Amelia Earhart, Part 1: The Flight That Never Came Home

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Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra over the Pacific Ocean, 1937

On the morning of July 2, 1937, a plane lifted off from a jungle airstrip in Lae, New Guinea, carrying two people and just under 22,000 miles of an already-completed journey behind it. Only 7,000 miles remained before it would become the first around-the-world flight ever completed by a woman pilot.

That plane never reached its next stop. Its pilot, Amelia Earhart, was already the most famous female aviator alive. Within hours, she'd become the center of one of the most enduring disappearances in modern history - one that, more than eighty-five years later, still hasn't been definitively solved.

Who Was Amelia Earhart?

Long before she vanished, Amelia Earhart was already one of the most recognizable people in America, not for a mystery, but for a genuinely remarkable career. Born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897, she took her first flight at 24 and was immediately hooked. By 1932, she'd become the first woman, and only the second person after Charles Lindbergh, to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, departing Newfoundland in a red Lockheed Vega and landing, after nearly 15 hours in the air, in a cow pasture near Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross, making her the first woman to receive it.

She didn't stop there. Over the following five years, Earhart set seven separate women's speed and distance records, became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland in 1935, and used her fame consistently to advocate for women in aviation, co-founding the Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots that still exists today. By the time she turned 40, she'd already accomplished more than most aviators of either gender managed in a full career. She wanted one more record before she was done: to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air.

What Was Earhart Trying to Do in 1937?

Earhart's round-the-world attempt wasn't actually her first try. Her original flight plan, launched in March 1937, headed west out of Oakland, California, with a first stop in Honolulu. It ended almost immediately, during takeoff from Hawaii on March 20, her Lockheed Electra ground-looped and suffered serious damage, forcing the entire attempt to be scrapped while the plane was shipped back to California for repairs.

Rather than give up, Earhart regrouped and relaunched two months later, this time flying the route in the opposite direction. On June 1, 1937, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, departed Miami heading east, aiming to circle the globe roughly along the equator, through South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, over to India and Southeast Asia, and finally across the vast, mostly empty stretch of the Pacific back to California. By the time they touched down in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, they'd already covered around 22,000 of the planned 29,000-mile route. What remained was, by a significant margin, the most dangerous leg of the entire trip.

Who Was Fred Noonan?

Earhart wasn't flying alone. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was a highly experienced professional aviator in his own right, with a background in maritime navigation and a résumé that included charting early Pan American Airways routes across the Pacific, exactly the kind of open-ocean, landmark-free navigation this final leg of Earhart's flight would demand. His job on July 2 was arguably the hardest part of the entire journey: guiding the plane to a target so small it would be genuinely difficult to find even with everything going right.

What Happened During the Final Flight?

The destination for that final leg was Howland Island, a flat, isolated coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific, just two miles long and barely a mile wide. It was, by any measure, an extraordinarily small target to hit after an 18-hour, 2,556-mile flight with no landmarks along the way, which is exactly why refueling there was necessary in the first place: the Electra's range simply couldn't stretch much further without stopping.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was stationed near Howland specifically to help guide Earhart in, and starting at 2:45 a.m. local time, its radio operators began picking up intermittent voice transmissions from her aircraft. The signal grew stronger as the flight progressed, suggesting she was closing in on the island, but something was clearly wrong with the communication setup itself. The Itasca could hear Earhart's transmissions with increasing clarity. Earhart, for reasons never fully resolved, couldn't hear the Itasca's replies at all.

At 7:58 a.m., the ship picked up her strongest signal yet, and it wasn't reassuring: Earhart reported she was running low on fuel and hadn't yet been able to spot the island. A little over an hour later, at 8:43 a.m., came her final transmission the Itasca ever received, a message reporting she was "running north and south," apparently following a standard search line in an increasingly desperate attempt to spot Howland's coastline.

After that transmission, silence. No further radio contact, no visual sighting, and no confirmed trace of the aircraft ever again.

The Search

What followed was, at the time, the largest air and sea search operation in American history. U.S. Navy ships and aircraft combed a vast stretch of open Pacific for more than two weeks, scanning hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean. They found nothing, no wreckage, no debris field, no confirmed sighting of any kind.

On January 5, 1939, with no new evidence having surfaced in over eighteen months, Amelia Earhart was officially declared dead by the United States government. The government's own conclusion was straightforward on paper: the Electra had most likely run out of fuel somewhere within roughly 100 miles of Howland Island and gone down in open water, taking Earhart and Noonan with it.

Straightforward as that conclusion sounds, it never actually closed the case in the public imagination and as later parts of this series will get into, it's still not universally accepted as the full story today.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Amelia Earhart disappear? Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, during the final, most dangerous leg of her attempt to fly around the world, while trying to locate tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean.

Where did Amelia Earhart disappear? She vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island, most likely within about 100 miles of Howland based on her last known radio transmissions and fuel calculations.

Who was flying with Amelia Earhart when she disappeared? Her navigator, Fred Noonan, an experienced aviator who had previously charted early transoceanic routes for Pan American Airways, was the only other person aboard the Lockheed Electra.

What was Amelia Earhart trying to accomplish on her final flight? She was attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world, a roughly 29,000-mile journey she and Noonan had almost completed, with only about 7,000 miles remaining when they disappeared.

Was Amelia Earhart's plane ever found? No confirmed wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra has ever been recovered, despite the largest air and sea search in U.S. history at the time and numerous expeditions in the decades since.

When was Amelia Earhart declared dead? The United States government officially declared Amelia Earhart dead on January 5, 1939, roughly eighteen months after her disappearance, concluding her plane most likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Read the Full Amelia Earhart Investigation Series

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