What happened
Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, set out in 1937 to circle the globe along the equator in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E. Together with navigator Fred Noonan, she had already covered most of the route when, on July 2, she took off from Lae, New Guinea, on the most difficult leg – more than 4,000 kilometers over the ocean to Howland Island, where the Coast Guard cutter “Itasca” was waiting. In the morning the cutter’s radio operators heard her increasingly loud transmissions saying that fuel was running low and the island was not in sight, but they were unable to establish two-way contact or get a fix on the plane. The last message received said they were flying along a line of position. The Navy and the Coast Guard searched hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of ocean, without result.
Witnesses
Radio operators aboard the Coast Guard cutter “Itasca,” who received Earhart’s last transmissions.
Explanations and hypotheses
The official view is that the plane ran out of fuel and went down in the ocean near Howland. The TIGHAR group has for years been investigating the hypothesis of a landing on Nikumaroro atoll, where human bones and objects were found in 1940, though their connection to Earhart has not been confirmed. Theories of captivity by the Japanese lack strong evidence. Successive sonar expeditions to the ocean floor have been inconclusive.
Unexplained There is no convincing explanation.
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