On July 2, 1937, a Lockheed airplane piloted by aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Frederick Noonan was reported missing somewhere between New Guinea and Howland Island ( the nearest land 2,227 miles away), in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A Coast Guard cutter, The Itasca, was in sporadic radio contact with her as she approached Howland Island. They received messages that she was lost and running low on fuel and the ship began sending out huge plumes of black smoke. She was unable to ever locate the ship, to land near it, or on it. She radioed that she was running out of fuel and may have tried to ditch (e.g., "land" on water and get in their lifeboat) in the ocean. No trace of Amelia or her navigator was ever found.
She became famous as the first woman to perform several feats of daring, including a transatlantic flight to Europe, and a solo nonstop across the United States (longer, but with a lot more places to land!). For duplicating Lucky Lindy's flight, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by Congress.
In 1935, in the first flight of its kind, she flew solo from Honolulu to Oakland, California, and won a $10,000 award posted by Hawaiian businessmen. Later that year, she was appointed to a sinecure at Purdue University. They bought her a Lockheed Electra airplane as a "flying laboratory." This is the plane that carried her, a couple of years later, into the great unknown.
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