Amelia Earhart was an amazing woman. A
pilot when few women flew, she was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean
by air when she went along as a passenger and then became the first woman to
pilot her way across the ocean when she did it by herself. She was the first pilot of either
gender to fly from Hawaii to California.
She was a role model without setting
out to achieve that status. She worked as a nurse during the first world war
and later lectured at Purdue University. She wrote a book about her solo flight
across the Atlantic and she was a poet. Her best-known poem, as far as I know,
was titled Courage is the Price and
is included below.
Mary S. Lovell wrote, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia
Earhart. By far the best Earhart biography your loyal blogger has read.
It is both unfair and true to say
that, for all of her accomplishments, Amelia Earhart is best known today for
her disappearance in July of 1937, nearly 80 years to the day before this
writing. She was attempting to fly around the world at the equator and was down
to the last three legs of the trip. Her third-to-last hop was supposed to be a
2,556-mile trip from New Guinea to Howland Island. Howland was little more than
the size of a runway and there was a runway there for her to land on, refuel
and take off again.
She never got there. Earhart and her
navigator, Fred Noonan, have been lost to the sands of time. Theories? We got
your theories. Lots of theories about what happened at the end of the flight.
Proof? There is none.
Clues?
That sort of depends upon your idea of what a clue is. One writer said Earhart
was alive and living in New Jersey in the 1970s. The writer put together the
first letters from a chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, made them spell the
name of the woman’s husband and called that a clue. Not a clue at all, to
logical people, but in a case where proof is drifting in the wind, well, a clue
is a clue in the eye of the beholder. The writer sold a lot of books though.
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| Howland Island from the air. |
Elgin
Long and his wife, Marie, spent decades researching the disappearance. Their
book, Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved,
is a logical, fact-filled step toward solving the mystery. The Longs concluded
that the final Earhart flight ended with a crash landing at sea. This is by far
the most logical theory, held together by known facts. Elgin Long was himself a
pilot and a veteran of long over water flights. The Long effort to find the
Earhart plane at the bottom of the Pacific has yet to net the results hoped
for.
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| My copy of Fred Goerner's book |
CBS
radio newsman Fred Goerner spent six years trying to solve the mystery and
turned the effort into a literary journalism classic, The Search for Amelia Earhart. Goerner concluded that Earhart and
Noonan crashed at sea and got picked up by a Japanese ship. They eventually
died on the Japanese-held island, Saipan, Goerner wrote.
There
have been other conclusions as well and, in the absence of creditable proof,
they are possible if hard to believe. One adventurer has made numerous trips to
an island in the Pacific, trying to prove Earhart and Noonan perished there.
Your
loyal blogger has read many books about Earhart’s life and about her
disappearance. Obviously, that is not the same as culling through official
records, flying around the ocean and chopping through island vegetation, but if
perspective means anything, perhaps it can be of service here.
A
few important notes:
1. A
US Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, was on station at Howland to assist with the
flight.
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| No trespassing? Who are they kidding? |
2. Earhart
never learned Morse Code and so she communicated with the Itasca via voice
transmissions during her flight toward Howland. She only acknowledged hearing
an Itasca transmission once during the flight, but the ship heard her in the
final hours of the flight.
3. Fred
Noonan was an outstanding navigator. It was Noonan who set courses for the first
Pan Am flying boats that flew across the Pacific.
4. Howland
Island was not exactly where Noonan and Earhart expected it to be. The chart
they used to set navigation plans was slightly inaccurate with regards to
Howland. Howland was about five miles away from the chart’s location.
5. Earhart’s
final radio transmissions were rated strength 5, the maximum, by Itasca radio
operators. She estimated the plane was within 100 miles of Howland in one
transmission. Your loyal blogger believes Earhart was correct.
6. Earhart’s
description of the cloudy weather near the end of the flight convinced the men
aboard Itasca that the course to set
for finding the lost plane was north and, when it became clear to those
seasoned Coast Guard sailors that the plane was down, that’s where they headed.
7. The
days of Global Positioning Satellites were far in the future and even
rudimentary versions of radar still weren’t off the drawing board. Earhart and
Noonan had to try to find Howland with celestial navigation and sharp eyes.
They didn’t.
It says here that Earhart
and Noonan missed Howland to the north. For reasons
that
have never been clear here, the plane was due to arrive shortly after sunrise
at Howland. As they were flying west to east, Earhart and Noonan were flying
directly into the sun’s morning glare. A different arrival time might have made
finding landfall easier.
Both Long and Goerner postulate in
their books that Earhart and Noonan missed Howland slightly northwards. Goerner
suggests that Earhart continued traveling east and was flying away from Howland
when her fuel supply went dry. Long’s belief put the plane in a different spot
when it splashed to earth but YLB sees little difference in the two ideas. The
Earhart plane was likely north of the island.
Then there is the long-standing matter
of international politics. Japan was four and a half years away from bombing
Pearl Harbor when Earhart and Noonan were lost and international tensions were
high. Some people today believe Earhart’s flight was at least in part a spy
mission to see what the strength of the Japanese military was on certain
islands.
Was Earhart on a spy mission? Did she
fly over militarily sensitive, Japanese-held islands during the flight? Your
loyal blogger doubts that theory because of the fuel needed to complete the
flight. Her plane, a Lockheed Electra 10-E, was not capable of carrying enough
fuel to complete a flight of that length, regardless of what island is
suggested.
Were Earhart and Noonan picked up after
their watery landing by some sort of Japanese ship and taken prisoner? Did they
die on Saipan?
Goerner’s book makes it clear that he
gathered witness reports in the early 1960s that two white fliers, a man and a
woman, were in captivity on Saipan around the time Earhart and Noonan flew into
the mists of fable and legend. If those reports are accurate – go ahead and
disprove them, if you can – then it is very difficult to determine what two
individuals they might have been other than the missing fliers.
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The person sitting is conjectured to be Amelia Earhart sometime
after she disappeared. Standing at left is said to be Fred Noonan.
|
New
conjecture has surfaced recently, centered around a photograph. A television
documentary that will air Sunday purports to prove Earhart and Noonan are
visible in an image taken on Jaluit Island after the end of the flight. The
image has made it to the internet and, for this observer, it does not show
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
The
individual supposedly Earhart has the wrong haircut and seems to be wearing the
wrong type of clothing. Further, the image is not clear enough to show the
figure is even a female. The figure that
is supposedly Noonan isn’t clearly anybody. Perhaps the documentary will show
better views of the image than has been available on the web. By the way,
reports about the documentary indicate the researchers follow Goerner’s conclusions
step-for-step.
Amelia
Earhart and Fred Noonan crashed a sea after failing to find Howland Island in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean in early July, 1937. They were somewhere north
of Howland and may have been flying in a search pattern when their fuel supply
was exhausted.
It
is impossible to disprove the possibility that the two were captured by the
Japanese and later died at the hands of their captors, but in the 80 years
since the disappearance there has not been one single verifiable clue that
proves the death on Saipan theory. A lot of people have searched and they’ve
come home with zip.
Watch
the show on Sunday and let’s all hope for new information that puts the mystery
on the path toward solution, but it seems pretty clear that Earhart and Noonan
died at sea. May God rest their souls.
Thanks for reading.
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace
The soul that knows it not knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings
How can life grant us boon of living compensate
For gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare the soul's dominion?
Each time we make a choice we pay
With courage to behold the restless day
And count it fair.
By Amelia Earhart
I watched the two-hour program on The History Channel last night and thought the researchers did a reasonably good job. Naturally, I found a few things to pick at. Still they did a good job of following Fred Goerner's research path and talked to some of the same witnesses Goerner found. I thought that, with the exception of the photograph in my blog above, the program was a credible effort.
