Daughter of the sky

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan and their plane were lost somewhere over a possible area of 450,000 square miles in the South Pacific. The United States Navy was determined to find them.

In Washington Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William D. Leahy acted quickly and ordered ships and planes to take up the search for the missing fliers. In addition to the Itasca, an aircraft carrier and its full complement of planes, a battleship, four destroyers, a minesweeper, and a seaplane were pressed into service. Together these ships and planes would search for sixteen days an area of more than 250,000 square miles.

Commander Thompson of the Itasca made some quick decisions after Amelia failed to arrive at Howland. If she had flown to the south, she should have seen Baker Island, just 38 miles south of Howland. The area to start looking for her, he concluded, was in the northwest quadrant indicated by the 337° of her last position report of 157-337.

Also, he was far from abandoning hope. Although Amelia was having radio trouble, there was every belief that Fred Noonan could make a fix and yet find Howland. Radio transmissions, therefore, continued around the clock at the same frequencies, of 3,105, 6,210, and 500 kilocycles.

If Amelia were leaning out her fuel at the rate of 50 gallons per hour, at the end of twenty-one hours, at 9:00 A.M. on the morning of July 2, she would have enough fuel left for two more hours of flying time, for she had had 1,150 gallons of gasoline aboard the aircraft. If, on the other hand, AE were using fuel at just under 45 gallons per hour, she could have flown for a total of twenty-six hours—until 12:00 noon, Lae time, but 2:00 P.M. Howland time. In other words, just as her tanks were going dry, her chronometer for elapsed time would have indicated approximately twelve o’clock. The Navy reasoned, presumably from AE’s point of view in the cockpit, that she could stay aloft trying to find some island somewhere until about noon.

If she were slightly north and west of Howland, and realized the fact, she would have tried for the Gilbert Islands; or, if she were even more north and west, she would have attempted the Marshall or Caroline Islands; if extremely north and west, the Mariana Islands. The last possibility was most unlikely.

“If they are down,” George Putnam wired from San Francisco, “they can stay afloat indefinitely. Their empty tanks will give them buoyancy. Besides, they have all the emergency equipment they’ll need—everything.”

That the Navy was unable to find the two fliers defies understanding if all the conclusions and predications were correct.

At 10:15 A.M. the Itasca steamed north, and a Navy seaplane took off from Honolulu bound for Howland, to help in the search.

At twelve o’clock Amelia was reported as definitely not having reached Howland. Her time had just about run out. She was most probably down; somewhere close by, everyone hoped, either riding the wing of the floating Electra, or paddling away from it in the emergency rubber raft. Holding to the first assumption, the Itasca listened for AE’s SOS on 3,105 and 500, because it was believed that the plane’s radio supply was by battery and that the antenna could be used from on top of the wing. The Itasca pressed the search and kept calling the Electra continuously.

Because only portions of Amelia’s transmissions had been received during the night, and those garbled amid static, the Navy concluded that the Electra had been flying through or above thunderstorms.

After her last report to Lae, at 5:20 P.M. on July 2, something had happened to put her off course. After sunset at 5:55 P.M. and during the night until sunrise at 6:12 A.M. the next morning, she had somehow become lost.

The navigation procedures of Fred Noonan tend to confirm this last view. It was his practice, according to those who knew him, to follow course and to correct it by taking infrequent fixes during the night; then, just before dawn, he would correct course for destination by determining a line of position near the end of the estimated run. This procedure would allow a flight of about three hundred miles during the morning without a good fix.

If the compasses had tumbled during the night and if the chronometers were badly out of calibration, then there were navigation errors aplenty—especially where Amelia depended on a faulty radio to make her landfall at Howland.

The seaplane out of Honolulu had to turn back to base because of bad weather. During the initial part of its 1,800-mile flight to Howland, however, it constantly received transmissions from the Itasca. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with the ship’s radios.

The Lockheed engineers were contacted to find out whether the Electra’s radio could operate if the plane were floating. Their answer was the first heavy note of discouragement. The Electra’s radio definitely could not operate if it were on the water, they wired, because it needed the right engine for power. But, they added, the plane could float from the buoyancy provided by the empty tanks for a maximum period of nine hours. It was now hoped, for radio purposes, that the Electra had made an emergency landing on land.

The Itasca searched an area of 9,500 square miles without success. In addition to constant transmission on 3,105 and 500, during the day it set up a smoke screen, and during the night it played its searchlight against the sky. These measures were in vain.

On July 7 the battleship Colorado and the minesweeper Swan joined forces with the cutter Itasca. The Colorado with its planes went south and east through the Phoenix Islands, exploring the 157° reciprocal of 337° represented in AE’s last reported line of position. The Swan and the Itasca turned north and then west to the Gilbert Islands.

On July 9 the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 63 planes, accompanied by the four destroyers Perkins, Cushing, Lamson, and Drayton, sailed from Hawaii. They arrived in the Howland area on the thirteenth to lend their support to the search. For the next five days the Lexington’s planes logged 1,591 hours looking north and west for the missing fliers. The planes covered an area of 151,556 square miles without turning up a trace of the Electra or its pilot and navigator.

Each ship was required to send out the same broadcast:

All attempts by the ships and planes were in vain. After exploring an area of 161,000 square miles, nothing was found of the Electra, the life raft, Amelia Earhart, or Fred Noonan.

Newspapers and radio stations across the country told the story of the disappearance and the search. Americans could not believe that Amelia Earhart was missing, and would not believe that she was dead. Everything about the story was too sudden, too tragic.

False signals and false reports now began to give spark to a despairing hope. On one of the ships two lookouts and an officer of the deck had seen a distinct green flare on the northern horizon. It was known that AE’s rubber raft had emergency flares. The Itasca steamed north and east to investigate; at the same time it asked AE on the radio if she were sending up flares, and if she were, to send up another one. A few seconds later another green light appeared at a bearing of 75°. It was seen by twenty-five witnesses.

The Itasca now checked with other ships in the area to find out if they had seen the flares. The replies were all in the negative; the signals, they cautioned, were probably heat lightning.

Howland Island then reported flares to the northeast. The men on the island immediately set flame to three drums of gasoline, hoping that the fire would serve as an unmistakable beacon. The Swan reported more lights but thought that they were meteors.

Because of the position, appearance, and timing of the lights, the Itasca seriously thought that they were flares; but because of the other dissenting reports, it was now decided that the lights were merely a meteoric shower.

There were all kinds of radio reports. Amateur and professional radio operators from Honolulu; from up and down the west coast of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle; from across the Rocky Mountains in Cheyenne; and from as far inland as Cincinnati, now reported hearing SOS signals from Amelia Earhart.

If Amelia had landed on an island or reef, and were using her radio, it was possible that her signals had skip-waved back and forth and forward between ionosphere and ocean across thousands of miles. Yet, if there were SOS signals, they were not heard in the Pacific by the official radio operators on any of the assigned Navy and Coast Guard ships, or on any of the shore stations from the Gilbert Islands through the Hawaiian Islands to San Francisco Radio on the West Coast.

In exploring the Gilbert Islands, the Itasca sent a party ashore to Tarawa, to confer with the senior British administrator of the islands. He had been informed of the Earhart search, and was surprised that neither the station at Tarawa nor the one at Beru had been notified about the flight before it began from Lae. Both stations, although they heard no Electra transmissions, could have helped, for Amelia’s course had lain just 20 miles south of Arorae, the most southern island of the Gilbert group.

The concentration of the search to the northwest had been based on a very careful analysis of the evidence. The weather conditions at the end of the flight were a clear blue sky to the south and east of Howland but heavy cloud banks about fifty miles north and west of Howland.

The Itasca had laid a heavy smoke screen for two hours on the morning of July 2; it would have been visible to AE, flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet, for more than forty miles from the south and east, but only twenty miles from the north and west.

Evidently, judging from her reports, Amelia had been flying earlier during the night at a high altitude and above a thick overcast of clouds. Her signal strength, if direct and not the result of skip waves, indicated a maximum distance of 250 miles from Howland and not nearer to the island than 30 miles. Such was the conclusion of the Itasca.

All available land areas were searched and hundreds of thousands of miles of sea area. On July 19, 1937, the Navy released the Itasca from any further search; the cutter’s mission was completed.

Back in California George Palmer Putnam had called on Jacqueline Cochran. He remembered Amelia’s having told him about her friend’s strange and marvelous powers at extrasensory perception. He was very excited when he came into Miss Cochran’s Los Angeles apartment. He begged her to help him locate Amelia.

Miss Cochran told GP where the plane had gone down: that it had ditched in the ocean, that Fred Noonan had fractured his skull against the bulkhead, that Amelia was alive, and that the plane was floating on the water. She named the Itasca as a ship that was in the area although she had never heard the name before; and she named a Japanese fishing vessel in the same location. She told GP to get ships and planes into the area immediately to begin the search.

For two days Jacqueline Cochran followed the course of the drifting Electra. Ships and planes searched the area of her insight, but to no avail. Miss Cochran was racked with disappointment. If her ability were worth anything, she reasoned, it should have been able to locate and save her friend. Giving up, Jacqueline Cochran went to the cathedral in Los Angeles and lit candles for the repose of Amelia’s soul. She never tried her powers at ESP again.

Amelia had unquestionably disappeared. At best, her attitude toward her radio plans for the flight was casual; at worst, a combination of poor coordination, faulty radio receiver, and imperfect navigation instruments, had sent plane, pilot, and navigator to a watery grave.

The search over, rumors now began to abound and multiply about what had really happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan.

Each would cause Noonan’s wife and Amelia’s husband and mother untold hours of anguish and false hope.