I think that, in the early days of aviation, all pilots were rolling the dice.
I’ll just add to the mix Harriet Quimby (1875-1912). , whom I never would have heard of had I not had the opportunity tonuse one of her Air Mail stamps back in the day.
That’s somewhat true, but it is noteworthy that other pilots and professionals frequently noted Earhart’s lack of skill and disregard for safety. She clearly stood out among her peers as being foolhardy and being pushed into taking risks by her husband.
Even in the 1930s, the aviation world did have standards.
There’s a big difference between being accepting of the risks inherent in the current state of the art of your profession, and being oblivious to them.
My takeaway of the latest publications is that Earhart, whatever her actual accomplishments, was in many ways even more what we would now call an “influencer”. The public just ate up the figure of the “daring aviatrix” whether or not they understood what she was doing.
The “celebration of failure” bit is a result of that. Over years she had already been built up for celebration as THE face of American female aviation achievement. So one way or another this flight was going ot be a huge public opinion hit – as noted the plan was centered around having a book ready for publishing in time for Christmas.
This event in turn led to a wonderful line in a post here at the Dope by dearly missed member Eve:
I remember other costumes at that party: Keith and Laura as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; David as “The Death of Organized Religion” (a pregnant, cigar-smoking nun); Joy as Amelia Earhart (she didn’t show up) .
Yes El Guapo, I got it. Although I persist in hearing it in Jefe’s voice rather than Ned’s.
Never saw Three Amigos, I must be an outlier.
The fact that Earhart almost made it, and died on the most difficult part, says something. First, that when you’re island hopping between distant tiny islands, the importance of capable navigation (especially back then) can’t be understated. Second, that it’s a good idea to wait for ideal conditions (assuming they knew conditions on the open seas in those days).
I’ll admit I don’t know a lot about her last ‘around the world’ attempt, but judging from this map, she still had most of the Pacific to cross before completion. That’s a little more than almost.
I assume she had 3 or 4 legs to go. Difficult ones, and long distance, little room for error.
The fun one would be from Hawaii, a long distance with nothing in between, but then it would be hard(er) to miss the continent.
Supposedly she almost made it halfway to Hawaii, the ship near her destination Howland Island hear her loud and clear and she was supposed to be about 100mi out.
Two
Howland to Hawaii - easier but not easy. Then hawaii to Oakland- pretty easy navigation.
Weather predictions back then were not very reliable (taking for example the 1938 Long Island/New England hurricane whose path forecasters grievously erred on). For the vast Pacific Ocean with reports dependent on isolated land points and relatively scant ship traffic, knowing where storms were and how they’d track was tough. More than eight years after Earhart’s disappearance, a large U.S. fleet was roughed up badly by a typhoon which Navy forecasters didn’t anticipate striking Halsey’s ships directly.
Quite true. But I did see one graph that showed her apparent (supposed?) angle of deviation. If she missed Oakland that much (north), it might have added quite a few more miles to the trip than she counted on.
'Zactly.
Goofing the angle so you make landfall well north or south of your target may well add more miles than you have fuel for. Unexpected headwinds or missing expected tailwinds may add more miles than you have fuel for.
Back in 1937 there was a lot of uninhabited coastal and interior land from central California up to the Oregon-Washington border. Heck, here in 2025 there still is. Lots of that land is pretty rugged. Finding uninhabited forested mountains where you expected to find San Francisco and Oakland would leave the dilemma of whether to go north or south and you may not have the fuel to go far, followed by an unsurvivable landing in rugged terrain.
My bottom line:
For darn sure aiming at a continent is easier than aiming at a tiny island. But that doesn’t make it easy.
If nothing else, if you do have the fuel, hitting a continent would give you landmarks, which, with good maps or other geographical knowledge, might give you the information on which way to turn to reach your intended landing spot (or at least, some usable landing spot). Miss an island, though, and you might not even notice you’ve missed it until you run out of fuel, and even if you do know “I should have reached that island by now”, you don’t know which side you’re on.
But, crucially, not the inverse; she doesn’t seem to have ever been able to pick up Itasca’s signals very well, and (presumably) never saw the smoke being generated by the cutter. So how close Earhart was to Howland is a matter of how to interpret the Itasca’s signal strength logs, and Earhart’s HF radios are within the range where ionospheric propagation could come into play. How much, and how strongly, depends on how wedded you are to TIGHAR’s “Gardner Island hypothesis,” although I would venture to say that most people who are not TIGHAR do not take it very seriously.
But in any case because she had removed her longwave antenna (intended for use on the 500 Hz band that would have allowed Itasca to properly get a fix on her), the other antennas had been futzed with in a way that reduced their effectiveness (as is noted in the USNI article linked earlier it doesn’t appear that anyone on the team had a good understanding of radio physics) and because neither Earhart nor Noonan were proficient in Morse code, it’s hard to know exactly what to make of those signals. At least, IMO.
(Also, conceivably, how much the Itasca’s crew contributed to or failed to ameliorate Earhart and Noonan’s own errors)
Zactly. Continent has many advantages. Just maybe not enough to be decisive, depending on one’s luck.
I have an old book on Pacific Island hopping (delivering small planes like Cessnas to Australia etc.). The worst part was the trip to Hawaii - even around 1980 the navigation was not too difficult, it was the range and lack of alternative destinations. Beyond that, the island hopping was not as bad.
I presume one issue was that in Amelia’s day, there were nowhere near as many airstrips on the islands leading to Hawaii. (Unless it was the case she was over-ambitious and took on too much of a distance at once.)
I see what you did there.
The New Yorker article makes it clear that Earhart’s crash was unsurprising. She planned to hit a distant island via dead reckoning, relied on a voice radio because she didn’t know Morris code (which had greater range especially in bad weather). Washburn was a navigator Earhart and Putnam considered working with, but that deal ultimately fell through:
Washburn said that she should at least place a radio on the island which would allow the Electra to home in on its position. Putnam dismissively told Washburn, “If you go to all that trouble, the book will not be out for Christmas sales.” As Washburn recalled it, “G.P. was just as confident in Earhart and her judgment as A.E. was herself, and this made a very difficult combination to argue with.”
There next candidate bowed out as well. They settled on Fred Noonan, a fine former Pan Am navigator and alcoholic. He was inexpensive.
Is this biography the first to explicitly doubt Earhart’s abilities, relative to other female pilots of the time and relative to what she attempted? Were there skeptical contemporaneous accounts? Or has it been all hagiography until now? If so, it would not be surprising, though it reminds us of the sheer unreliability of the celebrity press..
You might look at AMELIA EARHART: THE TURBULENT LIFE OF AN AMERICAN ICON By Kathleen C. Winters published in 2010
Reviewed at:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/nov/27/interpreting-the-earhart-story/
But again 2010 is fairly recently.