Ameila Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to circumnavigate the world at the equator. After 76 years, the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the world's first female celebrity aviator may finally be answered.
On that day, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from New Guinea in their Lockheed Electra, headed for Howland Island in the South Pacific. At 7:42 that morning (local time), the famed aviator made a call to the Itasca, a Coast Guard cutter located at Howland Island. She reported she should be near the destination but could not see it. The aviator was also at 1,000 feet and running low on gas. An hour later, she made her last known in-flight call, reporting her compass heading - 157-337, which would have carried her over Howland Island and Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island, an unihabitated piece of land 350 miles southeast of the destination.
Radio signals received by rescue craft in the hours and days after the plane went down - 120 in all - were deemed, at the time, to not be from the downed aviators. New research by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has shown that 57 of those signals received were likely from the plane.
If the radio was able to transmit messages, that would mean that the plane landed on land, as well as on its wheels. This is because the battery would have had to be recharged for the radio to continue operation, requiring the starboard engine to be functional, which could only happen with the wheel in place. With water rising the radio would have likely been destroyed in days. One Morse code message received just three days after the disappearance hinted at this.
"281 north Howland - call KHAQQ - beyond north - won't hold with us much longer - above water - shut off," Earhart messaged, using her call letters.
A box of rare aerial photos taken of Nikumaroro December 1, 1938 as part of the New Zealand Pacific Aviation Survey were discovered in storage room at a New Zealand museum. They will be carefully examined for evidence of Earhart's presence.
"For 25 years we have struggled to tease details from a handful of printed photos. Now we have an amazing array of detailed aerial images of every part of the atoll taken before the first colonists, or even the New Zealand Survey party, set foot on the island," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, said.
Bottles of ointment, including some usually used by women, were recovered in 2012 near the site of the skeleton. One of these is a liniment with a label written in English, having a patent date of 1933. This lends further evidence to the idea that the two survived for a while on the deserted island.
Recent sonar images suggest plane wreckage that matches Earhart's aircraft near Nikumaroro island. Researchers from TIGHAR plan to send a team to the island in July 2013 to conduct a high-tech underwater search for evidence about the disappearance.
The Earhart Project, run by TIGHAR, believes that both aviators survived their forced landing on Gardner Island. There, they lived as castaways until they each died from unknown causes. Human remains of a (likely) causation woman from that era were found on the island in 1940, but then disappeared, possibly taken by hermit crabs, providing an inauspicious end for one of the world's great aviators.
