THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AMELIA EARHART

In the early morning hours of 2 July 1937, American aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, embarked on the last leg of a daring attempt to circumnavigate the world at its widest point, the equator. Leaving New Guinea, they faced a grueling eighteen hours in the air. It was to be the longest and most difficult part of their flight. Their target was an inconceivably tiny island in the Pacific Ocean---Howland Island---2,556 miles away. They never arrived, and today, their fate is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time.
At the time of her disappearance, Amelia Earhart was the most famous woman flyer in the world. Her first plane ride came when she was a college student planning on a career in medicine. Being a tomboy by nature and a daredevil by design, she was instantly enchanted with the thrill of flying. But to establish herself as a flyer, she had to overcome obstacles and opposition that her male counterparts never had to face. Furious with the setbacks, she became an out-spoken champion for women's rights. Her critics insist she defied all labels and definitions.
Amelia was a quick learner. In 1922, she set an altitude record in an autogyro, a contraption that looks like a monoplane with helicopter blades on top. Soon after that, she was aloft again to capture a new women's transcontinental speed record, a forerunner to the now defunct Powder Puff Derby. When Charles A. Lindbergh became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, she immediately determined to be the first woman to do the same. Her opportunity came the next year when she helped pilot a plane to Ireland. She also found herself at the center of a publicity blitz conducted by publisher George Putnam, whom she married in 1931. The next year, she flew the crossing by herself---the first woman to solo the Atlantic.
In an interview after her historic flight, Amelia explained her triumph by saying, "It's much easier to fly the Atlantic Ocean now than it was a few years ago." She also said she expected to be able to do it again in her lifetime, "possibly not a solo expedition, but in regular transatlantic service which is inevitable in our lifetime."
In an era when women's roles were still being sheltered and protected, her incredible bravery had a profound effect on the world. She became "Lady Lindy," and a role model for women the world over. America was overjoyed, and even though crippled by the Depression, gladly mustered its most lavish welcome for its new hero. Her courage and spirit captured the hearts and imagination of the entire world.
In 1935, she sailed for Hawaii on an announced pleasure trip with her husband. In the ship's cargo hold was her plane, and its presence created much speculation and wonder as to why she had taken it along. Since she once told her husband, "I fly better than I wash dishes," her adoring public was not too surprised when she flew home, becoming the first to solo from Hawaii to California. That same year, she was the first to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Shortly thereafter, she announced her plan for an eastward flight around the world.
"Contemplated course covers about 27,000 miles. It will be the first flight, if successful, which approximates the equator. The plane I'm using on the proposed flight is a transport plane. It is a Lockheed Electra normally carrying ten passengers and two pilots."
The trip was to be Amelia's most challenging and hazardous flight. Several days before departure, she told her husband and the public she would do it "because I want to." She further confessed that if the flight was successful, she hoped it would increase women's interests in flying.
On 20 May 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator began their journey of no return. It was Amelia's plan to fly a twin engine plane around the equator, thus becoming the first person, man or woman, to accomplish the feat. The first leg of their flight was a short hop from Oakland to Burbank, California, and then on to Tucson, Arizona. From there they flew to New Orleans, Miami, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Brazil. Amelia and Fred then crossed the Atlantic, landing in Senegal on the African coast. They made several short hops across Africa and headed for Pakistan. Then came India, Burma, Thailand, two stops in Java, and on to Australia. Finally, they arrived in Lae, New Guinea.
They were tired when they got to Lae, and spent two days trying to rest. But after a month and a half of flying time, rest was impossible. They were literally exhausted, and ahead of them lay the most difficult leg of their flight. From New Guinea, they had to hit tiny Howland Island in the middle of nowhere to refuel.
Howland Island is one of the smallest islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It is one-and-a-half miles long and barely one-half mile wide. At its highest point, it is just twenty feet above sea level, or about one-half the height of a telephone pole. From the air, it is practically impossible to see, and even today it requires exact charts and expert navigation to locate it.
On the morning of 1 July, Amelia and Fred prepared to leave New Guinea. They were eager to get home, having already flown three-quarters of the way around the world, but squalls were predicted all along their flight path. After waiting with increasing frustration for several hours for the weather to clear, and with little more than 7,000 miles remaining in their quest, they reluctantly decided to postpone take-off for one more day. Amelia wired her husband that she would not make it back to Oakland on 4 July as planned.
At ten o'clock the next morning, Amelia and Fred began their flight into mystery. Their plan was to fly east across the International Date Line and land on Howland Island eighteen hours later, but somewhere in the lonely mid-Pacific, something went terribly wrong. Amelia and Fred disappeared and were never seen again...alive or dead.
At the same time, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter, USS Itasca, stood by off the coast of Howland Island to provide Amelia with radio assistance, and other ships patrolled in the area. As incredible as it seems now, in 1937 before radar came into use, a battery-powered radio was Amelia's only link with the world. With a radio bearing, the Itasca could rescue Amelia and Fred at sea should anything go wrong.
And any number of things could go wrong. Although Amelia had the best navigator and co-pilot in the world sitting beside her, she was responsible for flying the airplane. She had to fly the heading, watch the weather, watch the fuel flows, watch the fuel mixtures making sure they weren't getting carburetor ice. She had to do everything constantly, plus she had to do the radio transmissions. Finding tiny Howland Island required every skill she possessed.
Nineteen hours into the flight and one hour behind schedule, Amelia and Fred calculated that they should be directly above Howland Island. But looking down, they saw only ocean. "We must be over you," she radioed to the Itasca. "We cannot see you. Cloudy and overcast. We are flying at an altitude of 1,000 feet. Gas running low. Want bearings."
Something was badly wrong. Only once had Amelia indicated that she could hear the Itasca, even though they could hear her perfectly. All she really had to do was open a signal line and let the radio transmit. For the Itasca to get a bearing on its direction-finder, the radio operator needed for Amelia to make a continuous transmission of two minutes. The longest Amelia made
was only a few seconds at a time. She had over-used her radio and drained her battery on a flight the year before, making her reluctant to simply let the transmitter run.
Since neither Amelia nor Fred were proficient in Morse code, a feature which would have allowed them clearer signals on her plane's 500-kilocycle emergency frequency, she left her telegraphic key and the trailing antenna behind in the States. That limited her to receiving and transmitting voice signals on the relatively inefficient high frequencies.
Sixteen minutes after her last contact with the Itasca, she radioed, "We are circling you. We cannot hear you. Go ahead on 7,500, either now or on scheduled time of half-hour."
The Itasca's radio operator transmitted a direction-finding signal on the arranged frequency of 7,500 kilocycles and Amelia radioed that she was receiving it, but was unable to get a bearing. Since the Itasca's direction-finding equipment (like her own) functioned best at low frequencies---270 to 550 kilocycles---it is unclear why Amelia chose to use 7,500 kilocycles.
"Please take a bearing on us and answer by voice on 3,105," she requested a few minutes later.
The radio operator sent out several voice transmissions at five-minute intervals. Everyone knew that the Electra was off course, missing Howland Island, but no one knew on which side of the island the plane had passed. There was no way of knowing, and it left Amelia with the only choice she had. Twenty hours and thirteen minutes into the flight, at 8:45 am, Amelia sent her last message. She talked very rapidly with her voice very tense, "We are in line of position 157-337. We are running north and south. We are listening on 6,210 kilocycles."
In her final radio message, Amelia said she was switching radio signals to 6,210 kilocycles. The Itasca could not reach her on that frequency. They assumed Amelia, unfamiliar with emergency radio procedures, had turned her radio down to the wrong frequency. Frantically, the Itasca tried other frequencies with no luck.
It was the last anyone ever heard from Amelia Earhart. It was clear from her transmissions that she was off course and hopelessly lost. The crew of the Itasca calculated that the Electra had about three hours of flying time remaining at the time of the last transmission. After that, Amelia would have to emergency land on some other island or ditch in the sea.
In the days following the disappearance of Amelia, the most massive air-sea search ever launched in the history of the United States Navy, led by the Itasca and the aircraft carrier, USS Lexington, turned up no trace of Amelia, Fred, or their airplane. Bad weather also dogged the search. The same squalls that delayed Amelia in New Guinea, delayed reconnaissance aircraft sent out from other islands and countries. The pilot of a U.S. Navy Catalina long-range flying-boat dispatched from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, reported that the weather to the north of Howland was bad between 2,000 and 12,000 feet, with snow, sleet, rain, and electrical storms.
The search covered 250,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean. Besides the Itasca and the Lexington, it eventually involved a battleship, four destroyers, a minesweeper, and a flotilla of smaller craft. More than sixty aircraft from the Lexington were aloft at one time, flying over more than 151,000 square miles of ocean. Experts agreed that the plane with its empty gas tanks could have floated for five to eight hours before sinking. On the plane, Amelia and Fred had personal life preservers and a two-person life raft equipped with emergency supplies. They could have remained afloat for days. Yet no one saw anything...no debris, no life raft, no signal flares, no nothing. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan had vanished from the face of the earth without a trace.
The news that Amelia Earhart was lost registered shock and disbelief throughout the world. She had come within days of achieving her goal, and for many it was difficult to accept that so courageous a woman could be gone so suddenly. Unwilling to accept the loss of its heroine, rumors abounded. There were stories circulating that radio messages had been received with the instructions, "on coral southwest of unknown island." Others suggested she landed on some volcanic island that later sank into the sea. Although America was not yet involved in World War II, some thought that she might have been shot down by Japanese fighter planes and then captured. The most outlandish rumor claimed that she was actually on a top secret spy mission for the United States government.
Sixteen days after Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared, the air-sea search was called off. Fred Noonan was officially declared dead on June 26, 1938, and Amelia Earhart on January 1, 1939.
The announcement of Amelia's death gave rise to a new crop of rumors that she was still alive, and had actually been seen in all sorts of places, from the Caroline Islands to Tokyo, Japan. A Hollywood film, Flight For Freedom, made five years after her disappearance, did much to keep the rumors alive.
In the film, starring Rosalind Russell, a top-secret mission called for the lady flyer heroine of the film to ditch near a small Pacific island where food and provisions had been stored. According to the script, the world would think she was lost, and a wide spread search would be conducted. The search was to include the Japanese-mandated islands, and during the search, the government would photograph every square mile of those islands. The idea was that in the event of war, the photographs would show not only how to defend against a Japanese attack, but where to strike back for the most damage to the nerve centers of their empire. But when the film's heroine, Toni Carter, learned the Japanese knew of the plan, she ditched where no one could find her...in the sea.
Many Americans believed the film uncannily paralleled Amelia's last flight. It prompted another new wave of speculation centered on one idea---that she was on clandestine military operations in the Pacific. One researcher, Joseph Jervis, devoted more than twenty years trying to prove that idea. In his opinion, Amelia was on a military surveillance under orders from President Franklin Roosevelt to over-fly the Truk atoll in the Pacific, which the Japanese were secretly fortifying. She was to take pictures and return back to the United States with photographic evidence to present to the League of Nations, evidence that would prove Japan was in violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
Jervis claimed the Japanese had an aircraft carrier stationed between Canton and Hull Islands. The carrier's planes, Japanese Zeroes, intercepted Amelia Earhart, shot her down, and forced her to crash land on the island of Hull. His belief that Amelia landed on Hull Island was based largely on his interpretation of civilian radio direction reports received during the Earhart flight. He also found a photograph of Hull Island which he claimed showed a Japanese flag near the wreckage of Amelia's aircraft.
Jervis also claimed to have eyewitness reports. From a former Japanese solder, he alleged that in 1937, a woman pilot was interrogated by a Japanese officer and then taken captive to Japan. In Japan, she was an important political prisoner. The woman was held captive in the Imperial Palace for a period of approximately eight years. At the close of World War II, two weeks before McArthur occupied Japan, a woman named Jacqueline Cochran, accompanied by a group of people, secretly removed Amelia Earhart from Japan---disguised as a nun.
Back in America, Amelia was then supposed to have assumed a new identity, new occupation, and moved to Jamesburg, New Jersey. She was also supposed to have spent time abroad involved in foreign radio broadcasts. Jervis based his claim on years of studying the Amelia Earhart myth and on thousands of photographs of her. He claimed her new identity was Irene Bullam, but his revelation angered his subject matter. In a fit of controlled rage, Irene Bullam called Jervis's claim "utter nonsense," and vehemently denied being Amelia Earhart.
It was an interesting theory, and people believed in it for awhile---mainly because there was an outstanding pilot named Jacqueline Cochran who was also one of Amelia's closest friends. In fact, when George Putnam learned his wife was missing, he went immediately to Cochran and asked for her help in finding Amelia. Cochran was something of a psychic, and had successfully located a number of lost planes. All she could tell Putnam was that Amelia was alive, and specified the area where her plane was floating. Cochran also named two boats nearby, one the Itasca (which she had not heard of at the time) and the other a Japanese fishing vessel. Cochran, of course, denied the Jervis theory.
Other researchers also didn't like the Jervis theory and soon came up with ideas of their own. Elgen Long, a world record-holding pilot, navigator, and Amelia Earhart biographer, studied a wealth of detailed information about Amelia Earhart's last flight. He analyzed such things as the fuel consumption of the plane, the strength of the radio signals received by the Itasca, and the effect on the flight of crosswinds, which Amelia did not even know was there.
Long believed everything in Amelia's last flight went smoothly until they reached the area of Howland Island---that they never suspected anything was wrong with their flight until then. He was unable to find any evidence which indicated any single mistake anyone made which caused Amelia and Fred to miss Howland. Instead, in analyzing the data, Long believed that it was a series of several small errors which were compounded all in the same direction that caused the flyers to miss their intended destination. Once the flyers couldn't find Howland Island, they flew around for over an hour, eventually running out of fuel and ditching the plane at sea.
According to Long, Amelia and Fred ran into three problems: 1) the United States nautical charts that Fred used had mislocated Howland Island northwest of its true location by six miles; 2) a faulty compass on their aircraft took them seven miles further northwest off course; and finally, 3) wind drifts and other factors pushed them another twenty-two miles west. At the time they should have been off Howland Island, Amelia and Fred were actually thirty-five miles off course---far below the horizon for any search party around Howland Island to see.
From the information he gathered, Long believed he had pinpointed the exact place where the airplane crashed into the sea. The location lies about forty miles northwest of Howland in an area where the waters are over 16,000 feet deep. At that depth, the airplane is almost certainly perfectly preserved.
Long's theory carried more weight than the Jervis theory, primarily because of the deep abyss idea. Investigators now know that things are preserved in deep waters...just like the day they went down. If the plane could be found and raised, it would be worthwhile to America's heritage. Long said it best, "We can't afford to throw our heroes away."
But as with the Jervis theory, there were those who also didn't like the Long theory. These skeptics pointed out that Fred Noonan was a highly experienced navigator and co-pilot. He would have used astro-navigation to fix the Electra's position at periodic intervals, and even if the weather was poor, it was unlikely that he would have been unable to see the stars during the entire night flight. Noonan would have compensated for faulty compass readings and wind drifts.
And there are other theories. Fred Goerner, a newsman in San Francisco and author of The Search for Amelia Earhart, believed the Navy missed Earhart in the search in 1937 by only a few miles. Radio messages were received, after her disappearance, by amateur radio operators all along the west coast of the United States, and they were also received by Navy radio stations. Goerner believed that if the United States had looked in the right area in 1937, Amelia might be with us today.
Fred Goerner began his investigation into the Amelia Earhart mystery in 1960 as a news correspondent for CBS in San Francisco. His news affiliate had received information that there was a possibility Amelia might have reached Saipan in the Western Marianas, and CBS sent him to Saipan to find out if there was any supporting information.
Saipan is an island nearly 1,500 miles northwest of Howland Island. When Goerner arrived, he found several people able to recall incidents from 1937.
Farmer Jesus Salas was a prisoner of the occupying Japanese army at the time of Amelia's last flight. He claimed to have seen a white woman in the cell next to his. The woman was held for several hours and when Salas inquired who she was, prison guards told him that she was a captured American pilot. Grocer Jose Pangellan remembered seeing a white woman on the second floor of the compound hotel several times. He heard that she was a captured pilot and spy. Two men, Ben Salas and Jaoquin Seaman, told Goerner they heard an American woman was buried in the cemetery sometime in 1937. Goerner excavated several gravesites, but he found no proof.
Goerner claimed that the strongest evidence for Amelia's survival was the eyewitness reports on the island of Saipan. It was inconceivable to him that the people were not telling the truth, and it was also inconceivable that anyone else answering those descriptions was on that island at that time. He later found Japanese newspaper articles from the time of Amelia's disappearance. One reported that Amelia Earhart was picked up by a Japanese fishing boat. Goerner also learned of secret government documents, which he believed could prove the Japanese capture of Amelia Earhart. According to him, Admiral Chester Nimitz told him that the fliers had, in fact, been picked up by the Japanese (and presumably executed).
Incredibly, another Saipanese story also surfaced. This story alleged that in 1937 an eleven-year-old girl, Josephine Blanco, was riding down a beach road on her bicycle, taking lunch to a relative who worked at a secret Japanese seaplane base at Tanapag Harbor. Suddenly a silver twin-engined aircraft swooped low overhead and ditched in the harbor. When she finally reached the beach, she found a crowd of natives surrounding two white people, a man and a woman.
Josephine told reporters in 1960 that both people were thin and looked very tired. The woman had hair cut short like a man's, and was dressed like a man. The man had his head hurt in some fashion as he was holding it down and to one side. Japanese guards arrived and arrested the pair. The Japanese told her that the man and woman were American flyers. She later heard a rumor that they had been executed.
At the same press conference, it was announced that the wreckage of the missing Electra might have been found at the bottom of Tanapag Harbor. A generator was produced as evidence and allegedly identified as having come from Amelia's plane. But when shown to representatives of the Bendix Corporation, which had manufactured generators for the Electra, they categorically denied that it was one of theirs. They claimed it was a copy made by the Japanese, and indeed, that could have been true. The Japanese used a quantity of license-built Electras during the war, and the generator could have come from any one of them.
Also, as strange as it seems, yet another story surfaced about Saipan. This time, it came from American soldiers stationed on the island.
At the time of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, Saipan was the Japanese naval headquarters in the Marianas. In 1944, American forces liberated the island. One of the soldiers, Thomas Devine, was a member of the 244th Army Unit. He claimed to have overheard a conversation between two Marines outside a guarded aircraft hangar at a remote location on the island. "We have Amelia Earhart's plane in that hangar," Devine said one Marine whispered.
At that moment, a man in civilian clothes reprimanded the Marines and all conversation ceased. Later that same day, Devine said he actually saw Amelia Earhart's plane fly overhead. It was flying low, and he was able to clearly see the identification markings on it. He claimed the markings were NR 16020, the same as those of Amelia's plane. Late that same night, he said he saw it for a third time...engulfed in flames.
At about the same time, Robert Wallack was a Marine stationed on Saipan with the 1st Battalion, 29th Marines. During the daytime when he had nothing to do, he and a few of his friends explored the island. They were looking for Japanese souvenirs in some of the abandoned Japanese government buildings. In one building, they found a safe. Since one of the men in the group was a demolition expert, everyone believed they would be millionaires as soon as they could figure out a way to blow the door off.
While the others decided the best method of retrieving the safe's contents, Wallack looked around the room. He spied a briefcase, which he immediately grabbed, thinking it was full of money or something of similar wealth. He never imagined its true value. He said it was full of Amelia Earhart's papers, and although he was only an eighteen-year-old at the time, he knew he had a piece of history in his hands.
Wallack turned the briefcase and the contents over to a commanding officer. He never saw it again, but he believes it is still somewhere in the United States "because the officer was a high enough rank that he just didn't throw it away." Wallack doesn't think the officer's superiors destroyed it, either, because it was too valuable.
Another recent Amelia Earhart researcher also believes that Amelia survived the downing of her aircraft and ended up on Saipan. In 1987, T.G. "Buddy" Brennan interviewed a woman in Saipan, who claimed to have witnessed Amelia Earhart's death. The woman was Nieves Cabrera Blas, and she had lived on Saipan all her life. Blas claimed that Amelia and Fred were captured by the Japanese as spies, brought into town, and forced to undress. It was only then that Blas was able to determine that one was a woman. Blas claimed that the Japanese put the woman in jail. When the woman was finally removed, she was blindfolded, put on a motorcycle, driven out of the city, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave.
Adding fuel to the belief that Amelia had died in the Micronesian Island chain was a widely circulated story that the remains of Amelia Earhart had been recovered from a South Pacific island. A Hearst newspaper reporter brought Thomas McCown, an anthropologist at Berkeley and an expert on the techniques of modern forensics, a skeleton that had been dug out of a seaside grave on an island in the Micronesian chain of which Saipan is part of the chain. The reporter suggested it was the missing aviator, and he wanted proof. After a few hours of careful scrutiny, McCown put a wet blanket on the suggestion by saying the skeleton "was more likely the remains of a Micronesian male."
What really happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan? Did they end up prisoners on Saipan, as so much apparent evidence and testimony seems to indicate, or did their plane go down in the vast and unforgiving waters of the South Pacific? It seems inconceivable that anything new could turn up after all these years. Yet, that is exactly what happened.
In 1989, the tiny, uninhabited island of Nicumaroro became the focal point of another intriguing theory. Nicumaroro is located about 420 miles south of Howland Island in the Phoenix Islands group. Richard Gillespie, an aviation archeologist, decided that Amelia Earhart could have landed on Nicumaroro, and he led an expedition to search for any evidence that might remain. He found an aluminum aircraft part, which he believed might have come from her Lockheed Electra. Although it didn't constitute proof that Amelia crashed on Nicumaroro, it did provide fuel for a second expedition, which he launched in October 1991.
During the second expedition to Nicumaroro, searchers found several intriguing artifacts, which Gillespie claimed as proof that Amelia did crash on the island. On 16 March 1992, he presented his findings at a widely publicized press conference in Washington, D.C. Among the items on display were the weathered piece of aluminum alleged to have come from the fuselage of Amelia's plane and some tattered remnants of a shoe which he claimed was worn by Amelia Earhart herself. He claimed they conclusively solved the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. The only problem with Gillespie's conclusions was that several experts stepped forth to dispute them.
Elgen Long was one of the experts consulted by Gillespie. Long was asked to study detailed measurements and photographs of the aluminum section which he did by assembling a panel of experts to compare the evidence with an airplane fuselage identical to Amelia Earhart's. By making a template the exact same size with all the rivet holes in the exact same place as was on the fragment found on Nicumaroro, the experts put the template to the bottom of the actual airplane and tried to match the rivet holes.
Nothing matched. The panel of experts compared the template to every section of the airplane. No match could be made anywhere. They found "rivet holes where there shouldn't be any rivets, and there weren't rivet holes where there should be rivets." They determined there was no way the piece of aluminum could have come from a Lockheed 10 or Amelia Earhart's airplane.
But Richard Gillespie remained undaunted. He attributed the discrepancies in the rivet patterns to repairs made on Amelia's airplane during her first attempt to fly around the world. He claimed the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the aluminum fragment was consistent with the material used to build Lockheed 10 Electras---even if the Board could not confirm that it came from Amelia Earhart's airplane.
A former Lockheed engineer, Edward Warner, disagreed. He stated that all repairs made on Amelia's plane had to be done according to strict factory specifications. But this theory only holds true assuming all repairs were made at the factory. What if repairs were made at some time during one of her flights as Gillespie claimed? Might not the repairs be different from factory specifications? Unable to use existing rivet holes, might not new holes be drilled?
The controversy over Amelia Earhart's fate still continues. Confusing the issue was the finding of an Electra in 1961 which crashed on a mountain in California and which was identical to Amelia's, down to the last detail, even the serial number. How did it come to be? The obvious answer was that there were several identical planes flown by Earhart and Noonan. Why, if not to confuse?
And there are always the reports that she is still alive, living the life of ease in the South Pacific. One such "discovery" was reported in a supermarket tabloid in April 1992. According to Brian Bruton of Sydney, Australia, he found Amelia suffering from a heart ailment on a secret South Sea island in the Gilbert Islands group. She had married the chieftain of the small island where she had crash-landed and now has 165 descendants. According to the same tabloid's March 1993 issue, Amelia was secretly brought to the United States for heart surgery, and then returned to her island home. Absurb? Maybe.
In some sense, Amelia Earhart is alive. For in the memory of her courage, her passion, her dedication to an ideal, she still touches many of us. Before the takeoff on her last flight, Amelia wrote to her husband, "Please know that I'm 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."