Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E May Have Been Found Under The Waters Of This Uninhabited Island
On July 2, the 88th anniversary of famed aviator Amelia Earhart's disappearance, Purdue University announced an expedition to confirm whether or not the wreckage of her plane has been found. Satellite imagery from a decade ago indicated the presence of something that sure looks plane-like under the waters of Nikumaroro Island, an uninhabited spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that just happens to be near Earhart's intended flightpath. Now, the university where Earhart taught in the aeronautics department wants to find out exactly what it is.
This isn't the first time Earhart investigators have been to Nikumaroro. Human bones were recovered from the island previously, which scientists determined with 99% confidence to belong to the beloved pilot, per the university's student newspaper the Purdue Exponent. The investigators also found some women's beauty products from the 1930s. If that is indeed where Earhart died, it stands to reason that her Lockheed Electra 10E, nicknamed the Flying Laboratory, wouldn't be far away. Since nobody noticed any aircraft wreckage on the island (which isn't very big), it would probably be under the water. Time will tell if this mysterious undersea object is it, but signs point to yes.
Buried beneath the sand
Recovering such a legendary airplane will be a multi-stage process spanning years. This expedition, which will embark in November, is only planning to verify what's actually there, not retrieve anything. Recent satellite imagery doesn't show the object anymore, meaning it might have become buried; in fact, it was only ever visible in 2015, right after a cyclone blew threw and shifted a bunch of sand, as NBC News reports. The team will start with non-invasive procedures, such as sonar and magnetometers, before drilling through the silt with a hydroglobe to make physical contact with the object. Lastly, they will use a suction dredge to pull off loose sediment. If they're lucky, that will be sufficient to actually see part of the Lockheed Electra.
If the team strikes it big, later expeditions will be charged with actually moving the plane to its final resting place, wherever that might be. In the meantime, it will be up to the tiny Republic of Kiribati, which technically governs Nikumaroro, to keep underwater tomb raiders away. Apparently if it comes to it, the New Zealand Air Force is also ready to do its part, living planes defending a fallen one.
The final flight of Amelia Earhart
In 1932, Kansas-born Amelia Earhart was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Given the short ranges of aircraft at the time, that was quite a feat. But Earhart and her fame-seeking husband George Putnam wanted to go even bigger. In 1937, following an earlier aborted attempt, Earhart set out to become the first female pilot ever to circumnavigate the globe in a multi-month voyage, as recounted in the New Yorker.
Onboard her Lockheed Electra 10E with her was navigator Fred Noonan. On the plus side, he'd worked for Pan Am, so he was a pro. On the minus side, he apparently mostly used celestial navigation, famously not great on cloudy days. On the even more minus side, he was a hard boozer who got himself stinking drunk during a lot of their stopovers. Several months into their journey, and after Earhart gave Noonan an extra day to get over his latest hangover, the pair took off from New Guinea headed for a refueling stop on Howland Island, a small little thing in the Pacific. They never arrived.
Earhart did later send distress messages, which were picked up by ordinary Americans on their in-home radios, per CBS News. That implied that the plane's communications equipment was intact and on land (it would have shorted out in the water). Of course, the messages eventually stopped, and rescue teams never found her, Noonan, or the Electra (though a piece of the latter was found a decade ago). Hopefully, at long last, that's about to change.
