Amelia Earhart

At 8:43 on the morning of July 2, 1937, the radio room of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored off a speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, picked up a woman’s voice.

It was strong and clear, but urgent. “We are on the line 157 337,” she said. “We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait.” A few moments later: “We are running on line north and south.”

That was the last confirmed transmission from Amelia Earhart.

She was the most famous female pilot in the world, attempting to become the first woman to fly around the globe at the equator. She had flown more than twenty thousand miles. She had about seven thousand to go. And she and her navigator, somewhere over the vast Pacific, were lost.

The Most Famous Woman in America

By 1937, Amelia Earhart was one of the best-known people on earth.

Born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, she had fallen in love with flying as a young woman and bought her first plane in the 1920s. In 1928, she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, though only as a passenger. In 1932, she flew across the Atlantic alone, the first woman to do so, and the second person after Charles Lindbergh. She set speed and altitude records. She became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. She wrote books, gave lectures, designed clothing and luggage, and campaigned for women’s rights. She was married to the publisher George Putnam, who managed her career with the instincts of a promoter.

In 1937, she set out to fly around the world.

The Flight

Her plane was a twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E, specially modified with extra fuel tanks, which the press called her “flying laboratory.” Her navigator was Fred Noonan, an experienced aviator who had helped chart Pan American Airways’ routes across the Pacific.

After an earlier attempt ended in a crash on takeoff in Hawaii, she set off again in June 1937, this time flying east from Oakland, California. She crossed the United States, flew down to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, across Africa and the Middle East to India, Southeast Asia and Australia. By the end of June, she and Noonan had reached Lae, on the island of New Guinea.

The next leg was the most dangerous of the entire trip: a flight of about 2,500 miles across the open Pacific to Howland Island, a tiny, flat island about a mile and a half long, barely rising above the waves. There was nowhere else to land. Finding it would require precise navigation. If they missed it, there was nothing but ocean in every direction.

The Morning

Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae at 10 a.m. local time on July 2. The plane was heavily loaded with fuel.

The Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting at Howland Island to guide them in by radio. But almost from the start, there were communication problems. The radio frequencies Earhart was using didn’t match well with the Itasca’s equipment. Earhart’s messages came through, but she seemed unable to hear the cutter’s replies. The radio direction-finding equipment couldn’t get a fix on her position.

In the early morning hours, Earhart’s transmissions grew more anxious. At 7:42 a.m., she radioed: “We must be on you, but cannot see you, but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” The radio operators on the Itasca could tell from the strength of the signal that she was close. But they couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t see the island.

At 8:43 came the final message about the “line 157 337.” Then nothing.

The Search

The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard launched the largest air and sea search in history up to that time, covering some 250,000 square miles of ocean. President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the search personally. Ships and planes scoured the waters around Howland Island and the nearby islands for more than two weeks.

They found nothing.

On January 5, 1939, Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead.

The Theories

For nearly ninety years, people have tried to answer the question of what happened to her.

They crashed and sank. The simplest and most widely accepted explanation is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel near Howland Island, ditched in the ocean, and sank. The plane would have gone down in water thousands of feet deep. Several deep-sea expeditions have searched the seafloor near Howland using sonar. In early 2024, one company announced it had captured a sonar image that it believed might show the Electra; later that year, a closer look revealed it to be a natural rock formation.

They landed on Nikumaroro. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, has argued for decades that Earhart and Noonan didn’t crash at sea, but landed on a remote, uninhabited coral atoll called Gardner Island, now Nikumaroro, about 350 miles southeast of Howland, on the same “157 337” line Earhart mentioned. There, the theory goes, they survived for some time as castaways before dying. In 1940, British colonial officials on the island found a partial human skeleton, along with a woman’s shoe and a sextant box. The bones were later lost. In 2018, a researcher reanalyzed the original measurements and argued they were more consistent with Earhart than with most people. Many experts remain skeptical. TIGHAR’s expeditions have found artifacts that might be connected to her, but nothing definitive.

They were captured by the Japanese. Another theory holds that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed in the Marshall Islands, then controlled by Japan, and were captured, taken to the island of Saipan, and died in Japanese custody. Some islanders have told stories of seeing a white woman pilot in custody. No documentary evidence has ever been found.

The Woman Who Disappeared

What makes Amelia Earhart’s disappearance so powerful, I think, is that it froze her in time. She was thirty-nine, at the height of her fame, doing what she loved, attempting something no woman had done before. She never grew old. She never failed. She just flew off into the blue and never came back.

Before one of her flights, she wrote to her husband that she understood the dangers perfectly well, and that she wanted to go anyway, simply because she wanted to. “Women must try to do things as men have tried,” she wrote. If they failed, she added, their failure should only challenge other women to try again.