A Pilot Is Pretty Sure He Found Amelia Earhart's Plane
A pilot perusing Google Earth may have stumbled across the remnants of Amelia Earhart's plane.
Inspired by a documentary on the Earhart's final flight, Justin Myers compared the measurements of anomalies in a Google Earth image to the components of her plane.
So far, no major institutions have made any effort to investigate his claims.
This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.
What would you do if you thought you'd cracked an unsolved mystery, but nobody wanted to listen?
That's the predicament pilot Justin Myers currently finds himself in. With nearly a quarter-century in the air himself, he believes he's uncovered the answer to one of aviation's most enduring mysteries: Where is the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E, the final plane she ever flew? All it took was Google Earth and a little curiosity.
Unlike some who have tried to find the wreckage from Earhart and Fred Noonan's ill-fated final flight in 1937, Myers was not a life-long Earhart obsessive.
'To be totally honest,' Myers told Popular Mechanics, 'my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. It was the next day when curiosity about Nikumaroro Island took me to looking on Google Earth.'
Nikumaroro Island is often posited as a final resting place for, if not Earhart and Noonan themselves, than at least the Electra they were flying in. As Biography previously noted, 'This theory is based on several on-site investigations that have turned up artifacts such as improvised tools, bits of clothing, an aluminum panel and a piece of Plexiglas the exact width and curvature of an Electra window.'
When Myers first looked up Nikumaroro, he wasn't initially looking for a plane at all. 'I was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred's shoes,' he told PopMech. But as he stared at those overhead images, he started to employ his own experience as a pilot, to think about 'where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.'
That's when Myers noticed what he felt were some anomalies on the map. He detailed his observations in a blog post: 'I picked an area which would probably have been what I thought to be best considering the circumstances. I zoomed in and there was a long sandy-looking shape... I measured the sandy section, which was over 50ft long, looked up the specifications of the Electra, and that measured 39ft.'
Next to the sandy section, however, was a dark, straight object that was exactly 39 feet long. 'It looked man-made,' Myers noted as he continued to examine the object, 'it looked like a section of aircraft fuselage.'
As Myers poured over the images more, he made out what appeared to him to be even more airplane debris, including what looked like a partially exposed radial engine, and his approximate measurements all aligned with the dimensions of the corresponding parts of the Lockheed Electra 10E that Earhart and Noonan had flown.
But if these airplane parts could be seen from Google Earth images, why hadn't anyone seen them before? Myers suggested to PopMech that 'there was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time. I managed to catch some photos before being covered over again by passing weather systems.'
So, Myers assembled his images and his measurements, and was ready to present his findings. But just who do you present such a case to?
'I didn't know really where to go with this,' Myers wrote in his blog post. 'I wrote to the NTSB in the U.S., and they emailed me back saying it was not there [sic] jurisdiction, it was the ATSB, Australian Transport Safety Bureau. So, I filed an official report with the air crash investigation team in Brisbane.'
But in the years since, there has been no real movement to take Myers' theory beyond the theoretical. 'I did have some communication with an expedition company in California,' Myers said to PopMech. 'However, I haven't heard anything in a long time. I also contacted Purdue University a few years ago and recently, but unfortunately they never responded.'
So if Myers has found the solution to an enduring aeronautical quandary, why isn't anyone inquiring further? Well, in the case of Purdue University, it's not as though they're not pursuing answers to Earhart's disappearance at all. PopMech reported in July that they had announced their own expedition to investigate an anomaly known as the Taraia Object, often speculated to be the downed Electra.
But it's also an impediment to Myers' outreach efforts that he is hardly alone in thinking he has found the final piece of the proverbial puzzle.
If you had a dollar for every person who claimed to have found Amelia Earhart's plane, you'd probably have enough money to fund an expedition to try and find it. Hopes for answers have hinged on everything from old photographs to the promise of modern-day technology. In the process, some people with wildly different theories have become prominent figures in the aircraft recovery community, which has resulted in bitter feuds and sometimes even lawsuits.
And of course, there's the risk of getting it wrong.
In 2024, images from underwater drones operated by Tony Romeo's Deep Sea Vision showed 'contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale' of the Lockheed Electra. At the time, Romeo had confidently stated that 'you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that this is not an airplane and not Amelia's plane.'
But after another expedition was launched to more closely examine that anomaly, Romeo discovered that it was not an airplane but rather an ordinary rock formation. 'I'm super disappointed out here,' Romeo remarked after the fact, 'but you know, I guess that's life.'
For his part, Myers isn't challenging others to convince him he's wrong, though he does feel confident, based on his measurements, that what he's found is more than just a naturally occurring phenomenon.
'The bottom line is,' he told PopMech, 'from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft. What I can't say is that is definitely Amelia's Electra.'
And if it isn't Amelia's place, PopMech asked, would Myers be disappointed?
'If this is not Amelia's Electra 10 E,' he said, 'then it's the answer to another mystery that has never been answered. This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago.'
If Myers found Amelia Earhart's plane, it could bring him acclaim. But if it's a different downed plane he's found, it could at least bring closure to the family of whoever piloted it.
Only time will tell if anyone with the funds to launch a search will take the leap of faith to see if there truly is a plane there at all.
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