What happened to Amelia Earhart when she failed to reach Howland Island on her round-the-world flight in 1937? Author Ric Gillespie, founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), has pieced together evidence from numerous archival collections to recreate Earhart's flight and the subsequent search and rescue operation. At the time of the crisis, no one person/agency had access to all of the information the author has gathered.

Earhart did not finalize communication procedures for her arrival at Howland Island before she set out on her journey. Attempts to contact Earhart en route to iron out details were hampered by the length of time it took to route messages to Earhart, the differences in time zones, and Earhart's constant travel. Sometimes messages reached a location after Earhart had departed on the next leg of her trip.

There were multiple communication breakdowns during Earhart's last flight and the subsequent search for the downed plane. The Coast Guard vessel positioned at Howland Island for Earhart's arrival had incomplete information about the plane's communication system and were not aware that neither Earhart nor navigator Fred Noonan were skilled in Morse code. When it became clear that Earhart was missing, the ship's captain formed a theory of the plane's probable location based on a number of erroneous assumptions. When subsequent evidence seemed to contradict his theory, he forced the evidence to fit his original theory rather than adjusting his theory to the new evidence. Although several agencies were cooperating in the search, for the first few days there was no command and control center. Different agencies formed different theories about what had happened and where the plane might be and acted accordingly.

Gillespie spends a lot of time analyzing radio communications during and after the flight, with lots of technical detail about frequencies and equipment. It appears that Earhart did survive for at least a few days and was able to transmit messages that were picked up by receivers at various locations in the Pacific and even in the continental U.S. Based on the evidence presented in the book, it seems likely to me that Earhart and Noonan might have been rescued if the search had been better coordinated and had the parties involved not been selective about the information they shared with the others.

I had a hard time putting the book down once I started it. The narrative flows well even with all of the technical details about navigation and radio electronics. Even though I knew the search would fail, I kept hoping until the end that the searchers would find Earhart and Noonan. ( )

This is the second book I have read this year about this aviator. It is not because of the recent film but rather I just stumbled on the books in a used book store and a garage sale. This volume cost me $1.00 and it included a DVD containing all the documentation plus a film of her last takeoff from Lae, New Guinea. When Gillespie is writing about the preparation and the flight itself, this is a very readable book. He does get bogged down in all the details about the radio messages and general communications breakdowns that led to her failure. Earhart and some of her team were way too careless about radio communication. According to Gillespie who is a pilot, she was a glory seeker and not really that great a pilot. Not as much fun to read as Elgen & Marie Long's Amelia Earhart: the Mystery Solved. Many photographs included. ( )