Researchers announce new effort to find Amelia Earhart's plane

NBC News

02-07-2025

Researchers on Wednesday announced a new expedition to find ​​Amelia Earhart's plane, based on evidence that suggests the famed aviator may have crash-landed on a remote island in the South Pacific.
A satellite photo may appear to show the remains of Earhart's plane peeking through the sand on the small, remote and inhospitable island lagoon of Nikumaroro in Kiribati, nearly 1,000 miles from Fiji, according to Richard Pettigrew, the executive director of the nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute in Oregon.
In one of the world's most intriguing mysteries, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished while attempting to fly around the world exactly 88 years ago on July 2, 1937.
Now, Purdue University — which had employed Earhart and helped fund her historic flight — said it will send a team to Nikumaroro in November in hopes of digging up her Lockheed Electra 10E aircraft and returning what's left of it.
'We believe we owe it to Amelia and her legacy at Purdue to fulfill her wishes, if possible, to bring the Electra back to Purdue,' Steve Schultz, Purdue's general counsel, said.
The satellite photo was captured in 2015, a year after an intense tropical cyclone shifted the sand, potentially revealing the plane, said Pettigrew, who took the evidence to Purdue.
He said the size and composition of the object matches Earhart's plane. The location is also close to Earhart's planned flight path and almost precisely where four of her radio calls for help seem to originate, said Pettigrew, who has traveled to Nikumaroro.
'It satisfies all the criteria,' he said. 'Everything fits.'
The archaeologist, who has tried to solve Earhart's disappearance for years, said other evidence, including the discovery of American-made tools and a medicine vial, suggests Earhart may have been on Nikumaroro.
And in 2017, four forensic dogs and a team of archaeologists with the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) ventured to Nikumaroro, where the canines indicated they had detected the scent of human remains, according to National Geographic.
Still, there's been no clear proof of her presence there, Pettigrew said, and the object seen in the satellite photo has been elusive. In images taken since 2015, it is hidden under the sand again, he said.
'What we lack now so far is what you call, what I call the smoking gun evidence,' he said.
TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie doubts they will find that proof.
Gillespie's team on The Earhart Project has conducted a dozen expeditions over 35 years and recovered other physical evidence they believe shows Nikumaroro is where Earhart landed and died. But he believes the object in the satellite image is a coconut palm tree with a root ball, washed up in a storm.
'We've looked there in that spot, and there's nothing there,' he said.
Gillespie, who published the book "One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy" last year, said the plane would not be hidden in the sand but buried in coral rubble.
'I understand the desire to find a piece of Amelia Earhart's airplane. God knows we've tried,' he said. 'But the data, the facts, do not support the hypothesis. It's as simple as that.'
Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
The trailblazer worked at Purdue, serving as a career counselor for women and an adviser on its aeronautical engineering department, from 1935 until her disappearance in 1937, according to the university's website.
Schultz, Purdue's general counsel, said Earhart's post-flight plan was to return the plane to the school to be studied by future aeronautical engineers and aviation students.
The Purdue Research Foundation has given the first phase of the expedition a line of credit of $500,000, Schultz said.
It will take six days for the team of explorers to get to Nikumaroro by boat in November, he said. They'll then have another five days on the island to find the object in the sand and identify it as the missing plane.
'If we hopefully solve the mystery and confirm that it is, then there will be further efforts to bring it back, hopefully to a permanent home,' Schultz said.