I have never read extensively of Earhart specifically.
But growing up in an aviation household and reading various shorts and mentions of her in general aviation histories, I think by the 1960s it was pretty well established that she was a fool on a fools’ errand accompanied by a no-hoper. It was also well-established that the flight was purely a publicity stunt for a publishing magnate.
Another question- what were they trying to do?
Willy Post & Harold Gatty had already flown around the world on a fixed wing aircraft in 1931 (The Graf Zeppelin had done it earlier).
Clyde Pangborn flew from Japan to Seattle- (apparently non-stop?) a bit later in that same year.
So, why?
Write a book
The names you mentioned appear to be male. She wanted to be the first woman to do this.
This topic has played out but I just wanted to add that I originally read the title as “Amelia Earhart’s PHONE was found on the sea floor”. Now that’s the kind of proof I’m looking for.
I guess the GPS was totally unreliable back then, and iPhone batteries died quickly as well, so she just tossed it out the window.
Wiley Post.
His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1935 when the plane he was piloting crashed in Alaska, killing himself and passenger Will Rogers. It may not have helped that the plane was unconventionally designed and was largely made up of sections from two salvaged aircraft.
A sad moment.
Didn’t anybody bring up his multiple secret families?
He was a Rascal!
A new search mission is in the works [unfortunately some of us have become disillusioned and are no longer excited about these new search missions]:
A new mission to locate Amelia Earhart’s long-missing plane is being launched, researchers announced on Wednesday, following fresh clues that suggest she may have crash-landed on a remote island in the South Pacific.
A satellite image may show part of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E protruding from the sand on Nikumaroro, an isolated island in Kiribati about 1,000 miles from Fiji, according to Richard Pettigrew, head of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, a non-profit based in Oregon.
“What we have here is maybe the greatest opportunity ever to finally close the case,” Pettigrew said in a news release. “With such a great amount of very strong evidence, we feel we have no choice but to move forward and hopefully return with proof.”
The book I mentioned previously is coming out on July 15:
Do they hope to recoup those funds and more by selling documentary footage for a Discovery Channel special?
From @PastTense’s link:
This is really wishful thinking. That area is literally the aircraft graveyard of the Pacific War. It’s like someone spotting a smashed up Buick in a junkyard and assuming it’s the Jayne Mansfield death car.
Plus, it appears that people have visited the island several times, both in the years immediately after Earhart disappeared and on more recent expeditions specifically looking for evidence of her.
So I guess their theory now is it must have been very quickly buried, and only just become visible, rather than it just being the consequence of a low-resolution satellite imagine? But, oh wait, it’s worse than that: the picture is from 2015, the theory is a cyclone displaced the sand circa 2014, and yet when they visited the island in 2017… I guess it had already been re-buried? Wish I could get a job that consisted of me dreaming up new reasons to visit a small tropical island every few years, and having people actually pay to send me there…
Said another way, there’s enough BS in that set of claims to sink a small tropical island.
It’s massively more likely to begin with that she crashed into the water, not land, just because there’s so much more water. And then add in that, if she had crashed on land, she’d have been found quickly.
We know where her plane is. It’s on the bottom of the Pacific. Which is really huge, so there’s almost no chance of finding it, and we should be completely unsurprised by the fact that it hasn’t been found.
If they find it, it’ll probably be sitting next to MH370.
Wrong ocean.
That’s what they want you to think.
Right! They’re both right there smack in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
Nope. There’s a swimming pool in suburban Cleveland that I’m certain Discovery Channel has never properly searched for Earhart or MH370. So it stands to reason that that’s where they are.
Time to send out a cast & film crew to obliquely talk about the tantalizing possibility that something might be there. With lots of footage of almost the right thing.