Amelia Earhart disappearance (1939): Legal death — Section 1005: Legal death

On 2 July 1937 Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on the Lae-to-Howland leg of an around-the-world flight; no wreck or remains have been identified. Amelia Earhart, already the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, left Oakland in May 1937 on a second attempt to circle the globe at equatorial latitudes in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, civil registration NR16020, paid for in large part through Purdue University. After a March crash on takeoff from Luke Field, Hawaii, the route was reversed to run eastward. Navigator Fred Noonan joined the crew. By late June the Electra had reached Lae, New Guinea, after a chain of publicised hops across Africa, South Asia and the Dutch East Indies.

On 2 July 1937 Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae for Howland Island, a coral speck where the United States Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited as radio and fuel ship. Itasca heard Earhart’s voice, including a last transmission at about 08:43 Howland time that she was on the line 157–337 and running on line, but the aircraft never appeared. Direction-finding and frequency mismatches meant the cutter could hear her more often than she could hear it. A Navy and Coast Guard search of the central Pacific found no confirmed wreckage.

Earhart was declared dead on 5 January 1939. The official working theory remains a loss at sea when fuel ended near Howland. Later private groups, especially TIGHAR, have argued for a landing on Gardner Island (Nikumaroro) in the Phoenix Islands. Japanese-capture stories have not produced a document trail that professional historians accept. No court or service board has identified the Electra’s wreck. The case is unsolved.