Three pieces of a pocket knife and fragments of what might be a broken cosmetic glass jar are adding new evidence that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died as castaways on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. The island was some 300 miles southeast of their target destination, Howland Island.

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To learn more about Amelia Earhart’s travels, check out her official website here.

“Amelia Earhart: The Aviator, the Advocate, and the Icon” opened Monday (March 1) and will be shown through May 28 in the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Science and Education Library in Stewart Center. The display is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each weekday. Beginning May 10, shortened summer hours will be in effect.

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A three-dimensional, 8 ft. molded statue of Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, will be bolted onto the mural.

Besides Earhart, the mural depicts the stories of Lewis & Clark, Major Taylor, Native Americans, African-Americans, Irish immigrants and women who shaped the state’s transportation.

The mural was created by New Orleans artist, Marcus Akinlana. It can be found on the ground level in the baggage claim area of the airport’s Col. H. Weir Cook Terminal.

A journey that started in the days of Amelia Earhart was continued by the Tucson Ninety-Nines on Nov. 7.

In 1929, an international organization for women pilots was formed in Long Island, N.Y. Amelia Earhart was the first president elected. It was called The Ninety-Nines after the number of founding members.

Earhart would have been proud of the group of women pilots who belong to the Tucson chapter of The Ninety-Nines. The group participated in the annual Treasure Hunt in the Sky. The pilots and their team of two or more crew members took off Saturday morning from Tucson International, which was the first municipal airport opened in the nation. Earhart was there for the opening.

The challenge for the pilots and their crew in the treasure hunt was to test their piloting and navigation skills while flying a course around southern Arizona following a map and finding clues to fill in on a clue sheet.

Halfway through the contest, the ladies arrived at a “secret airport” for a spot-landing contest and lunch. The Safford Regional Airport was reserved for this event.

Pilot Connie Nicholson of Oro Valley has been flying for three decades. She and her 14-year-old daughter, Cecilia, flew a 1979 Piper Cherokee 6 in the contest. Nicholson said flying is something she and her daughter enjoy together. “We do a lot of laughing,” Nicholson said.

Cecilia plans to start earning hours for her pilot’s license next year. There are three milestones for a pilot: to get licensed, fly solo and fly with the first passenger. Nicholson also stressed the importance of yearly inspection and maintenance of each plane.

Colleen Crabtree flew a Bellanca Super Viking with her husband, Scott, and their young daughters, Anna and Elisa, as passengers. Scott is in the Air Force, stationed at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. Colleen was also in the Air Force and says she is “currently doing the stay-at-home-mom thing.”

After lunch, the group was busy filling in their clue sheets and preparing for the return flight to Tucson International.

Prizes and trophies were awarded at a banquet in Tucson that evening for those finding the most clues.

Only 6 percent of pilots in the United States are women. There are other female pilot organizations, but virtually all women of achievement in aviation have been or are members of The Ninety-Nines, according to the organization.

The mission of the organization is to maintain the fellowship that Amelia Earhart created back in her day. The organization now encompasses 35 countries and has 5,500 members. All proceeds from the organization go toward aviation scholarships for women.

What happened to Amelia Earhart?

Although that remains a mystery to this day, she is remembered as a great pioneer for women pilots.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared July 2, 1937, while making their second attempt to navigate the globe. The pair left New Guinea and were headed for Howland Island when communication was lost. Airstrips were built in the late 1930s to accommodate her planned stopover. Earhart experienced technical difficulties as they approached Howland Island. There are several theories about what happened – ranging from a damaged antenna to confusion on Earhart’s part.

Whatever happened, Earhart and Noonan missed the island and began to run low on fuel. Soon after, the plane crashed. Earhart tried to inform rescuers of her location. Transmissions continued for a few days after they crashed, but rescuers could not use them to find the plane’s location.

The United States Navy joined the search, mainly focusing on the Pacific Ocean, but turned up nothing. There was some evidence of a crash on Gardner Island, a nearby island now called Nikumaroro, but since the island was considered uninhabited, it was discounted. After the official search ended, Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, continued searching on his own. Eventually he gave up and had her declared dead in 1939.

Recently, the skeleton of a Caucasion woman, the heel of a boot in Earhart’s size, an aluminum panel, plexiglass and makeshift tools were found on Gardner Island. This provided circumstantial evidence that indicates a crash and attempts at survival. Unfortunately, the skeletal remains that were found have been lost.

The matter of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance will remain a mystery until her remains are found and identified. Until then, there is only speculation.

(some of the following information collected from MCT)

Amelia Earhart was a strong, successful woman and really a pioneer for women. She never allowed anyone to tell her she could not accomplish what she had put her mind to.

As most everyone knows Amelia is known for her dedicaiton to flying and her final flight. The last flight she ever took was attempting to fly around the world. She knew that no one had ever successfuly done it, but she just figured she’d be the first.

She disappeared during her trip never to be heard from again, but that single attempt made her a role model for young girls for years to come.

In 1932, she was the first woman to ever fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. In additon, she was the first female to ever receive the Airforce Distinguished Flying Cross. Only a few women proceeding her have been able to receive the same honor.

Amelia is easy to identify with her cropped hair, which was almost unheard of at that time, tomboy appearances, and usually alwalys pictured around an airplane or on a runway. She also always had on a leather flight jacket which would keep her warm during flights in her small aircraft.

Airstrips, also known as the runway, were not the only thing she was known for during her time period.

Amelia was in the news for more than her flight though. She appeared in fashion spreads, was pals with Eleanor Roosevelt, even hawked her own line of clothing _ and (unlike today’s celebs with fashion labels) actually made it with her own sewing machine.

Her clothing line was a complete failure, but to make ends meet she decided to sell things she had used, or at least claimed to have used or worn, to fans.

People could not seem to get enough of her memorablia before she had even made her incredible attempt at flying around the world.

“She was very aware of the power of publicity … and understood that flying alone wasn’t going to keep her in the public eye,” notes Dorothy S. Cochrane, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

A new film about Earhart, starring Hilary Swank, hit theaters last weekend, and designers and store owners were ready.

The movie just refreshed everyone’s memories of learning about Amelia. The movie also provides an avenue for the younger generations to be able to experience Amelia’s life through Hilary Swank, who does an excellent job playing the part.

There are very few, one main news cast, where future generations have been able to experience Amelia as she was instead of just looking at pictures.

Earhart’s iconic flight jacket, along with aviation-inspired accessories, seem to be everywhere, including Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan, where the film’s costumes are on display.

Clearly, Earhart’s legend lies not just in her mysterious disappearance, but in her stylish presence, too.

“Now the plain truth about flight jackets, Aviators had various leather coats during their careers,” notes Dorothy S. Cochrane, a curator for the Smithsonian Institution, which has this genuine Earhart coat on display.

“It was really cold in those planes, so most flying before World War II was done in three-quarter-length jackets,” says Jacky Clyman, co-owner of Cockpit USA, which makes replicas of vintage flight gear and sponsors the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale.

World War II fighter planes had smaller cockpits, so jackets became cropped. “It wasn’t a fashion statement,” Clyman says. Long coats would “bunch up and prevent you from flying the plane correctly.”

So before running out and buying a flight jacket just to keep up with the trends, stop and think about what this powerful woman accomplished. She made it three-quarters of the way around the world by herself. She set the stage for women, not only in the aviaton fields, but any field to fulfill their dreams. She made women realize that if they are determined and confident they do not have to listen to all the no’s, but only to their own personal determination to say yes.

Fasten your seat belt at the opening of “Amelia.” A Lockheed aircraft thunders on takeoff heading directly for the viewer of this film about aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

Suddenly, you are 1,000 feet up as the trimotor craft banks over tidy farmland and coastal terrain. It’s the first of a number of memorable flights you’ll take with cool Hilary Swank at the controls.

There are so many records to this slender flier’s credit, the film leaves it wisely to clips taken from Movietone News: “She has already set a woman’s world altitude record. Last year (1927) Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. Will Miss Earhart be next? …”

The film risks balancing two or three different flights but generally pulls it off. Early on, there is a lovely foreshadowing sequence of a pre-teen Amelia, the so-called “Kansas tomboy,” riding a farmhouse as if in a race with a biplane.

Not all of real-life Earhart makes the cut. The book “The Sound of Wings” reveals ties to family in Medford and work at a Boston settlement house. Every spare dime went for flying lessons at Squantum air base in Quincy.

Amelia was recruited by George Putnam (played by Richard Gere), her mentor and later her husband. The film dialogue shows her great love of flying and determination.

After the float plane churned out of Boston Harbor to the jumping-off area in Newfoundland, in a weather delay the pilot went drinking again. Stern Amelia somehow hauls him aboard. She has the right stuff.

The pontoon plane’s landfall on the Wales shoreline comes with Welsh villagers rowing out and singing their welcome, a special moment.

London embraced Amelia; ticker tape and book deals followed in New York City. And Amelia finally gave in to marriage (though “We’re both still free,” she advised George).

Ever restless, one morning she asked her husband, “Would you mind if I flew the Atlantic?” Seven women had been killed trying, but a meteorologist gave the OK.

Now a solo pilot, the camera follows her May 20, 1932, return to Newfoundland, Europe-bound into a storm front that roiled and thundered around her.

Her plane laden with ice, she barely recovered from a deadly oceanward spin. But the sun broke through to light up her landing on the rich green fields of Northern Ireland.

Her final flight, departing Miami on June 1, 1937, with navigator Fred Noonan, aimed to encircle the globe at the equator, another woman’s “first.”

Wrote author Paul L. Briand Jr. in “Daughter of the Sky,” by June 30 the 22,000 miles of flying had taken an “unremitting toll.” The 2,566-mile leg from Lae, New Guinea, to tiny Howland Island in mid-Pacific was marked by long radio silences.

Near dawn from about 200 miles out, the Coast Guard cutter Itasca heard her request a bearing, then at 100 miles, perhaps closer.

The film captures the drama as the Lockheed’s gas runs low, though there are no precise theories on the cause of its disappearance.

Describing an imaginary “line of position” on Howland, the intrepid Amelia advises that their aircraft would search up and down that navigation “ladder.”

“We are running north and south” were her last words. Ahead lay Valhalla.

*Jim Malone is a freelance writer from Middleton.

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Wednesday, November 04, 2009
By Donald Brown

She disappeared forever, seemingly, after a transmission on July 2, 1937. But Amelia Earhart is back. With the aviatrix currently on the big screen in Mira Nair’s Amelia, and with new conjectures about her disappearance surfacing, these are favorable conditions for Chandra Prasad’s Breathe the Sky, a fictional rendering of major events in Earhart’s life and career.

The dramatic focus of the novel, indeed half its length, is a tour de force presentation of her fatal attempt to circle the globe. Having learned Earhart made a visit to New Haven shortly before that flight, Prasad gave the famed pilot a cameo in her earlier novel On Borrowed Wings, set at Yale, where Earhart speaks in Woolsey Hall. Prasad “continued to read about her out of personal curiosity,” soon “had a miniature Earhart library” next to her desk, and planned to “write about [Earhart] on a larger scale.”

Prasad initially set out to write a novel balancing Earhart’s presence with fictional women of the period influenced by Earhart, but found, in writing, that Earhart’s story was “simply bigger, grander, and more dramatic.” And, as Prasad notes, “Earhart tends to experience a marked surge in popularity every decade or so. It has been this way ever since she disappeared.”

So the challenge became how to make her own distinct version of Earhart’s story, “an ode to Amelia.”

In focusing on Earhart, Breathe the Sky brings us into her consciousness, shaping the relationships in the book — particularly with husband George Putnam, and with Fred Noonan, her navigator on the final flight — through Earhart’s point of view. And yet there are nice novelistic touches outside Earhart’s perspective, such as views of the heroine as seen by the Putnams — George, his first wife Dorothy, their son David — when she stays at their grand home in Rye, N.Y. And late in the book there’s a memorable glimpse of Noonan’s final hours. Indeed, Prasad invests Noonan with a certain stalwart pathos. He is the person closest to Earhart in her bid to circle the globe, but seems never completely simpatico with his demanding boss. He is also the one person to share her uncertain fate.

To give us Earhart, Prasad must also give us the rigors of aviation at the time, but without bogging her narrative in too much technical detail. She keeps everything rolling along, much as Earhart herself seemed to do. In Prasad’s hands, Earhart is neither a daredevil nor a stickler for caution. She operates on instinct, on talent, and on a belief in herself and in her equipment. Aviation and Earhart’s love for it dominate the book.

At times, we might almost say flying becomes a metaphor for a woman’s effort to set herself apart from the reigning expectations facing women at the time. Or we might try to see Earhart as, to use a potent phrase the narrator lets fall when estimating what captured the public’s attention, “an entire nation’s raw potential poured into female form.” But whenever we might be tempted to read Earhart as a symbol, Prasad brings us back to the logistical problems facing her heroine — whether flight paths, fueling problems, or the many projects her husband G. P. uses her fame to promote.

We find that living at risk, by courage and skill, is a heroic calling, but also an exhausting one, taking its toll on relationships, and even on Earhart’s ability to see herself, on the ground, as anything other than the sum total of her fame and her flights. Only in the air is she herself.

The novel provides a gritty, unglamorized, or as Prasad says, “resolutely unsentimental” account of a unique and determined woman who succeeded, though not without misgivings and set-backs, on an unprecedented scale in a dangerous and exciting field.

Novels are, for Prasad, “daring, creative ventures … meant to take readers to places they didn’t expect to go.” Breathe the Sky takes us into the cramped space of that Lockheed Electra, and then into a do-or-die situation on the last leg of that journey, trying to reach tiny Howland Island. It’s a trip you’ll be glad to have made with her.

Donald Brown is a regular contributor to the New Haven Review.
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On March 17, 1937, Earhart’s first attempt to circumnavigate the world did not get far. After traveling from California to Hawaii, her plane experienced mechanical problems and was grounded. The plane ended up severely damaged and had to be transported back to California for repairs. Earhart made her final attempt two months later.

Quietly, Earhart and crew member Fred Noonan left California for Miami beginning her second attempt at circumnavigation. On June 1, she took off from Miami and traveled 22,000 miles before arriving in New Guinea. Earhart had 7,000 Pacific Ocean miles left. On July 2, the pair left Lae, New Guinea for Howland Island.

Earhart experienced technical difficulties on the Howland Island approach. There are several theories about what happened ranging from a damaged antenna to confusion on Earhart’s part. There is no way to know for certain. Whatever happened, Earhart and Noonan missed the island and began to run low on fuel. Soon after, the plane crashed.

Amelia Earhart tried to inform rescuers of her location. Transmissions continued for a few days after they ditched. However, rescuers could not make use of them to find the downed plane. The U.S. Navy joined the search, but turned up nothing. There was some evidence of a crash on Gardner Island, but since the island was considered uninhabited, it was discounted. Instead, the navy focused on the open ocean. After the official search ended, Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, continued the search on his own. Eventually, he gave up and had her declared dead in 1939.

Following her disappearance, several conspiracy theories emerged. Some claimed Earhart and Noonan were American spies captured and executed by the Japanese. Others believe the Japanese captured the aviators and murdered them, but they were not spies. One bizarre theory claims she returned to America and lived under an assumed name. Still another, popular after World War II, argued Earhart was the infamous Japanese propagandist, Tokyo Rose. There is no evidence to support any of these claims.

For years, most researchers believed the plane ditched in the ocean. However, recent examinations of Gardner Island have turned up intriguing evidence. For example, a skeleton of a white woman was found in 1940. Unfortunately, it has disappeared. Additionally, makeshift tools, Plexiglas, a zipper, the heel from a woman’s boot in Earhart’s size, and an aluminum panel have been found. Although nothing placing Earhart on the island directly has been uncovered, the artifacts are tantalizing.

What happened to Amelia Earhart will remain a mystery until her remains are found and identified. Until then, there is only speculation. The Gardner Island finds provide circumstantial evidence that point to a crash and subsequent attempts at survival. Unfortunately, the skeletal remains found by the British have been lost. Whatever happened, Earhart was a skilled pilot and inspiration to men and women aviators everywhere. Like John F. Kennedy, Amelia Earhart should be remembered for what she accomplished and not how she died.

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While she passed away before I was born, like many Americans, I grew up with a special affection for Earhart, who was a fellow Kansan who’d made good. From small-town roots, she struck her own unique and independent path–with confidence and without apology–inhabiting an increasingly glamorous world, yet never losing her down-to-earth ability to call too much fuss and bluster a load of “hooey.”

Her achievements buoyed a nation that had fallen on hard times. Yet as she soared to megawatt international stardom, she was keenly aware of the struggles of working families in the depths of the Great Depression. Indeed one of the more dazzling (and true) scenes from the film involves Earhart taking then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on an impromptu late-night flight over the nation’s capital–two iconic women leaders looking down over the most powerful city in the world.

Earhart handled the more than occasional dig at her gender with unflappable grace and infectious brio. In doing so, she broke barriers and inspired generations well beyond the world of aviation. She did well by her home state, too. A key early booster of commercial air travel, Earhart helped vastly expand an industry that today is one of Kansas’ leading job creators.

Fox Searchlight deserves kudos for bringing this important American story to the big screen, particularly at a time when strong female leads in major motion pictures are believed by many to be too few and far between.

Movies are incomparable in bringing history to life and to the masses. And, this one certainly boasts an on-time arrival as women leaders convene in Southern California this week for The Women’s Conference. Central to the conversation there, undoubtedly, will be The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. This groundbreaking document, produced in partnership with the Center for American Progress, explores the “new normal” in our society where women now make up half the work force and, nearly as often as men, are the chief breadwinners in their households.

We may love our “Mad Men” on television. But increasingly our society is moving beyond “the problem that has no name,” as Betty Friedan once famously put it. According to The Shriver Report, from the kitchen table to the conference room, men and women increasingly are negotiating together a new balance of work and home. There, too, Earhart was ahead of her time, striking the word “obey” from her wedding vows and noting firmly but with affection that her marriage was a “partnership” of “dual control.”

Growing up in Kansas, the Earhart legend was fresh in the minds of the people around me. She faced danger and courage at a time when this was not encouraged in women, and she changed history, women’s lives and our society in the process. Throughout her life, Earhart continually exhorted women to “take to the skies.” In the decades since her disappearance, they have answered her call in a virtually limitless abundance of ways. Now, through the power of movies, Amelia Earhart’s real-life heroism is inspiring a new generation. I hope they remember her as I do–head held high, looking to the horizon.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-glickman/amelia-earhart-a-differen_b_333658.html

Oct. 23, 2009 — Legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart mostly likely died on an uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, according to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

Tall, slender, blonde and brave, Earhart disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937 in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Her final resting place has long been a mystery.

For years, Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director and author of the book “Finding Amelia,” and his crew have been searching the Nikumaroro island for evidence of Earhart. A tiny coral atoll, Nikumaroro was some 300 miles southeast of Earhart’s target destination, Howland Island.

A number of artifacts recovered by TIGHAR would suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, made a forced landing on the island’s smooth, flat coral reef.

According to Gillespie, who is set to embark on a new $500,000 Nikumaroro expedition next summer, the two became castaways and eventually died there.

“We know that in 1940 British Colonial Service officer Gerald Gallagher recovered a partial skeleton of a castaway on Nikumaroro. Unfortunately, those bones have now been lost,” Gillespie said.

The archival record by Gallagher suggests that the bones were found in a remote area of the island, in a place that was unlikely to have been seen during an aerial search.

A woman’s shoe, an empty bottle and a sextant box whose serial numbers are consistent with a type known to have been carried by Noonan were all found near the site where the bones were discovered.

“The reason why they found a partial skeleton is that many of the bones had been carried off by giant coconut crabs. There is a remote chance that some of the bones might still survive deep in crab burrows,” Gillespie said.

Although she did not succeed in her around-the-world expedition, Earhart flew off into the legend just after her final radio transmission.

Books, movies and television specials about her disappearance abound as well as speculation about her fate. Theories proliferated that she was a spy, that she was captured by the Japanese, that she died in a prisoner-of-war camp, and that she survived and returned to live her life as a New Jersey housewife.

A new biopic about Earhart’s life, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, opens this weekend.

The general consensus has been that the plane had run out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near Howland Island.

But according to Gillespie, the “volume of evidence” TIGHAR has gathered suggests an alternative scenario.

“Propagation analysis of nearly 200 radio signals heard for several days after the disappearance make it virtually indisputable that the airplane was on land,” Gillespie said.

Eventually, Earhart’s twin-engine plane, the Electra, was ripped apart by Nikumaroro’s strong waves and swept out into deep water, leaving no visible trace.

“The evidence is plentiful — but not conclusive yet — to support the hypothesis that Amelia landed and died on the island of Nikumaroro,” forensic anthropologist Karen Ramey Burns told Discovery News.

The author of a book on Earhart, Burns believes that the strongest of the amassed evidence comes from the report related to the partial skeleton found by Gallagher.

“The skeleton was found to be consistent in appearance with females of European descent in the United States today, and the stature was consistent with that of Amelia Earhart,” said Burns.

According to Burns, another piece of documentary evidence comes from the accounts of Lt. John O. Lambrecht, a U.S. Naval aviator participating in the search for Earhart’s plane. Lambrecht reported “signs of recent habitation” on what was an officially uninhabited atoll.

Lambrechet’s report begs the question: Why did no one follow up?

“I have stood in plain sight on Nikumaroro in a white shirt waving wildly as a helicopter flew over me and was not noticed until the video tape of the flight was examined,” Burns said.

“I find it very easy to believe that Amelia and Fred would not have been seen by the pilot. If the Electra was not visible at the time, their last chance of rescue was lost in Lambrecht’s notes,” she added.

Abandoned on a desert island where temperatures often exceed 100 degrees, even in the shade, Earhart and Noonan likely eventually succumbed to any number of causes, including injury and infection, food poisoning from toxic fish, or simply dehydration.

The coconut crabs’ great pincers would have done the rest, likely removing some of the last physical traces of this pioneering aviatrix.

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