study her disappearance, we should marvel at her accomplishments.
This year, four women were in the starting field for the Indianapolis 500 and they acquitted themselves very well. But before those four women raced at the Brickyard, Janet Guthrie and Lyn St. James broke down barriers first.
And before Guthrie and St. James there was Amelia Earhart, a classic Midwesterner with a dream who ignored those who told her, ‘no.’
What do I think happened to Earhart and Noonan? For more reasons than I have the space here to relate (and more than you probably want to read), I think they missed Howland to the west and, perhaps, a bit to the south. Earhart’s radio calls registered their strongest, even over modulated, on her penultimate call to the Coast Guard ship stationed at Howland for her flight. On her final radio call, the strength was still the maximum rating but not as over modulated as before.
Earhart may have started a search pattern to look for Howland. If so, her initial turn probably went away from the island and that decision may have cost her the final drops of gasoline in her fuel supply.
Earhart’s flight path and timing flew her directly into the rising sun, making for poor visibility. Worse, Howland’s location was actually a few miles from where Earhart’s charts indicated. That means she aimed for the wrong spot in the ocean and then might not have been in position to see the right spot.
Earhart and Noonan probably splashed into the Pacific shortly after their final radio call.
Were they rescued by a Japanese fishing trawler and taken as prisoners to Saipan Island? I can’t explain away the reports by former residents of that island that two white fliers were prisoners there before the war, but I don’t think Earhart or Noonan were ever there. Did they somehow get to an isolated island somewhere else in the Pacific and live their final days there? No, I don’t think so.
Lots of things went wrong during that flight. But rather than point out every costly error or failure, it is much more insightful to point out that Earhart and Noonan stretched the technological envelope of the day and the envelope tore open, spilling them into the Pacific.
Sometimes stuff happens.
Thanks for reading.
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