A team of researchers believe they may have found Amelia Earhart’s missing plane 88 years after she mysteriously disappeared.
American aviation pioneer Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, while attempting to fly around the world.
They had set off from New Guinea and were due to touch down on a coral islet in the Pacific called Howland Island to refuel, but they never made it.
Despite several searches over the decades, and countless theories as to what happened, their plane was never found.
But a team at Purdue University in Indiana now feels confident they have located the Model 10-E Electra aircraft at the bottom of the sea, off the small, remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro in Kiribati, almost 1,000 miles from Fiji.
They said satellite imagery shows objects that they believe are theremains of the plane’s tail, wing, and body sitting just metres from the shoreline.
Artifacts from the 1930s and human bones had already been discovered on the island, which sits near Earhart’s intended flight path.
The island also matches the location where four of her distress calls were traced to.
Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) at Purdue, suspects Earhart and Noonan may have miscalculated and ended up on Nikumaroro Island instead of Howland Island, which lies further north.
Speaking to WISH TV, he things Earhart carried out a ‘successful landing on the reef with an intact aircraft’.
‘I think it’s likely Amelia was planning to be rescued, refueled, take off again and make it to Hawaii and continue on to California to complete her journey,’ he added.
‘We know there are radio transmissions from her for a period of about 4 or 5 days. She was basically sending out SOS.’
The human bones, discovered on the island in 1940, were forensically analysed in 2017 and found to have dimensions that matched Earhart’s bone lengths more closely than 99% of the population.
The period specific artifacts meanwhile, included a woman’s shoe, a compact case, a jar of freckle cream, and a medicine vial.
A further clue supporting the theory that Earhart’s journey ended on or near Nikumaroro, is a photo taken just three months after the disappearance that appears to show the plane’s landing gear on the Nikumaroro reef.
A satellite image from 2020 shows what looks like the same object, which is known as the Bevington Object, in the same spot decades later.
A team from ALI began researching Earhart’s disappearance that year.
Speaking about the latest satellite discovery, ALI said in a statement: ‘This object in the satellite images is exactly the right size to represent the fuselage and tail of the Electra.
‘It also appears to be very reflective and is likely to be metallic.’
The team, which is calling the object Taraia, are now launching a new mission, named the Taraia Object Expedition, which will be carried out in three phases over several years.
The first phase will be an on-site examination of Nikumaroro, the second will include a full-scale archaeological excavation and the final phase aims to recover what’s thought to be the aircraft remains.
‘We believe that the result of this Phase-1 field examination will probably be the confirmation that the Taraia Object is indeed the Lockheed Electra aircraft,’ the team shared.
‘This work, then, is likely to solve one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.’
Among previous missions to the island was that of well-known ocean explorer Robert Ballard, who was supported by National Geographic.
He carried out a systematic search of the deep waters around Nikumaroro but found no trace of the plane.
However, ALI researchers said this doesn’t mean the aircraft is not there.
‘The plane ending up in the deep water is not actually a likely scenario, given what we know about the prevailing winds and currents along the northwestern edge of the island,’ they explained.
In 2017, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) searched the island using dogs that detected the scent of human remains, but no physical evidence was found.
Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas in 1987 to a father who was a railroad lawyer, but later suffered from alcoholism, leaving the family often struggling for money.
She left junior college early to become a nurse’s aid and helped care for soldiers wounded in World War I and later started a premed programme, but quit after her parents asked her to move back home California.
It was there she took her first flight as a passenger in 1920 and was entranced immediately, saying:’As soon as I left the ground, I knew I had to fly.’
She started taking lessons, bought her first plane and by 1922 became the first woman to fly at 14,000 feet.
Earhart was chosen as the first female passenger to fly across the Atlantic in 1928, and became celebrity overnight.
Then in 1932 she became the first woman, and second person ever, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic.
It took her 15 hours, in which time she had to contend with mechanical issues, cold, tiredness and a drop of 3,000 feet on her descent.
Despite the arduous journey, she gave herself another challenge, to fly solo nonstop across America, which she successfully completed in 19 hours and five minutes.
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