Where's Amelia Earhart's Plane?
By Discovery
June 29, 2012




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U.S. Navy warships and aircraft failed to find Amelia Earhart when the pioneering female aviator vanished in the South Pacific during her second attempt to fly around the world in 1937.

This summer, aviation archaeologists have enlisted the help of underwater robots to find the wreckage of Earhart's aircraft.



The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (or TIGHAR) suspects that Earhart's Lockheed Electra landed on a reef off the uninhabited coral atoll formerly known as Gardner Island and stayed there for several days before waves washed the aircraft over the reef's edge -- perhaps enough time for the aviator and her navigator to have sent out radio distress calls.







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The expedition plans to deploy ship sonar and two robot submersibles to search the slope of the underwater reef for any aircraft parts.

"We will not be recovering anything on this trip," said Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR. "The objective is to get imagery and photographs of what's there."





The expedition is scheduled to set out aboard the Hawaiian research vessel "Ka'Imikai-o-Kanaloa" from Honolulu on July 2 -- the 75th anniversary of Earhart's disappearance.

Its underwater robots are capable of searching with sonar and taking black-and-white photos down to a depth of almost 5,000 feet, as well as checking out sonar targets with high-definition video down to a depth of 3,300 feet.









An underwater search

An eight-day journey to Nikumaroro (the former Gardner Island) will allow TIGHAR to search the underwater reef slope for approximately 10 days between July 9 and July 19. Success could pave the way for a later expedition to actually recover pieces of Earhart's aircraft.

"If there's wreckage there that can be recovered, we need to know what it is, how big it is, what it looks like, and what it's made of so we can prepare a recovery expedition that has equipment to raise whatever's there," Gillespie told InnovationNewsDaily.

"And, equally as important, to conserve it."





The first step in the search relies upon the surface ship's multi-beam sonar -- a device capable of mapping the seafloor at depths of almost seven miles. An autonomous underwater vehicle called Bluefin-21 made by Bluefin Robotics -- operated by Phoenix International Holdings Inc. -- can roam the shallows of the underwater reef slope as a programmed drone to help with the sonar mapping.

A second step would rely more upon the torpedo-shaped Bluefin-21 made by Bluefin Robotics to do a more focused search with its side-scan sonar while taking black-and-white pictures. The crew could recover the collected data, swap out the batteries and reprogram the robot between each six-hour search session.

The third step would try to take an up-close look at suspected aircraft parts with a high-definition video camera -- a job for the remote operated vehicle tethered to the surface ship and controlled by a human operator.

The TRV 005 robot made by Submersible Systems Inc. even has manipulator arms to move objects around.









Following Earhart's trail

But all the high-tech sonar and robots will only succeed if TIGHAR's hypothesis about Earhart's location proves correct. The group has launched nine expeditions in search of Earhart's lost trail over the past 24 years.

TIGHAR analyzed old radio transmissions originally followed by U.S. Navy and Coast Guard searchers in 1937 to help narrow down the search to Nikumaroro.

It also dug up old paperwork from a British colonial physician who described human bones recovered from the island -- bones that belonged to a woman fitting Amelia Earhart's profile, according to modern analysis.





Several expeditions uncovered items that could have belonged to Earhart, along with signs of survival living.

Such items include a jar that likely contained Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment (Earhart was known for disliking her freckles), a hand lotion bottle marketed to women in the 1930s, and a bone-handled knife matching the description of a knife listed in Earhart's aircraft inventory.

The expeditions also found airplane parts in the ghost village left behind by Pacific Islanders who temporarily settled on Nikumaroro several years after Earhart's disappearance. An old woman living in Fiji -- who lived as a young girl on the island -- pointed to parts of the island where people had found airplane parts.

One of those locations matched a big clue -- an object sticking out of the water in a British expedition photograph taken just months after Earhart's disappearance. Analysis by both TIGHAR and U.S. State Department experts suggested that the object fit the profile of Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft landing gear.









Making it all possible

Turning decades of sleuthing into a history-making payoff has required lots of outside help from the U.S. State Department and private companies. For instance, global delivery company FedEx has helped move 27,500 pounds of the expedition's robots and equipment by truck, ship and plane from the continental U.S. to Hawaii.

The robots and equipment will have moved about 22,000 miles by the end of the round trip -- just shy of the distance covered by Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan before they vanished in their attempt to fly around the world.

TIGHAR has raised almost all of the $2.2 million needed to make the expedition possible, but Gillespie vowed to go ahead with the full mission regardless.





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He pointed to Earhart as his inspiration -- the aviator had to scramble for funding to repair her aircraft after it crashed during a first attempt to fly around the world.

"Future is mortgaged, but what else are futures for?" Earhart wired in a telegraph message.










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This broken green glass bottle has a melted bottom and was found in a fire feature. It matches a three-ounce container of "St. Joseph Nerve and Bone Family Liniment."

The bottle design was patented on May 30, 1933.









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Coding embossed into the bottom of this three-ounce bottle reveals that it was made by Owens Illinois Glass. Co. at their Bridgeton, NJ plant in 1933.

Laboratory analysis of remnants of the contents show a close match to Campana Italian Balm, a hand lotion made in Batavia, Ill. that was popular with American women in the 1930s.









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These are three of five fragments that form a small jar of an "ointment pot."

It is among the most intriguing finds at the island site.






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When reassembled, the fragments make up a nearly complete jar identical to the style used by Dr. C. H Berry's Freckle Ointment, a concoction marketed in the early 20th century that was supposed to make freckles fade (it was 11 percent mercury).

Earhart is known to have been concerned about her freckles.





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Although the style of the jar is the same used by Dr. Berry's ointment, the artifact found is clear glass while all of the examples of freckle cream the TIGHAR researchers have been able to find are milky white or opal glass. They have also been unable to match the exact size of the artifact jar to a known jar of Dr. Berry's product.

The reassembled artifact jar does, however, fit nicely in a box in which anti-freckle cream was marketed. The known Dr. Berry jars do not.

"So we know there was a jar of Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment of the same size as the artifact jar, but we don't know whether it was clear glass," Ric Gillespie, TIGHAR's executive director, told Discovery News.





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Four of the broken pieces of the ointment pot were found together. The fifth piece was discovered about 65 feet away from the bones of a turtle. That piece of glass shows evidence of secondary use as a cutting or slicing tool.

"The bottles and other artifacts TIGHAR has found at the Seven Site tell a fascinating, but still incomplete, story of ingenuity, survival, and, ultimately, tragedy. Whether it is Amelia Earhart's story remains to be seen," Gillespie said.

http://weather.aol.com/2012/06/29/wheres-amelia-earharts-plane?

I don't think she was a spy for the military. I also think her plane is somewhere at the bottom of the vast ocean; she crash landed and there's a very good chance Amelia and Fred Noonan survived. Here are two scenarios that I think could have happened:

1) She and Fred died at sea from dehydration, hungry sea creatures or injuries sustained in the crash.
2) If they survived at sea, they could have been captured and eventually died somewhere among the Asian or Oceanic population and their remains are astronomically difficult to find as a result. Even though the Japanese might have executed her in this scenario and deny it, maybe they deny it because they are unaware of whom they had executed.

I read that they are zoning in on her plane. If they find it, then perhaps that would mean they did indeed lose fuel and crash into the ocean or had been shot down and not taken prisoner somewhere.

Good luck but after 75 years of dead ends, I'm not optimistic about this.

I hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, but who is funding this? Seriously, the money spent towards this (which will likely never be solved) could go to better things. If it's a rich person with tons of money to waste, that's fine, but I hope the government isn't funding this.

I hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, but who is funding this? Seriously, the money spent towards this (which will likely never be solved) could go to better things. If it's a rich person with tons of money to waste, that's fine, but I hope the government isn't funding this.

Pretty sure TIGHAR is funded by private donations.

I think it is a stretch trying to say these fragments are from jars like the ones in the pictures. Is there a chance? Perhaps. Perhaps enough of one that if there is private funding available to research the glass fragments, then yes, do it and maybe end speculation. But to use public funds to do so- I think it's too much of a stretch and sadly I think they and the plane are at the bottom of the sea.

I think it is a stretch trying to say these fragments are from jars like the ones in the pictures. Is there a chance? Perhaps. Perhaps enough of one that if there is private funding available to research the glass fragments, then yes, do it and maybe end speculation. But to use public funds to do so- I think it's too much of a stretch and sadly I think they and the plane are at the bottom of the sea.

Again, I'm not familiar with any public funding for TIGHAR. It is a private research organization. I don't see why, if they're obtaining their own funding, there should be any issue.

Pretty sure TIGHAR is funded by private donations.

I had a feeling that was the case, but damn, that's a lot of money.

Amelia Earhart Search: $2.2 Million Expedition To Find Famed Aviator's Plane
By Oskar Garcia | AP
Posted: 07/23/2012


A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from famed aviator Amelia Earhart's final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain.

But the group leading the search, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed onto a reef off a remote island in the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago this month, its president told The Associated Press on Monday.

"This is just sort of the way things are in this world," TIGHAR president Pat Thrasher said. "It's not like an Indiana Jones flick where you go through a door and there it is. It's not like that – it's never like that."





Thrasher said the group collected a significant amount of video and sonar data, which searchers will pore over on the return voyage to Hawaii this week and afterward to look for things that may be tough to see at first glance.

The group is also planning a voyage for next year to scour the land where it's believed Earhart survived a short while after the crash, Thrasher said.





Thrasher maintained touch throughout the search with TIGHAR founder Ric Gillespie, her husband, and posted updates about the trip to the group's website.

The updates tell of a search that was cut short because of treacherous underwater terrain and repeated, unexpected equipment mishaps that caused delays and left the group with only five days of search time rather than 10, as originally planned.





During one episode, an autonomous underwater vehicle the group was using in its search wedged itself into a narrow cave, a day after squashing its nose cone against the ocean floor. It needed to be rescued.

"The rescue mission was successful – but it was a real cliffhanger," Gillespie wrote in an email posted online last week. "Operating literally at the end of our tether, we searched for over an hour in nightmare terrain: a vertical cliff face pockmarked with caves and covered with fern-like marine growth."

Thrasher said the environment was tougher to navigate than searchers expected.








The U.S. State Department had encouraged the privately-funded voyage, which launched earlier this month from Honolulu using 30,000 pounds in specialized equipment and a University of Hawaii ship normally used for ocean research.

The group's thesis is based on the idea that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed on a reef near the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, then survived a short time.





Previous visits to the island have recovered artifacts that could have belonged to Earhart and Noonan, and experts say an October 1937 photo of the shoreline of the island could include a blurry image of the strut and wheel of a Lockheed Electra landing gear.

The photo was enough for the State Department blessing, and led to the Kiribati government to sign a contract with the group to work together if anything is found, Gillespie said at the start of the voyage.

A separate group working under a different theory plans its third voyage later this year near Howland Island.




Earhart and Noonan were flying from New Guinea to Howland Island when they went missing July 2, 1937, during Earhart's bid to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/amelia-earhart-search-expedition-returning-_n_1696851.html?

Parts of the plane. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48707048/ns/technology_and_science-science/

wasnt there a post on here a while back about some teenage girl listening to the radio around the time Amelia Earheart disappeared and her radio picked up what sounded like a distress call or something of that nature between a man and a woman? and the man appeared to be injured i believe. the girl recorded it in her diary i thought. or did I dream this up? i was telling my husband about it but he just looked at me like I was crazy. could have sworn I read that here.:confused: