What Happened to Amelia Earhart? · 4:49pm Dec 28th, 2023

I recently did a deep dive on Earhart's disappearance as research for a story, and figured I would share it here.

As usual, I'll do my best to delineate facts from opinions.

Bottom line up front:
I believe that a combination of mismatched and broken electronics led to the plane being unable to home in on the destination. They got close, but not close enough, and circled until running out of fuel and ditching in the ocean. Kind of mundane and unsensational.

The Facts

Personnel
Amelia Earhart needs no introduction, but to examine relevant points: she had been flying for 16 years at the time of the incident and had extensive long range solo flight experience, including crossing the Atlantic, and flying between Hawaii and California.

Fred Noonan is not as well known. He was Earhart's navigator on the final flight. He had spent more than twenty years sailing, and was licensed as a merchant ship captain. He had spent almost a decade flying, and as a navigator for Pan American Airways, mapped several new trans-Pacific routes as far west as China. During WWI, Noonan had had three ships torpedoed out from under him, so he had experience in water survival.

The Aircraft
A Lockheed L10E Electra had been extensively modified for the world flight, packed full of fuel tanks and navigation equipment. Unfortunately, the electronics appear to have been unreliable, requiring maintenance several times during the trip, including blown fuses. The radio transmitter and receiver were both modified from standard. The transmitter was only capable of sending on three frequencies.

The World Flight
Earhart and Noonan attempted to fly west, but had an accident at the first stop. The airplane required a month of repairs. Their second attempt left California eastbound on May 20, 1937. By June 29, they had arrived at Lae, New Guinea. The planned future route would take them to the tiny Howland Island, then to Hawaii, and then back to California.

The Howland Leg
A video of the plane taking off from Lae shows it bouncing, heavily loaded with fuel as it was, and there is a puff of dust. Some assert that the video shows a kicked up object tearing an antenna off the plane. I'm not able to personally confirm or deny this from the quality of the video, but support this idea because it would explain what happened next.

The plane headed for Howland, 2,556 miles away. Howland being a small target of just one square mile, and a place where a plane had never landed before. The US Coast Guard ship Itasca was at Howland to provide service, and there was a small settlement on the island.

After flying all night, the next morning the plane was close enough to Howland to make radio contact, but not two-way. The ship could hear the plane, but the plane could not hear the ship. The plane was able to receive one type of signal from the ship, but the ship could only send Morse on that frequency, not voice. Startling to me, despite being world-class aviators of the 1930s, and Noonan also being a mariner, neither knew Morse.

The plane and the ship attempted to radio-locate each other without success. Of the small number of frequencies the plane's radio could transmit, the ship's direction finder was not built to detect. Of the signals the ship could send that the plane could receive, the frequency was too high for direction finding on that type of antenna.

In terms of visual reference, the weather that morning was reported as low, patchy clouds. This could have created a pattern of shadows on the surface of the ocean, obscuring the small, low island. Itasca made a smoke cloud, but that apparently did not help. In later review, it was found that Howland's position was misplaced on the chart by approximately five nautical miles.

Around 7:40 that morning, Earhart radioed that there was only an estimated half an hour of fuel left. It lasted a little bit longer than that, as 8:43 was her last confirmed transmission.

The flight was planned to take eighteen hours. Her last transmission came a little more than 20 hours after taking off.

My Speculation

In many aviation mishaps, there is not any one thing that went wrong, but a compound of factors. Earhart and Noonan were respectively some of the most experienced trans-oceanic aviators and navigators in the world as of 1937. However, unreliable equipment, poor coordination with support elements, and the high risk they had undertaken ultimately led to their disappearance.

I see the equipment issue as being the biggest problem, for a few reasons. There were a few redundant systems for communication and direction finding. But when it was discovered too late that some of the ship and aircraft radios were incompatible, and combined with a further missing antenna that rendered others ineffective, the key navigation aid fell apart. Better planning ahead of time could have helped, but some of it came down to luck.

And speaking of luck, with 86 years of hindsight, Earhart and Noonan were sure pushing theirs. The flight was a huge risk. No one had ever flown to Howland before. The margins of error were exceedingly small - a 1% error in navigation would have put them off course by 25 miles and in the open ocean there would be no landmarks. Assuming the plane went down shortly after Earhart's last transmission, they arrived in the area of Howland with only about 12% extra fuel. Would you take the risk of flying 2,556 miles out into the ocean, looking for a one square mile island, and knowing you would arrive with less than 1/8 of a tank remaining?

So, as I stated above, I believe the plane probably went in the ocean somewhere vaguely near Howland. Maybe Earhart and Noonan were able to get into a life raft, though that still did not save them.

What else could have happened?
Of course, yes, I have to address alternate theories. And boy howdy, there are a ton. Multiple dedicated forums have argued this topic for decades, and there are a pile of speculative books.

Commonly Claimed Alternate Landing Sites
Baker Island - 42 miles from Howland - We know they didn't land there because it's even smaller than Howland and the inhabitants would have seen it.
The Phoenix Islands - 350 miles from Howland - A big stretch on fuel. Some interesting bones and artifacts have been found there, but nothing conclusive. Robert Ballard did an undersea survey in the area, but found nothing.
The Marshall Islands - 800 miles from Howland - No way on fuel.
There are a handful of other possibilities, but the Pacific is a huge place, and none are within what I would consider a reasonable distance.

I feel that the plane ran out of fuel shortly after their last transmission. The plane had been heard by Itasca for several hours and the signal was only getting stronger. For radio calls to have stopped suddenly, and Earhart never said they were going to try to find another island, seems to rule out anything but a sudden water landing.

Did they have enough fuel to reach those other places if they flew direct, instead of diverting from Howland? Yes, theoretically, but it would have required Noonan to make a navigation error of several hundred miles. Me, a student pilot following only a compass, probably couldn't even do that badly.

There are reports that transmissions from Earhart continued to be heard for several days, implying that the plane had landed somewhere, or she had a portable survival radio. I don't put a lot of faith in this, as I have not seen official sources hearing the signals, and also the fact that potential rescuers searching for her were probably hearing each other.

There are other theories that the Japanese shot down/captured/whatever the plane. The route didn't take them anywhere near Japanese territory, and Earhart's flight was well-publicized, so it shouldn't have been interpreted as a spying mission.

Anyway, a long way of saying that I sometimes go down rabbit holes in pursuit of details in fiction. I may modify this post depending on if something comes up in the comments.

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