Daughter of the sky

by Jr. Paul L. Briand

All attempts by the ships and planes were in vain. After exploring an area of 161,000 square miles, nothing was found of the Electra, the life raft, Amelia Earhart, or Fred Noonan.

Newspapers and radio stations across the country told the story of the disappearance and the search. Americans could not believe that Amelia Earhart was missing, and would not believe that she was dead. Everything about the story was too sudden, too tragic.

False signals and false reports now began to give spark to a despairing hope. On one of the ships two lookouts and an officer of the deck had seen a distinct green flare on the northern horizon. It was known that AE’s rubber raft had emergency flares. The Itasca steamed north and east to investigate; at the same time it asked AE on the radio if she were sending up flares, and if she were, to send up another one. A few seconds later another green light appeared at a bearing of 75°. It was seen by twenty-five witnesses.

The Itasca now checked with other ships in the area to find out if they had seen the flares. The replies were all in the negative; the signals, they cautioned, were probably heat lightning.

Howland Island then reported flares to the northeast. The men on the island immediately set flame to three drums of gasoline, hoping that the fire would serve as an unmistakable beacon. The Swan reported more lights but thought that they were meteors.

Because of the position, appearance, and timing of the lights, the Itasca seriously thought that they were flares; but because of the other dissenting reports, it was now decided that the lights were merely a meteoric shower.

There were all kinds of radio reports. Amateur and professional radio operators from Honolulu; from up and down the west coast of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle; from across the Rocky Mountains in Cheyenne; and from as far inland as Cincinnati, now reported hearing SOS signals from Amelia Earhart.

If Amelia had landed on an island or reef, and were using her radio, it was possible that her signals had skip-waved back and forth and forward between ionosphere and ocean across thousands of miles. Yet, if there were SOS signals, they were not heard in the Pacific by the official radio operators on any of the assigned Navy and Coast Guard ships, or on any of the shore stations from the Gilbert Islands through the Hawaiian Islands to San Francisco Radio on the West Coast.

In exploring the Gilbert Islands, the Itasca sent a party ashore to Tarawa, to confer with the senior British administrator of the islands. He had been informed of the Earhart search, and was surprised that neither the station at Tarawa nor the one at Beru had been notified about the flight before it began from Lae. Both stations, although they heard no Electra transmissions, could have helped, for Amelia’s course had lain just 20 miles south of Arorae, the most southern island of the Gilbert group.

The concentration of the search to the northwest had been based on a very careful analysis of the evidence. The weather conditions at the end of the flight were a clear blue sky to the south and east of Howland but heavy cloud banks about fifty miles north and west of Howland.