Stock Image Amelia Earhart - What Really Happened At Howland

Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has inspired enough theories to fill a small airport terminal, but in Amelia Earhart: What Really Happened at Howland, G. Carrington concentrates on the crucial final approach to the tiny Pacific island that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were supposed to find—and spectacularly did not.

On 2 July 1937, Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was approaching Howland after an exhausting flight from Lae, New Guinea. Waiting near the island was the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca, equipped to communicate with the aircraft and help guide it in. Earhart’s transmissions were received loudly enough to suggest that she was nearby, but she apparently could not hear the ship’s replies or obtain the radio bearing she desperately needed. It was an exceptionally unfortunate moment for two-way communication to become one-way communication.

Drawing upon Coast Guard records, radio logs, navigational evidence and technical details of the flight, Carrington reconstructs the confused final hours and examines the planning, equipment and decisions behind them. Frequencies, fuel calculations, lines of position and conflicting messages all come under inspection. Howland itself was little more than a pale strip of land in an enormous blue wilderness, proving once again that there is a considerable difference between drawing a destination on a chart and actually seeing it through an aeroplane window after eighteen hours in the air.

Carrington does not confine himself to the conventional conclusion that Earhart simply ran out of fuel and fell into the sea. He enters the more controversial territory surrounding the suggestion that the flight had an undisclosed intelligence purpose, involving Japanese-held islands and the possibility that Earhart and Noonan survived the immediate disappearance only to fall into Japanese hands. It is a dramatic theory, certainly, but one presented alongside a substantial accumulation of records, calculations and arguments for readers to assess rather than merely admire from a safe distance.

The result is a densely researched and highly individual contribution to the Earhart debate: part aviation investigation, part navigational post-mortem and part challenge to the accepted story. It will appeal to readers interested in aviation history, Pacific intelligence, radio communication and historical mysteries in which every apparent answer is immediately pursued down the runway by several objections.

Published by Britnav in 1993, this copy is in Good condition. Please note that “Stock Image” is not part of the title, merely a stray piece of bookselling furniture that appears to have wandered into the description. The book itself is very real, even if its conclusions concern an aeroplane that remains obstinately absent.

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