The mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart is among those mysteries which puzzled the world for the last 81 years. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and also the first woman to earn the Air Force Distinguished Flying Cross. Amelia empowered many women to pursue their dreams and aspirations. She also inspired the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to get flying lessons. Her disappearance on 2nd July 1937 was one of the history’s greatest tragedies. She was accompanied by her navigator Fred Noonan when the incident occurred.
It is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation since no one knows what happened to her. Some believed she crashed into the Pacific Ocean; some said she crash-landed on a Pacific Island. Ric Gillespie, who studied the disappearance of Amelia Earhart believes that she crash-landed on a South Pacific island which is 2000 miles away from Hawaii. Radio signals from her phone continued to transmit for a week before they stopped. If the plane had crashed into the Pacific ocean, the radio wouldn’t be able to send the signal for 1-week because of the water damage.
Battleships were sent out to locate her and bring her back, however, it took a week for the ships to reach there. Gillespie said, “It took the battleship a week to get there, by which time the radio signals had stopped, and when the planes flew over the island, they didn’t see an airplane.” He added that the ability for a plane to transmit radio signals indicated that it was on land. He said, “Now the airplane’s manufacturer, Lockheed, had said that if you’re hearing calls from this airplane it’s not floating around in the water because the radios would be wet, it won’t work. The airplane is on land and able to run an engine to recharge the battery, so it’s on its wheels. She’s made a safe landing someplace.”
Since she was using radio frequency for her transmissions, anyone who tuned into the band was able to hear her distress calls. Several people claimed that they heard Amelia’s voice through their radio. A woman in Canada said that she heard a female voice saying, “we have taken in water. … We can’t hold on much longer.” The US government spent nearly $4 billion for Amelia’s rescue missions, but none of them came out positively. Years later, bones which are believed to be of a female washed on the Kiribati shores. Gillespie thinks that these bones are identical to Amelia.
From the evidence and conclusions that Gillespie found during his research, he said that Amelia and her navigator crash-landed on the Nikumaroro island after they faced problems which the plane. She was able to send distress signals for a week which made navy search for her. The radio signals stopped after a week, and it is thought that they must have been washed away by the ocean. The rescue team was unable to spot the island or her plane after carrying out various attempts. Gillespie said, “There is an entire final chapter of Earhart’s life that people don’t know about. She spent days – maybe months – heroically struggling to survive as a castaway.” He further added, “This case is closed.”
