Amelia Earhart search postponed till next year
The mystery of her 1937 disappearance could be solved before then, if photos prove a metal scrap found on a Pacific atoll came from her plane.
Maybe Amelia Earhart's plane can be found next year.
An ambitious expedition with minisubs, originally planned to launch next week, has been scrapped for lack of funding, according to Ric Gillespie, head of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which is based in Oxford, Chester County.
The budget was about $2 million for a monthlong trip to the remote Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, where Amelia Earhart, on the last legs of her flight around the world in 1937, may have died as a castaway after an emergency landing.
A new expedition, penciled in for June, has set a more modest fund-raising goal of $500,000. As a result, the underwater searches for the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra will target specific areas deemed promising after a 2012 trip documented on a Discover Channel special.
An unexpected line on a sonar mapping marks the most promising spot for the fuselage, at a depth of about 600 feet, Gillespie said. Video of another area showed shapes resembling a tire, a pulley and a fender.
"We can't afford to search the entire reef face, but we have a couple of good targets to check out," Gillespie said. "We can do that with a small ROV [remote-operated vehicle] and a much smaller boat. We'll charter the same 120-foot motor sailer we've used on five previous expeditions."
Researchers will also explore the island for signs of what might have been Earhart's first campsite. It's closer to the reef where the Electra may have landed than to an area that yielded a variety of clues. Human bones found there were taken away and lost after being examined by a British doctor. He concluded they belonged to a native male, but his careful measurements suggested to a forensic anthropologist in recent years they belonged to a woman of European descent.
Right now, though, the most exciting piece of possible evidence is a scrap of aluminum with rivet holes.
Earhart flew east, starting in Los Angeles, and photographs taken in Miami show a patch of metal over a rear window. TIGHAR's latest analysis suggests the odd rivet pattern fits the photographic evidence.
"We still have some verification to do, but we may be able to prove that a piece of Earhart's airplane ended up on Nikumaroro," Gillespie said.
A lawsuit, decided in TIGHAR's favor in August, likely hurt the group's fund-raising efforts. Timothy Mellon, who donated $1 million to the 2012 expedition, alleged Gillespie and company had already located and videotaped Electra wreckage during a 2010 expedition and fraudulently covered it up.
"Plaintiff has no more than theories and opinions that Earhart's plane, or parts of it, are depicted in the 2010 footage," District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled. "... No false representations were made."
"The lawsuit is now history," Gillespie said. "An anonymous donor is paying off all of our legal bills plus any future costs from a possible appeal. That clears the decks for action and lets us move forward with a doable plan."
For more, visit TIGHAR.org.
Contact staff writer Peter Mucha at 215-854-4342 or pmucha@phillynews.com. Follow @petemucha on Twitter.
