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 Caltech study argues Amelia Earhart's plane had a significantly shorter fuel duration (20-21 hours) than commonly believed, suggesting she ran out of fuel near Howland Island.
- This reduced effective range was due to high tropical temperatures decreasing fuel density and a constant 26 mph headwind increasing the flight's true distance.
- Combined with unreliable radio communication and the immense difficulty of finding the tiny, low-lying Howland Island, these critical factors likely led to her disappearance due to fuel exhaustion.
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