Still searching for Amelia Earhart

Mysteries are alluring, especially those of explorers who seem to simply vanish without explanation

ighty years ago this month American aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared while trying to find tiny Howland Island, a dot in the Pacific Ocean. They had radioed that their twin-engine Lockheed Electra was running short on fuel. Generations of Americans have been trying to find her ever since. It is hard to overstate her celebrity when she vanished. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the first pilot to cross on her own from Hawaii to San Francisco. In her latest adventure, she was trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the planet at the Equator.

In the early years of commercial aviation, with many frontiers still to be conquered, her exploits pointed the way to the future. And not just in aviation. She was a woman making her considerable mark in a man’s world. Now she is in the news again.

A blurry photograph has been found in the files of the National Archives in Washington that shows a woman who might be Earhart and a man who might be Noonan. It was shot on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The photo is a basis for a History Channel documentary and is seen by its advocates as further proof that Earhart and Noonan were rescued and jailed by the Japanese. That’s not likely, though.

This theory has popped up from time to time over the years. The idea was originally proposed and investigated by Fred Goerner, a CBS radio journalist, who headed several expeditions to the island of Saipan in the 1960s to track down the truth. He was sure Earhart and Noonan had been captured by the Japanese and taken to Saipan. He uncovered no concrete evidence to support his theory, but remained convinced that he was right.

There are other reasons to discount his theory, principally that in 1937 the United States and Japan were not at war and Japan had not yet begun to fortify the islands. It had nothing to hide. The claim was again thoroughly investigated in 1981 by the journalist Fukiko Aoki, who concluded it was baseless. She interviewed a crew member of the Koshu Maru, one of two Japanese ships in the area where Earhart is thought to have crashed. The ship had received orders to search for the plane but found nothing. Aoki also read the ship’s log, which made no mention of Earhart. [It has now been reported that the photograph supposedly showing Earhart alive in the Marshall Islands in 1937 is from a Japanese book published years before the famed aviatrix disappeared, in 1935 to be precise, a military expert said yesterday].

No concrete evidence

Another theory now being explored in an expedition partly backed by National Geographic is that Earhart and Noonan ended up hundreds of miles southeast of the Marshall Islands, landing on the atoll Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands. But 11 earlier expeditions there did not yield any concrete evidence. Based on my research as an Earhart biographer, I believe the best guess about what happened is that her plane ran out of gas, lost altitude, hit the water in a way that Earhart and Noonan could not survive and sank in an area where the Pacific is 16,000 feet deep.

In 2009, Ted Waitt, a wealthy co-founder of a computer company, financed a search of the ocean floor on the west side of Howland Island using autonomous underwater roving vehicles. The vehicles picked out pieces of metal resting on the ocean floor, including a 55-gallon (208 litres) steel drum. Other expeditions have continued to search the surrounding ocean, without success.

Eighty years after she vanished, why does Earhart continue to have such a hold on our imaginations? Because she died at the height of her fame, unsullied. At the dawn of the air age, she and her fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh were the faces of American exceptionalism. Walter Trumbull, a newspaper columnist at the time, put it well: “So now Charles Lindbergh and you are the only two who have ever flown the ocean alone and the championship, as John L. Sullivan would say, remains in America.” In Britain, the Sunday Express said, “Her glory sheds luster on all womanhood.”

Earhart’s last flight was front-page news at the time. She sent chronicles of her circumnavigation to the New York Herald Tribune. By July 2, 1937, Earhart had completed nearly two-thirds of the journey when she and Noonan disappeared. If they were captured by the Japanese, it would mean that her piloting skills had saved them in a crashlanding and reaffirm her image as the Wonder Woman of the day. The same could be said of a landing on Nikumaroro. Of course, mysteries are alluring and perhaps none more so than those of explorers who seem to simply vanish, without explanation. But whatever happened 80 years ago will do nothing to diminish Earhart’s legacy as a pioneering aviator and woman unafraid to breach the constraints of her time. East to the Dawn: The Life