The Amelia Earhart tragedy - accident, Japanese threat or spying for the U.S?

Charles Lindburgh and Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) was a Kansan who learned to love fly­ing while attending a Toronto air-show in WWI. She enjoyed flying lessons and set a women’s altitude record of 14,000’ in 1922, but wasn’t yet committed to a flying career. She studied health at Columbia Univ­ersity and then was a social worker in Boston, becoming the only female member of a local pilots association.

George Palmer Putnam, pub­lisher of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 book "We", was looking for a female Lindbergh to replicate the suc­c­ess of the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic. In 1928, fascinated by Earhart & her similarity to Lind­bergh, Putnam invited her to be a passeng­er on a transatlantic flight. In Jun 1928, on the an­nivers­ary of Lindberg’s Paris journey, she became the first woman to fly ac­ross the Atlantic and back. The two married in Feb 1931, and he became her pub­l­icist/backer in the May 1932 flight.

In her 1932 memoir The Fun of It, Earhart wrote flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it was worth the price. Perhaps not, but she actually was a best selling author. Her career got going. She paid for her flying by being a writer and public speaker. Her publicity stunts paid well too; in 1935, she was paid heaps to become the first person to fly from Hawaii to mainland U.S. 

Purdue Uni engaged the World’s #1 Airwoman to run a career centre for women, and she inspired many to switch from cooking to engineering and to the aviation industry. But by 39 this role-model for women knew she had only 1 more noteworthy flight in her. For her last proj­ect, she began by flying from Oak­land to Miami, where she announced she would fly around the world. 

She took off 1st June 1937, and en route, reported regularly to the U.S media. After leaving Darwin on 30th June, Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan stopped at Lae New Guinea, before leaving the next day for the longest and most dang­erous leg of the flight. But they disap­peared in the central Pacific Ocean. somewhere on their way to Howland Island, 4,113 km ms away .

Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan

A search was quickly organised, but where would they look? The Coast Guard cut­ter Itasca, which had been sent from San Diego to Howland Is, could have taken directional bearings on the Earhart plane, if only it had tuned its signals better. And the Itasca‘s com­mander might have sear­ch­ed better, if the plane had radioed its position often. But after New Guinea, NO pos­it­ion reports were received.

When word that the Earhart plane was lost reached the U.S, hus­band George Putnam sent a telegram to Pres Roosevelt. In any case the Secretary of the Navy had already ordered the Navy to start searching. The battleship Colorado launched small planes from its deck but they saw nothing rele­vant. By week’s end, the Colorado’s planes had scanned 100,000+ square miles.

The Itasca went on with its patrol until they ran out of petrol. The minesweeper Swan landed searchers on Canton Is. And the air­craft carrier Lex­ing­ton, with 62 planes aboard and an escort of 4 destroyers, left San Diego, refuelled in Hawaii and continued into the search area.

Dozens of amateurs continued to report messages from the lost plane’s radio, but Navy radio experts doubted them. If the Lex­ington’s great fleet of planes could not find the lost flyers, the Rear Admiral who coordinated the search would abandon it. The flyers would not be alive by then. The oceans had claimed another aircraft in similar conditions to Kingsford Smith’s tragic disappearance in 1935 during his flight to break a UK-Australia speed record.

Later the Navy told the court that Earhart and Noonan had no petrol left, crashed into the Pacific and drowned. So a court declared her legally dead in Jan 1939. That tragic end was the result of years of searching for Earhart and decades of specul­ation about what had happ­ened. But while the formal search end­ed, the citizen search was just beginning. Earhart’s death laun­ched conspiracy theories that continued.

Some blamed Japan, America’s WW2 enemy, even though Pearl Harb­our didn’t happen for another 4.5 years. The theory proposed that the pilots had landed on the Marshall Islands, then-Japanese, and were taken prisoners.

And in 1970 the book Amelia Earhart Lives, by former Air Force Major Joseph Gervais argued that Earhart was on “a spy mission for Pres Roosevelt, interned in Japan during the war and traded back to the U.S in 1945, where she lived on.

In 1991, TIME reported that the FBI confirmed a clue to her last landing site; an aluminium map case was rec­ov­ered by aircraft archaeologists on an atoll near Howland Is. More recently, a Nat­ion­al Arch­ives photograph was discussed showing that Earhart and Noonan died on an atoll in the Japanese Marshall Is­lands. Ted Waitt, producer of biopic Amelia, financed as recently as 2009 a robotic search of the ocean floor near Howland Is, to find the plane.

My best reference was Museum of Fine Arts and Sciences NSW. For the top modern theories about Amelia Earhart's disapp­ear­ance, and for modern search projects, see National Geographic. A very interesting blog is Amelia Earhart.