What Happened to Amelia Earhart: Untangling the Search for Her Plane

After the largest rescue effort ever for a single lost plane failed to find a trace of Earhart, Noonan or the Electra, naval authorities called off the search on July 19. Noonan was declared dead in absentia on June 20, 1938. The same was said of Earhart on Jan. 5, 1939.

But the search for answers as to what really happened—some preferred to believe that reports of Earhart’s death were greatly exaggerated—continued, and never stopped.

And now, researchers have arrived on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, to investigate the Taraia Object—an unidentified shape submerged in a lagoon that the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery believes to be the wreckage of Earhart’s plane.

Here’s what to know about Earhart’s disappearance and what happens next as the search for her plane heats up once again:

What happened during Amelia Earhart’s final flight?

Earhart and Noonan had already traveled 22,000 miles when they took off for what turned out to be the last time.

Since leaving Miami on June 1, 1937, they had spent 21 days in the air, flying for 13 hours straight on three of those days.

She and Noonan arrived in Lae on June 29 and left July 2 at 10:22 a.m. for what would be the most taxing leg of their journey yet, a 2,556-mile, 20-hour flight to Howland Island. From there, it would’ve been on to Honolulu, and then Oakland, their intended final destination.

Lae radioman Harry Balfour remained in touch with Earhart for seven hours, according to Doris L. Rich‘ 1989 biography Amelia Earhart, but she wasn’t heard from again until 2:45 a.m. (still on July 2, local time) by crew aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which was sent to the Howland Island to aid with comms and navigation for Earhart’s return.   

Why did the disappearance of Amelia Earhart become such a big mystery?

Since no trace of the aviator, her navigator or the plane was ever found, that left a lot of blanks for people to fill in, and countless theories have been floated in the nine decades since Earhart and Noonan vanished.

The Los Angeles Times noted in 1987 that every presidential administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s had officially denied that her stated attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe was a cover for Earhart’s true mission, to overfly a suspected Japanese military buildup in the South Pacific. The government also denied she and Noonan were captured, imprisoned or executed by enemy forces.

What’s happening with the search for Amelia Earhart’s plane?

Years of research led the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery to propose that Earhart and Noonan’s journey ended on the uninhabited South Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, part of the Phoenix Islands of the Republic of Kiribati—and that a murky shape submerged in a lagoon, captured in satellite images and dubbed the Taraia Object, is the Electra wreckage.

On Oct. 13, aided by a 17-member boat crew, 17 people from the Taraia Object expedition—a joint effort between the Archaeological Legacy Institute, Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University (which was set to house Electra after Earhart’s flight was completed)—arrived on Nikumaroro after a five-day, 830-nautical-mile voyage from Tarawa in hopes of filling in the biggest blank of all.

Once they reached the lagoon, expedition leader Rick Pettigrew explained, per a Purdue news release, “We will start our remote sensing work using magnetometers and sonar to get a better idea of what is there before we actually uncover it. After that is all done, we will uncover it using a hydraulic dredge.”

The team planned to spend five days on Nikumaroro, according to Purdue. But they would sleep off-shore on their boat, the Marin Mainiku, for various reasons, not least being the presence of giant coconut crabs “whose size and overnight activity make staying on the island impractical.”

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