Victoria’s Read

At 8:43 a.m. local time, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, steaming off Howland Island, receives this faint transmission from Amelia Earhart: “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you — but gas is running low….”

She vanishes along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, into the Central Pacific and they’re never heard from again.

The disappearance of the celebrated flier remains perhaps the most tantalizing unsolved mystery in aviation history.

In the age of Charles Lindbergh and other daredevil fliers, Amelia Earhart became a household name in 1928, after becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

True, it was as a passenger with a male pilot and copilot, but she soloed across the Atlantic in 1932.
Although fellow pilots rated her as no better than competent, Earhart parlayed her sex and her absolute devotion to flying into a celebrity that few of her contemporaries enjoyed. And it’s not like she wasn’t legit: Earhart was the first pilot of either sex to successfully fly solo from Honolulu to the U.S. mainland, reaching Oakland, California, on Jan. 11, 1935.

She wrote voluminously about her experiences and worked hard to promote aviation, both to women and to the public at large.

Various stations around the Pacific reported receiving unidentified signals, leading to the hope that Earhart and Noonan had somehow managed to find land somewhere. None of these reports amounted to anything.
Over the years the mystery only deepened, leading to some pretty fanciful theories concerning Earhart’s fate.

The likeliest explanation for what became of Earhart and Noonan is that they ran out of fuel, ditched at sea and drowned, but there are other theories out there still being pursued. In any case, they were officially declared dead Jan. 5, 1939.

As for Earhart herself, she knew she was taking a big risk for high stakes:
“Please know I am quite aware of the hazards…. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.”