Amelia Earhart, Largest Rescue Attempt Ever

World's best-known aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were on their second attempt to fly around the world when they disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island, on July 2, 1937.


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Sixty-six planes and 4,ooo people on nine ships covered about 250,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean to find the them, but after 16 days and $4 million, on July 19, naval authorities decided to end it. The search for Amelia's airplane has been the largests rescue attempt ever made for a single lost plane, and, also, the most costly and intensive search by the Navy and Coast Guard in US history up to that time.



Amelia and Fred Noonan had departed from Miami two months earlier and before getting lost, about 22,000 miles of the journey had been completed, through South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. The remaining 7,000 miles would all be over the Pacific. Although Amelia's family went on searching for years, neither the bodies no the plane were found, and Fred Noonan was declared legally dead on June 26, 1938, while Amelia was on January 5, 1939. But not everybody was satisfied with this end of the story, and many theories emerged after the disappearance of Amelia and Noonan.



Amelia was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. You can see her story opening today at theaters.