At dawn on 2 July 1937, the radio room of the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed off Howland Island in the mid-Pacific, heard a woman's voice grow steadily louder. At 7.42 a.m. it was almost shouting: "We must be on you but cannot see you — but gas is running low." The signal strength suggested the aircraft was practically overhead. The crew poured smoke from the ship's boilers as a marker and scanned an empty sky. Just over an hour later came a final, composed transmission — and then nothing, ever again.
The voice belonged to the most famous aviator alive. Amelia Earhart had become a celebrity in 1928 as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though only as a passenger aboard the Friendship — a role she dismissed as being little more than baggage. She earned the fame properly in 1932, flying the Atlantic solo, the first woman and third person to do so after Lindbergh and Bert Hinkler (and the second across the North Atlantic), and landing in a Northern Ireland pasture. In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. The 1937 project was her grandest: a roughly 29,000-mile circumnavigation near the equator in a twin-engined Lockheed Electra 10E, with Fred Noonan, a pioneer of Pan American's Pacific routes, as navigator. The Electra had been financed largely through Purdue University, where Earhart advised women students, and she liked to call it her flying laboratory. A first attempt ended in March with a take-off crash in Hawaii; the second ran eastward from Oakland, and by late June the pair had reached Lae, New Guinea, with about 7,000 miles left. Ahead lay the worst leg of all: 2,556 miles of open ocean to Howland, a coral speck barely two miles long.
What the Itasca heard
The radio traffic that morning was a one-way conversation. Earhart transmitted on schedule, but she could not hear the Itasca's replies, and repeated attempts at radio direction-finding failed — a tangle of mismatched frequencies, equipment limits and procedure that specialists have argued over ever since; neither she nor Noonan could work Morse code to any useful standard. At 8.43 a.m. she reported flying "on the line 157 337", running north and south — a navigational line through Howland's position. Then silence. The US Navy and Coast Guard mounted what was then the largest and costliest search in American naval history, sweeping the ocean for more than two weeks with ships including the battleship Colorado and the carrier Lexington. Nothing was found. Earhart, who had disappeared less than a month before her fortieth birthday, was declared dead in absentia in January 1939.
Gardner Island, weighed
That 157–337 line, extended south-east, passes near Gardner Island — now Nikumaroro, in Kiribati — an uninhabited atoll roughly 350 nautical miles to the south-east of Howland. The Gardner hypothesis holds that Earhart landed on its reef flat at low tide and died a castaway, and it rests on genuinely interesting fragments. In 1940 a British colonial officer, Gerald Gallagher, found a partial skeleton on the island alongside a sextant box, the remains of a campfire and part of a woman's shoe. The bones were shipped to Fiji, where a doctor measured them in 1941 and pronounced them those of a stocky middle-aged man — and then they were lost. In 2018 the American anthropologist Richard Jantz re-ran those old measurements with modern forensic software and argued they matched Earhart more closely than the vast majority of people. Striking — but it is statistics performed on a vanished skeleton. Supporters add dozens of alleged post-loss radio signals and artefacts such as fragments of a 1930s freckle-cream jar; sceptics note that none of it is provably hers, that the island was later inhabited, and that a 2019 expedition led by Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, searched Nikumaroro's reef slope and found no aircraft.
The soberest reading remains the simplest: the Electra exhausted its fuel searching for Howland and sank in water more than five kilometres deep, where deep-sea searches have so far found nothing — hardly surprising in so vast an ocean. The persistent theory that she was captured by the Japanese has produced no credible evidence at all; a photograph touted in 2017 as showing her in Japanese custody turned out to come from a travel book published two years before she vanished. Somewhere near a two-mile speck of coral, the twentieth century's most celebrated aviator simply ran out of sky.
Quiz nuggets
- In 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, five years after Lindbergh's crossing.
- Her final flight left Lae, New Guinea, on 2 July 1937, heading for Howland Island 2,556 miles away, with navigator Fred Noonan.
- The ship waiting at Howland to guide her in by radio was the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca.
- Gardner Island, centre of the castaway hypothesis, is now called Nikumaroro and lies in Kiribati.
- Earhart was declared dead in absentia in January 1939, about eighteen months after she disappeared.