Amelia Earhart disappearance (1937): Legal death, open wreck — Section 989: Legal death, open wreck

Earhart’s disappearance is a navigation and communications failure in public view: a famous pilot, a thin island, a cutter that could hear a voice and could not bring the aircraft in. Howland Island had a new airstrip built for the flight. Itasca’s job was to talk Earhart in and to take radio bearings. Earhart’s Electra used frequencies and a trailing antenna arrangement that, on the morning of 2 July, did not give the cutter a reliable two-way link. Itasca’s logs — later published and much parsed — show her reporting half-hour and then lower fuel, asking for bearings, and finally saying she was on the 157–337 sun line and running north and south.

A sun line is a band, not a point. If Howland was missed, the same line also runs toward the Phoenix Islands. That geometry is why later researchers could argue both a ditching near Howland and a continued flight southeast. It is not, by itself, a wreck site. Noonan’s celestial navigation was the intended fix; the radio was the intended confirmation. Both failed in public.

The United States Navy, including the battleship Colorado and later the carrier Lexington, and the Coast Guard searched thousands of square miles. Reports of reefs and flares were followed and not confirmed as Electra wreckage. George Palmer Putnam, Earhart’s husband and publicist, pressed officials and the press. In January 1939 a California court declared her dead so that estates and contracts could close.