Did these small mistakes doom Amelia Earhart?

On November 28, 1971, Elgen Long set his sights on Howland Island. Like Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, he was making a world flight—one he hoped would set multiple records. And like those two lost aviators, Long aimed to locate the speck of an island with celestial navigation. 

The 44-year-old pilot would use the same tools too: a bubble octant, which measures celestial bodies’ angle above the horizon, and a wet compass. His plane was a two-engine Piper Navajo that had previously been used for mountain rescue work and was much smaller than Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E. All the seats, except the pilot’s, were removed to make room for four extra fuel tanks. An inertial navigation system, which partially automated navigation, was installed by the company that had designed it for the Apollo missions. 

He didn’t plan to land on Howland; the island’s air-strip had long since been abandoned. He was just making a slight detour on his flight from Fiji to Wake Island to see if he could find the island Earhart and Noonan had missed. He had no idea he was launching himself on a decades-long quest.

Throughout his world flight, Long had relied on a system called the Carousel IV, which allowed him to automate navigation by plotting latitudinal and longitudinal waypoints—especially helpful when flying extended distances over water. But for this leg, he put a hood over the instrument so he wouldn’t be tempted to cheat. As the plane flew north, Long used the octant to periodically take sights on the sun—measuring its angle above the horizon to calculate his line of position. He then estimated his location on the line by comparing it to where he thought he should be, given his speed and the weather conditions. From there, he could determine if he needed to adjust his compass course to Howland.

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A sweep of thunderstorms forced Long to adjust his altitude and impacted his fuel supply. Later, it became so hot he flew shirtless. Nine hours into the 19-hour flight, he started his descent toward Howland. At first he couldn’t see it; there were too many clouds. But then the sun broke through and there it was, half a mile away and exactly where he’d thought it would be. His celestial navigation was spot-on. Lozenge-shaped and featureless, Howland barely rose above the waves. It wasn’t much to look at, but if the two lost fliers had spotted the island, they might have lived to a hearty old age. “There was no reason that I could see why Noonan couldn’t find it,” said Long.

Elgen Long officially broke three records for his class of airplane with his world flight, including fastest around the world at both poles and speed between the poles. Unofficially, he set many others, but couldn’t afford the several-hundred-dollar fee to confirm those. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale awarded him the Gold Air Medal—an honor he shared with his childhood hero, the American aviator Wiley Post.

After the ceremony in Paris, in which he met French president Georges Pompidou, he and Marie discussed what they would do next. Aviation had been so good to them that they decided they’d do something to give back: They’d solve one of its greatest mysteries. They’d figure out what happened to Amelia Earhart.

Finding the last people who heard Earhart's voice

Long was uniquely qualified to conduct the search: He’d been a radioman, a navigator, and a pilot. He’d flown in the Pacific just a few years after Earhart disappeared. He’d trained in accident investigation at the University of Southern California, the first major research university with an aircraft safety program, and had served as an aircraft crash investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association. And he was one of the very few people who had flown solo around the world. Marie would bring her formidable organizational and research abilities. They’d conduct this search as a team.

They decided to approach the mystery of Amelia Earhart as if it were any other investigation: They’d interview witnesses and examine the data. But Long knew they were up against some seemingly insurmountable hurdles. There was no black box, of course—U.S. planes weren’t required to carry flight recorders until 1965. More significant, they didn’t have the plane—no wreckage to painstakingly piece together for signs of structural failure, no smashed instruments to decipher for clues as to what was going on in the cockpit, no crash site to sift through for evidence of what went wrong. The plane had disappeared. If it ditched in the ocean, it would be far out of reach.

What they did have were witnesses: the people who knew Earhart and how she piloted a plane; those who knew Noonan and how he navigated; the many technicians who helped prepare the Lockheed Electra 10-E and its equipment for the world flight; the mechanics who serviced the plane as it circled the globe; and most crucially, the people in Lae, New Guinea, who prepared the plane and watched it take off, and the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard's Itasca waiting at Howland Island to guide it in.

(Amelia Earhart's search crew shares theories about her disappearance)

But all of this had happened so long ago that many of the key players had died, including Commander Warner K. Thompson, the captain of the Itasca (in 1939, suddenly, in Alaska); Amelia’s husband, George Palmer Putnam (1950, of kidney failure); and Earhart’s technical adviser Paul Mantz (1965, plane crash). Others were quite elderly. The Longs knew they had a limited window before the chance to interview these crucial witnesses was lost forever.

Their approach was methodical. They started by interviewing witnesses close to their California home: William Galten, an Itasca radioman; Lawrence Ames, a director at Lockheed; and Henry Anthony, a Coast Guard communications officer who discussed the radio schedule with Earhart before her first attempt at the world flight (and whose opinion of her was blisteringly negative and sexist). They spent a Hawaiian vacation meeting with the former colonists who had prepared Howland for Earhart’s arrival, including Yau Fai Lum, Ah Kin Leong, Paul Yat Lum, and Joseph Anakalea. They spoke with Arnold True, who had provided the weather forecasts, and William Swanston, the Itasca navigator who surveyed Howland and the other Line Islands. They talked to Noonan’s former colleagues at Pan Am, and Vernon Moore, who built Earhart’s radio direction finder. They tracked down Bo McKneely, Amelia’s personal mechanic, and the widows of Noonan, Mantz, and Putnam, who’d remarried twice after losing Earhart.

Eventually, they flew as far as Australia to interview Stanley Rose, who had changed the fuse on the Electra’s radio receiver in Darwin, Australia; Robert Iredale, who’d filled the plane’s fuel tanks at Lae; and James Collopy, the district superintendent who’d been in charge of civil aviation at Lae. They made it to Lae to speak with several people who had encountered Earhart and Noonan at the hotel where they stayed before their last flight. They interviewed Earhart’s sister, Putnam’s sons, and Neta Snook, the woman who taught Earhart how to fly. Slowly, they filled in the picture.

They got to Leo Bellarts, the chief radio operator on the Itasca, in 1973, a year before he died. He gave them a sense of the frustration on board the ship: “She apparently didn’t listen for us at all.” He sounds angry in the interview recording. “That’s what really disturbed us, and no little bit. She’d call or she’d come on and just say well, the weather’s overcast this, that, and the other thing and hang it up. Not ‘go ahead.’ She never tried to establish contact until the last quart of gas she had.”

(Inside Robert Ballard's search for Earhart's plane)

Thomas O’Hare, another Itasca radio operator, confirmed the confusion. Long caught up with O’Hare in 1975 at a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As it had with Bellarts, Earhart’s disappearance had evidently weighed on O’Hare for the last four decades. “Why couldn’t she hear me on [the frequency] 3,105?” he asked. Earhart had never responded to his messages on the frequency she said she’d be listening to, and O’Hare still didn’t understand why; the transmitter he was broadcasting on was powerful. She should have been able to hear him hundreds of miles out.

He often wondered if something was wrong with her transmitter. “Or was it all her fault?” Long didn’t answer him then. He waited until he could spend a long, sober day with O’Hare at his home nearby, going over the radioman’s logs and that of the ship, walking him through the events of July 2, 1937, moment by moment.

The Longs sifted through reams of documents: plane diagrams, inspection and repair reports, receipts for gas and oil. They went over Earhart’s notes and Noonan’s charts from the early legs of the world flight, which had been sent home from Australia. Long especially scoured the Itasca’s radio logs, as well as the ship’s official report describing the catastrophe and Pan Am’s account of what its Pacific radio stations heard of Earhart’s transmissions. Two decades into their research, they discovered a lost memo that proved crucial to their understanding of what happened.

It took the Longs more than 25 years to publish their conclusion: After a cascade of errors, the Lockheed Electra 10-E ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean near Howland. In their accounting, nearly everyone involved in the flight made mistakes or had the wrong information. None of these errors were insurmountable individually. Compounded, the Longs argued, they almost inevitably doomed Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.

A cascade of accidental errors

Earhart and Noonan never knew about their first mistake. Indeed, it wasn’t a mistake, just a matter of bad timing. When Earhart radioed the Itasca at 7:42 a.m. on July 2, 1937, to say, “we must be on you but cannot see you,” she was going by what their charts and Noonan’s dead reckoning was telling her. And she was right to rely on Noonan, who had pioneered Pan American’s commercial routes across the Pacific; few navigators were more experienced than he was in that region of the world. Yet the island wasn’t where he thought it would be.

The Itasca had been traveling down to the Line Islands—Howland, Baker 42 miles south, and Jarvis more than 1,000 miles to the east—since 1935, as part of the bid to establish them as U.S. territories. On one trip south from Hawaii, the ship’s navigator surveyed the islands and discovered existing maps put Howland nearly six miles east of where it actually was. (The island had last been charted by the U.S.S. Narragansett in 1872.) The Itasca sent the updated coordinates to Coast Guard headquarters, but an updated chart wasn’t published until June 1937—too late for Noonan to be apprised of the island’s real location.

Compounding the error, Noonan made what Long considered a baffling mistake: He assumed his compass presented the actual magnetic heading, without any deviation. Long examined the charts Noonan sent home, which included his calculations. “Whenever it came to deviation, he wrote zero,” said Long. But most compasses on most planes deviate, reacting magnetically to metal objects and electrical currents on board. “There’s no such thing in my navigational experience (and I’ve had a lifetime of it) in those days as a perfect compass,” he explained.

He estimated Noonan’s compass was actually off the mark by nearly four degrees—not a big deal for short flights (the Federal Aviation Administration now allows for deviations of up to 10 degrees) but potentially catastrophic in a long flight like theirs. This error may have put the Electra short by another six miles. Add that to the six miles from the incorrect map and Earhart’s “must be on you” was actually 12 miles west of Howland.

(Read Earhart's National Geographic essay about her record-setting 1935 flight)

Meanwhile, a wind blowing at exactly the wrong speed put them even farther off course: The Itasca had reported an easterly wind at four to eight miles an hour. Too weak to create whitecaps on the waves, thought Long, such a breeze would have been invisible to Earhart and Noonan. Noonan would have had no other way to measure wind speed as he had left his drift bomb behind in Lae. This light little wind pushed the Electra another six or so miles west. Now they were some 18 miles west of Howland, beyond visual range in the early morning sunlight.

But all wasn’t lost. Unpredictable conditions are a predictable element of any long journey, and Earhart had prepared for them. She knew finding Howland would be one of the trickiest parts of the world flight, and that the smallest error could put them off their course to the island. That’s why she’d established a radio communication plan with the Coast Guard—through their cutter, the Itasca—so they could talk her in if need be. That’s why she’d had a cutting-edge radio direction finder installed on her plane, and why the Itasca was waiting at Howland with its own pair of radio direction finders: a powerful low-frequency model on the ship and a portable high-frequency counterpart on the island. With these backup systems in place, she and Noonan would be able to make a slight course correction and within minutes see the rough runways on Howland Island. 

Unfortunately, according to the Longs, every one of those backup systems failed. 

The trouble began early on. Earhart had informed the Itasca she would transmit 15 minutes before and after the hour and listen for their messages on the hour and half hour. The radiomen misunderstood; they were used to keeping to schedules, which to them meant making an appointment with another radio operator to be on the same frequency at a set time. They thought that’s what Earhart would be doing, and assumed they’d be able to communicate back and forth.

But Earhart meant what she said. She’d flip on her transmitter to transmit messages at set times and turn on her receiver to listen for messages at others. She didn’t have time to hang out on a frequency waiting to chat. The Itasca had four radio operators whose sole responsibility was managing communications for the ship. The Electra only had Earhart. The discrepancy didn’t register with O’Hare, Bellarts, and their colleagues. When O’Hare demanded why she didn’t keep monitoring her receiver, Long responded with uncharacteristic heat: “She’s flying an airplane. She’s got to keep track of her fuel. She’s marking the engines. She’s navigating. She’s watching her autopilot. She’s doing everything.”

“Has she got the cans on her ears?” asked O’Hare. The headphones, he meant. “For 20 hours?” Long replied, his voice rising. “Her ears would fall off, for Christ’s sake.”

To Long, who’d flown solo around the world, it was clear: Earhart had to keep to the schedule she described so she could take care of everything else.

And there was another big problem with the communication plan—one the Longs called “the simplest of booby traps”: the time zones. Earhart was operating on Greenwich Mean Time (now Coordinated Universal Time or UTC) while the Itasca crew was on Greenwich time plus 11:30 (one hour behind Hawaiian Standard Time). In other words, the Longs wrote, “Earhart’s ‘on the hour’ was their ‘on the half hour.’” They weren’t transmitting when she was listening for them, and they were when she wasn’t. She never heard them, except once right toward the end.

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“The half-hour difference? Never gave it a thought,” said O’Hare. In Long’s recording of their interview, the former radio operator’s breath sounds short, as if the wind had been knocked out of him.

The one time Earhart did hear them, the Itasca was sending a message on 7,500 kilocycles in Morse code. And therein lies another big error, according to Long: Neither Noonan nor Earhart knew code, but the radiomen on board the ship assumed they did. In their world, everyone who operated a radio knew code. But because she didn’t, she would have turned the switch to off on her receiver for CW—continuous wave Morse code signals. When they transmitted code, all she would have heard was an undecipherable whoosh.

But despite the misunderstandings between the Electra and the Itasca, Earhart and Noonan might have landed safely on Howland Island if the cutting-edge technology they were all relying on as the ultimate backup had worked. And in this case, according to the Longs, the failure was not that of the Coast Guard crew—at least not completely—but of Earhart herself.

Earhart had originally planned on having a dedicated radio operator on board for the first few legs. But Henry Manning, a ship’s captain as well as an accomplished pilot, navigator, and radio operator who knew Morse code, backed out after Earhart crashed on her first attempt around the world. When the radio direction finder was installed on the plane, Manning had been the one to learn how it worked.

When Manning returned to his ship, Earhart received a brief tutorial. But she was too busy to practice using the device, which was so new that it didn’t even come with a manual. Not realizing that low frequencies were crucial to direction finding, she removed the trailing wire that would have made receiving them possible. She never figured out why she couldn’t get the direction finder to work throughout the world flight.

The problems with direction finding didn’t end there. If the Electra couldn’t receive signals on 500 kilocycles, it also couldn’t transmit them. The Itasca direction finder was powerful, but only worked at low frequencies; it would not be able to guide the plane in. There was still the high-frequency direction finder loaned to the Itasca for this mission. None of the crew members knew how to operate it. A young radio operator was temporarily transferred from another ship. But he didn’t know how to operate it either. Later, he would claim the batteries had run out, and that’s why he never homed in on Earhart. But when he finally returned to the ship with the direction finder, the wires were “twisted up like a bunch of rats’ tails,” as if the loop had been turned too hard. It was inoperable.

And there was one last miscalculation, according to the Longs—one that didn’t prevent Earhart and Noonan from finding the island, but did stop them from searching a little longer. The Electra had less fuel than Earhart realized. The tanks had been filled the day before they left Lae; tropical heat had affected the fuel’s density, effectively reducing the gallons on board from 1,100 to 1,092.

“She was in the middle of her last radio message when they went in,” said Long. “I can tie that down pretty good.” Long also thought he had a pretty good idea where the plane went down. Or at least where it didn’t.

He calculated that the Electra couldn’t have crashed anywhere within visual range of Howland Island—so nowhere within 20 nautical miles to the north, south, or east. To the west, the visual range shrank to 15 nautical miles because the aviators were flying toward the sun’s glare, which reduced visibility.

Knowing what Noonan didn’t know about the charts, his compass, and the wind, and making the standard assumption that dead reckoning is 90 percent accurate, Long calculated that at 8:43 in the morning on July 2, the plane crashed somewhere within a rectangle 62 miles north and south of Howland, 29 miles to the east, and 41 miles to the west. “If this approximately 2,000-square-nautical-mile area is searched, there is a 90 percent probability that the Electra will be found within it,” he wrote. The Longs were convinced they’d figured out what had happened to Earhart. Now they just needed to find the plane.