adding to Lono's comment... modern emergency communications..EPIRBs and PLBs would make all the difference in the world...

in 1972 (only 35 years after Earhart and Noonan's disappearance) we worked an SOS by a Filipino fishing vessel in the Sulu Sea off the Philippines...one of my morse search positions picked up the message, and ordered a flash DF fix.. we got a class A fix via the AN-FLR9 system... by the time the Coast Guard got there, they estimated the vessel was off our reported position by less than 500m (UTM grids) due to drift...