Amelia Earhart mystery stays down in the deep

For two weeks in August, a multimillion-dollar search from air, land and sea sought to solve the 80-year mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.

Robert Ballard, the ocean explorer famous for locating the wreck of the Titanic, led a team that discovered two hats in the depths. It found debris from an old shipwreck. It even spotted a soda can. What it did not find was a single piece of the Lockheed Electra airplane flown in 1937 by Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, which vanished during their doomed voyage around the world.

Ballard and his crew don’t consider it a failure. For one thing, he says, they know where the plane isn’t. And in the process, they may have dispensed with one clue that has driven years of speculation, while a team of collaborating archaeologists potentially turned up more hints at the aviator’s fate.

“This plane exists,” Ballard said. “It’s not the Loch Ness monster, and it’s going to be found.”

Ballard had avoided the Earhart mystery for decades, dismissing the search area as too large, until he was presented with a clue he found irresistible. Kurt Campbell, then a senior official in President Barack Obama’s State Department, shared with him what is known as the Bevington image — a photo taken by a British sailor in 1940 at what is now known as Nikumaroro, an atoll in the Phoenix Islands in the Republic of Kiribati. American intelligence analysts had enhanced the image at Campbell’s request and concluded a blurry object in it was consistent with landing gear from Earhart’s plane.

Motivated by this clue, and by 30 years of research on Nikumaroro by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, Ballard and his crew set a course for the island in August. They were joined by archaeologists from the National Geographic Society, which sponsored and documented the journey for Expedition Amelia, which will air on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

Ballard and Allison Fundis, the Nautilus’ chief operating officer, coordinated an elaborate plan of attack. First, they sent the ship five times around the island to map it with multibeam sonar and deployed a floating autonomous surface vehicle to map shallower areas off the island’s shore. They also used four aerial drones for additional inspections of the reef.

Nikumaroro and its reef are just the tip of a 16,000-foot underwater mountain, a series of 13 sheer escarpments that drop off onto ramps, eventually fanning out at the base for 6 nautical miles at the bottom.

If Earhart crashed there, they believe, rising tides would have dragged her plane over the reef and down the escarpments. Fragments should have collected on the ramps, especially heavier components like the engine and the radio.

In deeper water, the team deployed the Hercules and the Argos, remotely operated vehicles equipped with spotlights and high-definition cameras. These robots descended 2,400 feet around the entire island and found nothing. At that point, the crew focused on the northwest corner of the island near the S.S. Norwich City, a British freighter that ran aground on the island in 1929, eight years before Earhart’s disappearance. That is the area where the Bevington photo was taken.

While they searched there, crew members found so many beach rocks consistent in size and shape with the supposed landing gear in the Bevington image that it became a joke on the ship.

Still, Ballard and Fundis confess that other clues pointing to Nikumaroro have left them with lingering curiosity about whether Earhart crashed there. For instance, Panamerican Airway radio direction finders on Wake Island, Midway Atoll and in Honolulu each picked up distress signals from Earhart and took bearings, which triangulated in the cluster of islands that includes Nikumaroro.