New search may solve the Earhart mystery
What happened to Amelia Earhart? That question has been asked countless times over the 82 years since she disappeared on July 2, 1937 on the thirdtolast leg of her planned flight around the world. We have a pretty good idea of what happened to her but as yet no conclusive proof. But that may soon change, thanks to a search now underway in the South Pacific.
Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, left Oakland on May 20, 1937 in her twoengine Lockheed Electra 10E plane, accompanied by Fred Noonan, her navigator. Circling the globe from west to east, by July 2 she had reached New Guinea and left Lae at midnight on the longest leg of the flight — more than 2,500 miles — to Howland Island, from which, after refueling, she would fly on to Hawaii and then to California.
Howland is a tiny island, less than two square miles in size, that is an unincorporated territory of the United States The United States built a runway on Howland for Earhart’s flight. Given the rudimentary communication and navigation instruments available at the time, flying more than 2,500 miles to a speck of land in a vast ocean was undoubtedly the most challenging leg of the entire flight.
Earhart never arrived at Howland. Some thought she was probably blown off course by the winds, ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Pacific. But that theory is contradicted by the fact that, between July 2 and July 7, more than 50 radio messages from Earhart were heard by the Coast Guard at Howland, a Department of the Interior radio operator at nearby Baker Island, the Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and Pan Am station in Hawaii, the Pan Am stations on Midway and Wake Islands, and a number of individuals in the United States and Canada listening on short wave. In many of the messages, Earhart identified herself, gave the plane’s call letters, said they were down on a small uncharted island and needed help. In one of the last calls, heard by a woman in New Brunswick, Canada, Earhart said they were taking on water, that Noonan was badly injured, and that “we can’t hold on much longer.”
By triangulating from the directional bearings of the radio messages received at Howland, Baker, Midway, Wake, and Hawaii, the U.S. Navy focused on the area around Gardner Island, now known as Nikumaroro, a small uninhabited island that’s now part of the Republic of Kiribati, roughly 350 miles southeast of Howland. On July 9, two days after the last signal from Earhart, three observation biplanes were launched from the USS Colorado battleship and flew over Gardner. But they saw no plane and no individuals. But they did report signs of recent habitation, although the island had been uninhabited for many years.
In 1940, a British working party on Gardner came across the partial skeletal remains of a person. Thirteen bones were sent to a medical center in the British colony of Fiji, where they were examined and measured. The bones were subsequently lost but the measurements survived. Recently, a forensic anthropologist compared the measurements of specific bones with estimates, based on photographs of Earhart with objects of known size, of her bones. He concluded there was good reason to believe the bones were those of Amelia Earhart. A series of archaeological searches at the site where the bones were found discovered a number of items — a woman’s compact, a piece of a hand lotion bottle, the pieces of a jar of Americanmade freckle ointment, the heel and partial sole of a Cat’s Paw woman’s shoe — that suggest the presence of an American woman.
Several years ago, the head of a group investigating the Earhart mystery brought a photograph, taken by Eric Bevington, a British colonial officer, in Oct. 1937 of a British freighter, the S.S. Norwich City, that had run aground on a reef of Gardner Island, to a U.S. government official. The group’s forensic imaging expert thought a tiny speck in the water some distance from the freighter was consistent with a Lockheed Electra’s landing gear. The official shared the photo with various intelligence analysts who, using classified technologies to enhance the image, concluded it did indeed look like the landing gear of a Lockheed Electra 10E.
The official contacted Dr. Robert Ballard, the founder of the Ocean Exploration Trust who, with the E/V Nautilus underwater research vessel, discovered the Titanic and many other shipwrecks, and showed him the photograph and the conclusion of the intelligence analysts. Ballard and the Nautilus are now searching the waters off Nikumaroro as part of a National Geographic Society investigation of the Earhart mystery.
What happened to Amelia Earhart? The best guess is that, unable to find Howland, perhaps because of a defective radio direction finder, and running low on fuel, she landed at Gardner on a reef just offshore and used what little fuel was left to periodically start an engine and recharge the radio battery until the fuel ran out or the tides pulled the plane off the reef and sent it to the depths below.
The waters off Nikumaroro drop off sharply and quickly to a depth of more than 10,000 feet. But Ballard’s remotelyoperated underwater research vehicles and sonar equipment can operate and retrieve objects from those depths. If they find anything that was once part of a Lockheed Electra 10E, we will finally know what happened to Amelia Earhart.