The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart

Introduction

Amelia Earhart is one of the best-known pilots in history, instantly becoming a central figure for women’s rights and aviation enthusiasts after becoming the first female pilot to travel solo, non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. 

The Plan

After becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928 and completing the first non-stop transatlantic solo flight by a woman in 1932, Earhart completed several other solo flights over the next few years. Over this time period, she also broke numerous speed and distance records using a Lockheed Vega– her plane of choice. 

In 1936, Earhart began planning to circumnavigate the world– this would make her the first woman to complete a circumnavigation, and her flight path was longer than any other due to its route along the Equator. 

After receiving funding from Purdue University, who gave her enough money to purchase a Lockheed Electra 10E for the flight, she chose Henry Manning as her navigator. Then, Fred Noonan was chosen as a backup navigator, and they set out on a journey from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii to begin the circumnavigation. However, upon takeoff from Hawaii, the plane’s landing gear collapsed and caused significant damage, forcing them to restart the voyage.

The Circumnavigation

After extensive repairs over several months, the plane was ready to begin the flight. Manning had left the crew during that time, leaving Noonan and Earhart to complete the circumnavigation. They flew from Oakland to Miami, Florida – they had decided to go the opposite way around the Earth due to weather patterns – where she publicly announced that she would be traveling the globe. 

The pair departed on June 1, traveling across the Caribbean, South America, Central Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia before arriving in Lae, Papua New Guinea on June 29. By this point, they had completed 22,000 miles of their journey, with only 7,000 miles over the Pacific remaining. 

The Incident

Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae on the morning of July 2, headed for Howland Island, a small strip of island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The trip spanned 2,556 miles, making it the longest leg of their journey, and the small size of their destination made it extremely difficult to locate. With around 1,100 gallons of fuel, the plane was expected to make it to Howland Island within 20 hours. 

The US Coast Guard sent a ship named the Itasca to help them navigate to the island, and Earhart maintained consistent communication with the ship as they approached Howland Island. 

However, they could not communicate back, preventing Earhart from using direction finding (DF) systems to locate the ship and subsequently, the island. Noonan was also unable to use celestial navigation to locate their destination due to overcast skies. After reporting that they were extremely low on fuel, all radio contact with the plane disappeared, and they never landed on Howland Island.

Investigation

After a thorough investigation into the disappearance, authorities determined exactly what went wrong in Earhart’s communication with the Itasca. The true cause: technical issues, misunderstandings from Earhart, and some unluckiness. 

It was later discovered that just before they took off from Miami, Earhart had her Electra’s trailing wire antenna removed, preventing her from communicating on low frequencies like 500 kHz, which is commonly used in ship direction-finding for aircraft. 

She did not understand the implications of this at the time, and believed a shorter antenna would be sufficient– instead, the shorter antenna radiated with higher frequencies that she preferred to use, but the weaker signal was less efficient. Additionally, tropical areas have higher atmospheric static due to the warmer, wetter climate, garbling her communications with other ships.

Then, after reaching Indonesia, she met with a specialist to discuss which radio frequencies to use in order to communicate with the ships between Lae and Howland Island. They designated a frequency of 400 kilocycles (kcs), which is known as 400 kHz today, and has a wavelength of 750 meters. 

However, in her message to the Itasca, she made a crucial error, mixing up the wavelength and the frequency. Instead, she asked the Itasca to communicate on a frequency of 7500 kHz, which was far too high for her plane’s direction finder to use– high frequencies skip, preventing bearings from being obtained through direction finding. If the signal had been lower, she could have used the DF system onboard the plane to locate the radio waves broadcasted by the ship, helping her locate the island. 

Because of these errors, Earhart was able to transmit messages at 3105 kHz, allowing the Itasca to hear her, but her shortened antenna could not receive messages back from the ship. Additionally, she had instructed the ship to broadcast a direction finding frequency that her plane was unable to use to calculate a bearing, preventing her from locating the ship. 

This led to a lack of communication between the two, causing her to run out of fuel before reaching Howland Island. 

Theories

Theory 1: The most likely situation is that Earhart crashed somewhere between Lae and Howland Island, probably nearer to the latter. Ships in the area had been receiving communications from Earhart, albeit garbled ones, but that would be a sign that her plane would have run out of fuel somewhere near the island.

However, while most signs point to this theory, there is no cold, hard evidence to back it up– Earhart’s plane was never officially found, despite the massive search; it lasted for 16 days and involved 9 US Navy vessels, 4,000 crewmembers, and 66 aircraft. Earhart and Noonan were pronounced dead about a year and a half after their disappearance, on January 5, 1939.

The waters around Howland Island are extremely deep, though, going down to as low as 18,000 feet below sea level, and pose a significant challenge to search crews even today with modern technology due to the countless seamounts, valleys, and trenches scattered across the seafloor. 

Theory 2: Nevertheless, there is another theory to their disappearance that has been gaining traction in recent years. The idea that they crash-landed on a remote Pacific island was dismissed at the time, but researchers are now considering the possibility that they landed on Nikumaroro Island and lived out the rest of their days as castaways.

Nikumaroro Island is a small atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, around 400 miles south-southeast of Howland Island. The atoll officially belongs to Kiribati, but it is uninhabited and is part of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area.

On July 2, 2025 – the 88th anniversary of their disappearance – experts from Purdue University confirmed that they would be sending a research expedition to Nikumaroro Island to search for Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane after discovering significant evidence that they crash-landed there.

Satellite images from 2021 revealed a murky spot next to the Taraia spit in the Nikumaroro lagoon, and further investigation showed that the murky spot happens to be in the vague shape of a plane, with a wing on the side. 

This brought up the topic of Amelia Earhart’s death once again, and the existence of what could be her plane in the waters of Nikumaroro has been backed up by additional evidence. Back in the 1940s, an expedition was launched to Nikumaroro, and the partial skeleton of a castaway was found on the island. However, Earhart was ruled out as a possibility due to the fact that the bones seemed to belong to a male, but a reanalysis of the skeleton has showed that it matches Earhart’s build and could have belonged to her.

Additionally, several products believed to be women’s beauty products from the 1930s were also discovered on the island, further backing the claim that they crash-landed on Nikumaroro and lived for a few years as castaways.

Now, multiple expeditions are set to take place on and around the island over the next year, and the results of those searches could confirm or rule out this theory. 

Theory 3: Other conspiracy theorists believe that Earhart and Noonan may have been captured by the Japanese after landing, as the flight took place during times when tensions between the US and Japan were relatively high. However, there is no hard evidence to back up this claim. 

Theory 4: Lastly, another theory claims that the pair turned back after their inability to locate Howland Island and landed on the island of New Britain, which belongs to Papua New Guinea. Several locals in the area reported seeing Earhart’s Lockheed Electra in the area, but searches conducted after their disappearance yielded no results.

Conclusion

We will most likely never find out what actually happened after Amelia Earhart went missing in 1937, but we can conclude that they probably either crash-landed in the ocean or lived out the rest of their days on Nikumaroro Island. However, they could have ended up somewhere else– who knows? 

Image credit to National Geographic