Three-quarters of the globe behind them, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, now had only the Pacific Ocean left to cross. They took off midmorning from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 1, 1937, bound for Howland Island, an 8,200-foot-long, paramecium-shaped speck halfway to Honolulu. A runway had been carved out on the uninhabited island for their use. Fuel awaited them, and the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca stood by with radio-direction-finding equipment. Earhart would navigate by pilotage and dead reckoning until nightfall; they would then rely on Noonan’s celestial navigation until the sun rose an hour before their anticipated arrival. Thereafter, Earhart would dead-reckon again.
Amelia Earhart’s Final Flight
Key Takeaways:
- A 1999 study suggests Amelia Earhart's Electra had a significantly shorter actual fuel duration (20-21 hours) than the commonly believed 24 hours, due to factors like less dense fuel from tropical temperatures, altitude effects on consumption, and a constant 26 mph headwind.
- This limited fuel, coupled with critical failures in radio direction-finding equipment and the extreme difficulty of visually locating the tiny Howland Island, indicates Earhart and Noonan most likely ran out of fuel near their destination and were lost in the Pacific.
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