Amelia Earhart died searching for Howland Island

The argument

When Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, they were aiming for Howland Island, a tiny island just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean. From their subsequent disappearance, it is obvious enough they did not succeed in finding the island — the aircraft never arrived, so the question is what happened between the departure and that failure rather than whether the flight went wrong. The official United States position on the death of Earhart is that while en route to Howland Island, Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. This prediction has been supported by many experts over the course of 80 years, specifically due to the known end goal of the flight as well as triangulations made from their last radio messages. Those two things constrain the answer from opposite directions: the intended destination fixes where the aircraft was trying to be, and the triangulations indicate where it actually was when last heard. Together they narrow the location considerably. The estimation is that Earhart died very close to and a bit north of Howland Island due to a miscalculation by navigator Fred Noonan. A small navigational error is sufficient to account for the outcome, because the target was a tiny island in open ocean, and an aircraft that misses such a target has nowhere else within reach before its fuel is exhausted. This argument is the most practical as it takes into account the facts of the day including navigational dilemmas, fuel dilemmas, and the mannerisms of how Earhart and Noonan would respond in a disaster scenario. Because it accounts for the flight as it was actually flown, Amelia Earhart died searching for Howland Island.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many experts have claimed full confidence that this is what occurred to Earhart and Noonan, staking their careers upon it. However, the area of ocean believed to be where the craft crashed has been explored many times. It is unsensible that Earhart’s aircraft would elude mission after mission to find it if it were truly in this area. Furthermore, if Earhart’s disappearance and death are so cut and dry, it would not have consumed the public imagination in the way it has for 80 years.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Failing to reach Howland establishes only that. It does not distinguish crashing near the island from flying on to another landfall, which is what the rival positions propose. [Rejecting P2] Official endorsement and long-standing expert agreement are appeals to authority rather than evidence, and triangulation from the last radio messages yields a broad search area rather than a crash site — an area that, as the counter-argument notes, has been searched repeatedly without result. [Rejecting P3] "Best fits the known facts" is a comparative claim the argument does not make good on: no wreckage, remains or debris has been recovered that would favour this explanation over the others on offer.