Amelia Earhart's last radio message came at 8:43 am

Amelia Earhart’s last confirmed radio message reached the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca at about 8:43 am on 2 July 1937, as she and navigator Fred Noonan hunted for Howland Island, a strip of land just two miles long, at the end of a planned 2,556-mile flight from Lae, New Guinea.

What did Earhart’s last message say?

The Itasca’s radio log, now held by the US National Archives, logs her plane by its call sign, KHAQQ, and records the final call in operator shorthand. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum gives it in full:

“We are on the line of position 157-337. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.” — Amelia Earhart, 2 July 1937

A line of position tells a navigator which direction a line runs, not where on it the aircraft is, so the message could not pin her down. The decisive failure was that the plane and the Itasca never made two-way contact: Earhart may never have heard the cutter at all, she struggled with her new Bendix direction-finding radio, and neither flier knew Morse code. It was meant to be one of the final legs of a round-the-world flight by the pilot who in 1932 had become the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo.

Has anyone found the plane?

No. The US government’s search, its largest ever for a lost aircraft, ended on 19 July without a trace. National Archives files show Japan offered help too: Tokyo sent the survey ship Koshu toward the Marshall Islands and told its fishing craft to watch for her, a detail rarely mentioned by theories that Japan captured her.

Private hunts continue. In 2024 a deep-sea company’s sonar image of a “plane” turned out to be a rock formation. An expedition backed by the Purdue Research Foundation to inspect the Taraia Object, an anomaly in the lagoon of Nikumaroro in Kiribati, was postponed from November 2025 to 2026 while awaiting clearance from Kiribati’s government.