Amelia Earhart's Last Flight

On the second of July, 1937, Amelia Earhart took off from a grass airfield in New Guinea bound for Howland Island — a half-mile-wide coral atoll, 2,556 miles east, sitting alone in nineteen million square miles of open Pacific. She was attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world. Her navigator was Fred Noonan, one of the most experienced celestial navigators alive.Eighteen hours later, she radioed the US Coast Guard ship anchored at Howland: "We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low."She was never heard from again.This is the story of Amelia Earhart's last flight. The 250,000 square miles of ocean the US Navy searched in seventeen days and found nothing in. The bones found on a different island in 1940 — and then lost — that a 2018 forensic analysis matched to Earhart with 99% confidence. The 2019 sonar scan that detected something Electra-shaped under the lagoon at Nikumaroro. And the three theories that still divide every researcher who has ever looked at the case.A real flight. A real disappearance. An aircraft that has never been found.Episode Nine of The Quiet Files.Sources: USS Itasca radio log, July 1937; US Navy Search-and-Rescue Report, August 1937; Jantz, Amelia Earhart and the Nikumaroro Bones: A 1941 Analysis versus Modern Quantitative Techniques, 2018; TIGHAR field expedition reports, 1989 onward.