Pilot Amelia Earhart vanished 89 years ago but the legend lives on

Imagine your mission was to find long-lost American aviation* pioneer Amelia Earhart, who has been missing for almost 90 years.

Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in May 1932. But in 1937, she and her navigator* Fred Noonan mysteriously vanished while flying over the Pacific during their attempt to fly around the world.

WHAT IS KNOWN
At 10am on July 2, 1937, Earhart’s plane, a silver Lockheed Electra, took off from an airport in Lae, in modern-day Papua New Guinea. She and Noonan had already flown 35,000km over the course of a month. But this leg of the trip would be their most difficult.

Their intended destination was Howland Island, a tiny speck of land spanning just 2.5km in the vast Pacific Ocean. It would take 18 or more hours to get there, and they had just enough fuel to do it. If they missed, there would be nowhere else to go.

They never arrived at the island. The radio operator on the Itasca – the ship awaiting them at Howland – heard Earhart’s increasingly frantic messages but couldn’t get through to her.

“We must be on you but cannot see you,” Earhart reportedly said.

An hour and a half after her last message, the Itasca notified the Coast Guard in San Francisco.

The US government looked for Earhart and Noonan for 16 days before calling off the official search.

The unofficial search carried on and has now endured for almost 90 years. Here are three popular theories around Earhart’s disappearance that National Geographic writer Rachel Hartigan explores in her new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life.

THEORY NO. 1: CAPTURED
Immediately after the official search ended, some Americans began to wonder if Earhart had been captured by the Japanese*.

“It was sort of in the air when she disappeared, partly because the Japanese had control of all these islands in the Pacific … and they weren’t letting many foreigners in,” Ms Hartigan told the New York Post. “So, paranoid*-minded people started to wonder what was going on there.”

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, such theories reached a fever pitch and persisted long after the Second World War.

THEORY NO. 2: CASTAWAY
The idea that Earhart made an emergency landing on a deserted island was immediately appealing at the time, especially given her reputation for extraordinary feats of derring-do*.

In the 1980s, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) decided to look again down a well-trodden path of inquiry toward the Phoenix Islands, southeast of Howland.

Hartigan said the group, which hoped to recover the plane, figured “if the plane was passing through Howland, then it would have passed really close to Nikumaroro”, an uninhabited coral atoll* in the western Pacific Ocean that is part of the Phoenix Islands.

Since 1989, TIGHAR has made about a dozen expeditions to Nikumaroro.

“They have found some things that are suggestive of a castaway living there, or being there at least for a short time,” Ms Hartigan said.

However, there was already a shipwreck on the island that was there several years before Earhart’s disappearance, and any signs of human life could have come from an earlier castaway.

THEORY NO. 3: SANK
The most likely explanation also remains the most straightforward: that Earhart couldn’t find the island, ran out of fuel, and crashed somewhere in the Pacific.

There were several factors that could have made Earhart and Noonan miss their target. Neither of them really knew how to use their radio direction finder, which would have helped them figure out where the ship’s transmissions were coming from.

Neither of them knew Morse Code, either, which also made communication difficult.

And most significantly, Noonan’s flight charts were inaccurate, reportedly placing Howland Island nearly 10km east of its actual location.

The world may never know Earhart and Noonan’s final resting place – but after almost a century of trying, there’s no end in sight for the aviation buffs, scientists and sleuths who are determined to keep searching.

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission

Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life is published by National Geographic

POLL

GLOSSARY

• aviation: flying
• navigator: a crew member who plots the pilot’s course using maps and instruments in order to make sure they arrive at their destination safely
• Japanese: during WWII, the Japanese took control of Korea, Taiwan and large parts of China as well as many Pacific Island nations. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an American Naval Base in Hawaii, the Japanese cemented themselves in attack against the US, which had remained neutral in the global war up until this point
• paranoid: worried about bad things happening without having evidence to suggest they will actually occur
• atoll: a ring shaped island or reef shaped of coral

EXTRA READING
Brit artist Banksy finally unmasked
Captain Cook’s ship found at last
Ancient city or natural formation?

QUICK QUIZ
1. What was Amelia Earhart famous for achieving in 1932?
2. When did she go missing?
3. What was risky about her flight to Howland Island?
4. How many days did the US Government officially search for Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan?
5. Which of the three theories around her disappearance is the most likely?

LISTEN TO THIS STORY

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Where did they disappear?
Find Papua New Guinea and Howland Island on a map (use an online map if you like). Using information from the story, draw a line or diagram that shows Amelia Earhart’s flight path. Circle where you think her plane may have disappeared. Write one sentence explaining why you chose that location.

Time: Spend at least 30 minutes on this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Geography

2. Extension
Imagine that you are part of a search team trying to solve what happened to Amelia Earhart after she disappeared. Consider the three main theories: she was captured, became a castaway on an island, or ran out of fuel and sank in the ocean. Choose the theory you think is most likely and explain your reasoning using evidence from the story. What questions do you still have about her disappearance?

Time: Spend at least 45 minutes on this activity
Curriculum Links: English, History

VCOP ACTIVITY
Wow word recycle
There are plenty of wow words (ambitious pieces of vocabulary) being used in the article. Some are in the glossary, but there might be extra ones from the article that you think are exceptional as well.

Identify all the words in the article that you think are not common words, and particularly good choices for the writer to have chosen.

Select three words you have highlighted to recycle into your own sentences.

If any of the words you identified are not in the glossary, write up your own glossary for them.

Extension
Find a bland sentence from the article to up-level. Can you add more detail and description? Can you replace any base words with more specific synonyms?

Down-level for a younger audience. Find a sentence in the article that is high level. Now rewrite it for a younger audience so they can understand the words without using the glossary.