Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean
On this day · 2 July 1937
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart radioed she was low on fuel near a tiny island, then was never heard from again.
On July 2, 1937, aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island, a flat sliver of land more than 2,500 miles away across open Pacific. It was one of the last legs of her attempt to fly around the world near the equator.
The island was barely a mile and a half long and almost impossible to spot. As fuel ran down, Earhart radioed the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, waiting offshore, but the signals never let either side fix her position.
“We are running north and south,” she reported, low on fuel. Then nothing.
A vast Navy and Coast Guard search found no trace of the plane or its crew. Decades of expeditions and theories, from a fuel-starved crash at sea to a landing on a distant atoll, have settled nothing. Earhart’s disappearance remains aviation’s most enduring mystery.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
