In the years since Amelia Earhart vanished while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, people have been trying hard to figure out what really happened to the famous aviator. On May 21, 1937, Earhart took off from Oakland, California, and headed east. It was the start of her second attempt to fly around the world at the equator. An earlier try in March had ended just a few days into the trip when her Lockheed Electra L-10E crashed during takeoff from Honolulu. Despite that incident, she remained determined to be the first pilot, man or woman, to circle the globe at the equator. Success would not only bolster her reputation, but would also rescue her family's finances as she had plans to write a book about her adventure. Flight preparations, including the acquisition and subsequent modifications to a new plane, meant she had mortgaged her future. The accident in Hawaii and resulting delay did alter some of Earhart's original plans. Instead of flying west, from California to Hawaii and then over the Pacific, she now intended to travel in the opposite direction. This would help her avoid bad weather, but it would also put the most difficult leg — flying to Howland Island, a tiny, two-mile-long dot in the vast Pacific Ocean — towards the end of a fatiguing journey.
Earhart wasn’t alone on the flight. She was accompanied by Fred Noonan who served as navigator for the journey. Unfortunately, Fred Noonan has been consigned to a historical footnote as Amelia Earhart’s navigator. That’s partly because little is known about him. When he and Earhart vanished on July 2, 1937, headlines blared about the disappearance of “Lady Lindy” and the frantic search for her Lockheed Electra. Little coverage was devoted to the equally lost Noonan at the time, and little has been written about him since. Earhart may get all the glory for being a pioneering aviator, but Noonan was no slouch in that respect either. Widely credited with opening the Pacific to air transportation, Noonan worked for Pan American World Airways beginning in the mid-1920s and was responsible for charting the westward routes from California to Manila for the carrier’s Clipper airplane fleet. Born in Chicago (or, according to some reports, in Ireland), he had first encountered these far-flung corners of the globe after leaving home at just 13 to join the merchant marine in 1906. Over the next 20 years he rose through the ranks to become a captain, working on ships that ferried goods around the world. In the 1930s Noonan changed gears to take up flying.
Neither Earhart or Noonan were adept at wireless telegraphy, commonly called CW for Continuous Wave. Essentially, CW refers to a Morse Code transmission using a radio signal. This prompted her to get rid of the CW (telegraph code key) transmitter on the Electra as she felt it would be "dead weight" with just her and Noonan onboard. Before departing, she also dropped a trailing antenna that would have allowed her to use the 500-kilocycle marine frequency. Instead of Morse Code, Earhart planned to communicate by voice at higher bandwidths. Long days of flying brought the pair to Brazil, Dakar, Khartoum, Bangkok and Darwin, Australia, among other locations. On June 29, the plane arrived in Lae, New Guinea. Three days later on July 2, she and Noonan took off from Lae at !0 AM local time headed for their next stop - Howland Island, which lies in the central Pacific between Australia and Hawaii.
Earhart was one of the most famous women in the world and the US Government constructed the airfield on Howland solely for the her use. In addition, the Coast Guard Cutter Itasca was stationed at Howland to provide communications, smoke signals, and radio bearings to guide Earhart and Noonan as they approached the small isolated island. But, some of the ship's communications were on bandwidths that Earhart didn't have the ability to receive. There were other difficulties as well. A radio direction finder on Howland that would work with Earhart's higher-bandwidth equipment required batteries, which were drained by the time she was in the area. Fourteen hours and 15 minutes into her flight, the Itasca received a first, somewhat garbled transmission from Earhart about "cloudy weather." Though the messages themselves would grow clearer, their content remained worrying, as when Earhart radioed, "We are circling but cannot see island cannot hear you." She apparently only received one message from the ship, though the Itasca had been transmitting for hours. While continuing to broadcast — the radio strength of her communications indicated she was close — Earhart remained unable to see the island.The weather was clear, but there were clouds about 30 miles northwest. If she had flown into clouds and bad weather along the way, it could have prevented Noonan from taking the sightings he needed to navigate precisely. Earhart's last transmission, made 20 hours and 14 minutes into her flight, indicated they were going to continue "running north and south." The plane never made it to Howland Island.
When efforts to contact Earhart proved fruitless, the Itasca got underway. It commenced one of the greatest air-sea searches in history, which quickly involved the US Navy Battleship Colorado. Before too long, the Navy also ordered the aircraft carrier Lexington to make a high-speed run to the search area. Carrying sixty-three aircraft, the carrier offered the prospects of greatly expanding the search area. Search efforts were suspended on July 12th. The aircraft had searched an area of 25,490 square miles, larger than the State of West Virginia. After she had been missing for 18 months, Judge Clarence Elliot Craig of the Superior Court of the County of Los Angeles County declared Amelia Mary Earhart legally dead in absentia on January 5 1939.
In the absence of any physical evidence, the world has not stopped wondering what really happened to the pioneering female aviator and her navigator. Theories abound. The most credible is that the pair simply ran out of fuel and ultimately crashed into the ocean. Another holds she ran off course and headed for the Marshal Islands instead, which were under Japanese control at the time. Some believe they were shot down by Japanese forces and perished, but others claim the pair landed safely somewhere on the islands and were subsequently taken prisoner by the Japanese. The timing of Earhart’s tour around the globe can be viewed as somewhat suspicious, prompting some conspiracy theorists to assert that Earhart was more than just a pioneering aviator. They claim she was a secret reconnaissance pilot collecting information for the US Government. By 1937, geopolitical tensions were already running high, and Japan had invaded China. Could it be that President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the nation’s intrepid female aviator as the perfect candidate for investigating a possible Japanese threat? Most investigations of this theory have proved fruitless, but it’s certainly provocative. Some even argue that Earhart was captured, released, and then repatriated in the United States under an assumed name. In the ensuing years, numerous expeditions have come up empty handed. But then, earlier this year, a hazy, plane-shaped sonar image taken from 16,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean's surface was released to the public. Tony Romeo believes Deep Sea Vision, his South Carolina-based sea exploration company, captured an outline of the iconic American's Lockheed 10-E Electra. Archaeologists and explorers are hopeful.
Amelia Earhart’s life and her disappearance have been celebrated in books, movies, and across the internet. It’s been 87 years since she failed to make the scheduled landing on Howland Island, but she continues to fascinate the world.
Until next time…safe travels.
Fascinating, and educational, as I had not heard of the part played by Fred Noonan...