Amelia Earhart's Last Flight: The Final Radio Calls and What Happened Next

At about a quarter to eight on the morning of July 2, 1937, a radio operator on a U.S. Coast Guard ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean heard a woman's voice. Strong and clear. Close.

"We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low."

The ship was the Itasca. It was anchored off Howland Island, a flat speck of sand about two miles long, waiting to guide in the most famous pilot in the world.

The voice was Amelia Earhart's.

She was close enough to hear. Close enough to be heard. And she could not find the island.

An hour later, she sent one last message that anyone was sure of. And then the most famous woman in aviation, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were gone.

This is what we actually know about Amelia Earhart's last flight.

The most famous pilot in the world

By 1937, Amelia Earhart was one of the most famous people on earth.

In 1932, she became the first woman to fly alone, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. She was on magazine covers. She designed clothing and luggage. She lectured all over the country. She was a symbol of what women could do.

And she wanted one more record. She wanted to be the first woman to fly around the world. Not the short way, near the North Pole, but the long way. Close to the equator. About twenty-nine thousand miles.

For that, she had a plane built. A Lockheed Electra 10E, a twin-engine, all-metal airplane, with extra fuel tanks packed into the cabin. Purdue University, where she worked as an adviser, helped pay for it. She called it her "flying laboratory."

For a navigator, she chose Fred Noonan. He was one of the best in the world. A licensed ship's captain who had helped Pan American Airways chart its routes across the Pacific for the famous China Clipper flying boats.

The first attempt

The first attempt did not get far.

In March 1937, Earhart, Noonan and another navigator flew west from Oakland, California, to Hawaii. That part went fine.

Then, on March 20, during takeoff from Luke Field at Pearl Harbor, the Electra swerved and spun out on the runway. The landing gear collapsed. Both propellers hit the ground. Nobody was hurt, but the plane was badly damaged.

Some witnesses said a tire blew. Her technical adviser, Paul Mantz, blamed pilot error. Either way, the plane had to be shipped back to California for repairs.

When it was fixed, Earhart decided to try again. But this time, because of changing weather patterns, she would fly the other direction. East.

Around the world

On June 1, 1937, Earhart and Noonan took off from Miami. Just the two of them this time.

The route took them through the Caribbean to South America. Across the Atlantic to Africa. Across Africa to the Red Sea. Across the Arabian Sea to Karachi, in what was then India. Across India and Southeast Asia, through monsoon weather. Earhart got sick along the way.

On June 29, they landed at Lae, on the island of New Guinea.

They had flown about twenty-two thousand miles. There were about seven thousand left. Almost all of it over the Pacific Ocean.

And the next leg was the hardest of all.

The hardest leg

From Lae, the next stop was Howland Island.

Howland is tiny. About a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, and only a few feet above sea level. From the air, it would be very hard to see until you were nearly on top of it. And it was more than twenty-five hundred miles from Lae, across open ocean. Roughly twenty hours of flying.

There was no GPS in 1937. Noonan would navigate by the stars, the sun, and dead reckoning. To help with the final approach, the U.S. Coast Guard stationed a ship, the cutter Itasca, just off Howland. The Itasca would send radio signals the Electra could home in on, and it would send up a column of black smoke so Earhart could spot the island.

On the morning of July 2, 1937, at ten o'clock local time, the Electra took off from Lae with about eleven hundred gallons of fuel.

The radio problem

To understand what went wrong, you have to understand the radios.

Earhart's call sign was KHAQQ. She was mostly talking on one frequency, and listening on others. The Itasca was trying to find her using a radio direction finder, a device that tells you which way a signal is coming from. But the Itasca's direction finder could not pick up the frequency Earhart was transmitting on.

Earhart had a direction finder on her plane too. But she had had only a brief lesson in using it. And when the Itasca sent her signals, she could not get a bearing on them.

There were other problems. Earhart and the Itasca were using time systems half an hour apart, which caused confusion about when to transmit. The Itasca sent many of its messages in Morse code, but Earhart was not a skilled Morse operator. She preferred voice.

The result was that, through the long morning of July 2, the Itasca could hear Earhart, and Earhart could hear the Itasca, but they could not use those signals to find each other.

The last calls

The Itasca's radio operators logged Earhart's transmissions through the early morning. At first they were faint. Then they grew stronger, which meant she was getting closer.

At around seven forty-two, the operators logged this message:

"We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at one thousand feet."

Her signal was so strong that the operators believed she was very near.

The Itasca kept sending signals. Kept sending smoke. Earhart kept calling. She asked them to send voice signals she could take a bearing on. She said she was receiving their signals but could not get a direction.

At around eight forty-three, the Itasca heard what is generally accepted as her last confirmed message.

"We are on the line one five seven, three three seven. Will repeat message. We will repeat this on six two one zero kilocycles. Wait."

And then she said they were running on a north and south line.

That line, one five seven, three three seven, was a line of position. A compass line, running from southeast to northwest, that Noonan would have worked out to pass through Howland. It told them which line they were on. But not where on that line they were.

After that, the Itasca never heard from her again.

The search

Within about an hour, the Itasca began searching.

The search grew into the largest and most expensive air and sea search in American history up to that point. The Navy and Coast Guard sent ships and aircraft, including the battleship USS Colorado and the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. It cost about four million dollars at the time.

It found nothing. No oil slick. No wreckage. No life raft.

There was one more strange part. For several days after the disappearance, radio operators and ordinary people with shortwave radios in different places reported hearing calls that sounded like they could be from Earhart. Some were clearly hoaxes. The captain of the Colorado said the flood of calls added to the confusion. But some researchers believe at least a few of those signals were real, and that Earhart and Noonan were alive somewhere, sending distress calls from the plane.

The official search ended on July 19. Earhart's husband, George Putnam, paid for more searches of nearby islands.

On January 5, 1939, Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead.

The theories

So what happened? There are three main explanations.

The first is the simplest, and it is the one most historians and the U.S. government accepted. Earhart and Noonan could not find Howland, ran out of fuel, and went down in the ocean somewhere near the island. The plane sank in water thousands of feet deep. It is still down there.

Several expensive deep-sea searches have looked for it with sonar in the area north and west of Howland, in the 2000s and since. None has found it.

The second is the Nikumaroro hypothesis. Nikumaroro, then called Gardner Island, is a small uninhabited coral atoll about three hundred and fifty nautical miles southeast of Howland. It lies close to the line one five seven, three three seven, if you follow it southeast. The idea is that Earhart and Noonan flew down that line, landed on the reef at Nikumaroro at low tide, and survived for a while as castaways, sending radio calls until the plane was washed away.

There is some intriguing evidence. In 1940, a British colonial officer found part of a human skeleton on the island, along with what appeared to be part of a woman's shoe and a box that may have held a navigation instrument. A doctor who examined the bones at the time concluded they were from a man. The bones were later lost. Decades later, an anthropologist re-analyzed the doctor's measurements and argued they were consistent with Earhart. That analysis is disputed. Expeditions to the island have found intriguing objects, but nothing definitive. In 2019, the explorer Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic, searched the waters around Nikumaroro and found no sign of the plane.

The third is the Japanese capture theory. It says Earhart and Noonan went down in the Marshall Islands, then controlled by Japan, and were captured. Some people have collected accounts from islanders who said they saw a white woman pilot. But no physical proof has ever been found.

There was also a theory, popularized by a 1970 book, that Earhart survived and lived on in New Jersey under a different name. The woman named in the book sued, the publisher withdrew the book, and the case was settled. There is no credible evidence for that claim.

What we still don't know

Almost ninety years later, the Electra has never been found. Neither have Amelia Earhart or Fred Noonan.

What we know is this. On the morning of July 2, 1937, two of the most experienced aviators in the world were somewhere close to a tiny island in the middle of the largest ocean on earth. They could hear the ship waiting for them. The ship could hear them. And somehow, they never found each other.

"We must be on you but cannot see you."

Did they go down in the deep ocean near Howland? Did they reach Nikumaroro and survive for a time, calling for help that never came? Or did something else happen?

What do you think?