Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan vanished during a leg of their round-the-world flight, last heard from as they searched for tiny Howland Island in the vast Pacific. Despite the largest air-and-sea search in U.S. history at the time, no confirmed trace of the plane or crew was ever recovered.
Earhart's final radio transmissions, received aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, grew increasingly desperate: she reported running low on fuel and being unable to locate the tiny island that was supposed to be their refueling stop, an almost impossibly small target — barely two miles long — in thousands of miles of open ocean. Her last confirmed message placed her running on a line of position, still searching.
The disappearance triggered a search costing $4 million and covering 250,000 square miles of ocean, the most extensive air-and-sea search operation the U.S. Navy had ever mounted, yet it turned up nothing. The mystery has fueled decades of theories — crash and sink, capture by the Japanese, survival on a remote atoll — none proven, all part of the enduring legend of America's most famous aviatrix.
Key people: Amelia Earhart, Fred Noonan