Fred Noonan as navigator on the flight got lost in the vastness of the South Pacific ... easy enough to do in 1937.
He was reputed to be one of the best at the time ...
I read a very detailed book about the entire flight. And the many flights leading up to it. Heavily documented. They were to be guided into Howland Island using both a voice radio as a beacon and a morse-code type beacon. (It’s been awhile since I read the book - but it was something like that).
Earhart had two different receivers for the signals that she would switch between. And she was to search for one on the hour and half-hour, and the other on the quarter hours.
The book had documentation for a variety of items where things may have gone wrong. There may have been some confusion on the labels on her switch. Fog, sunlight in her eyes, etc. There was a problem with the island’s radio transmitter so they used a Navy ship achored off the island.
Seems the island had one time, and the Navy ship was running on Hawaii time - something like 1 1/4 hours different. It is the 1/4 that messed things up. They were transmitting the wrong signal when Earhart would have been listening for the other type!
One of the things that came about from the gov’t investigation of Earhart’s missing was creating Greenwich Mean Time as a standard.