The Last Flight of Amelia Earhart: The Pacific, 1937
1937 · event
On 2 July 1937 the American pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae in New Guinea in a twin engined Lockheed Electra. Ahead of them lay more than four thousand kilometres of open Pacific and a target barely three kilometres long, the coral speck of Howland Island. A United States Coast Guard cutter waited there to guide them in by radio. Her voice came through the static for hours, growing more urgent, reporting that fuel was running low and that the island could not be seen. Then the transmissions stopped.
Earhart was already one of the most recognised people in the world. In 1932 she had flown alone across the Atlantic, the first woman to do so, and she used her fame to argue that aviation, and much else, should be open to women. The flight of 1937 was an attempt to circle the globe close to the equator, the longest route anyone had tried, and she had completed roughly two thirds of it when she left New Guinea.
The search that followed was the largest the United States Navy had mounted for a single aircraft. Ships and planes covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of ocean and found nothing. Investigations have continued ever since, from the straightforward conclusion that the aircraft ran out of fuel and went down near Howland, to the theory that the pair reached an uninhabited island to the south and lived for a time as castaways. Expeditions still return to the region with new equipment.
Amelia Earhart is remembered less for the mystery than for what she did with her life while she had it. She wrote, lectured, mentored other women flyers and refused the limits that were placed on her. The unfinished flight has kept her name in the air, but the reason it still matters is the deliberate courage that put her over the Pacific in the first place.