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The Straight Story

(48,121 posts) Tue May 28, 2013, 12:18 PM May 2013

Is Amelia Earhart's disappearance solved?

Underwater sonar images captured off a remote Pacific atoll might be the remains of the aircraft that Amelia Earhart was piloting in 1937 when she disappeared.

For a quarter of a century, Ric Gillespie and the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) have been chasing the same elusive lady. A grainy three-color image captured some 200 meters below the surface off the island of Nikumaroro is the strongest evidence to date that the group's theory on her fate is correct and might finally answer the question of what happened to the world's most famous female aviator 76 years ago as she attempted to become the first person to circumnavigate the planet close to the Equator.

TIGHAR first set foot on the uninhabited island, a former British colony that is today part of the Republic of Kiribati, back in 2000 to test a hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, put down on the coral flats at the western end of the island.

Tantalizing clues

Subsequent visits have turned up tantalizing clues that support the theory - shards of plexiglass from a windscreen and aluminum from an aircraft body, stories of the discovery of a human body that was subsequently lost in the confusion of World War II and indications that a castaway survived on the island for some time before succumbing to the elements - but Gillespie hopes that the sonar image might finally be the "smoking gun" that they have been searching for.

http://www.dw.de/is-amelia-earharts-disappearance-solved/a-16842693?maca=en-rss-en-world-4025-rdf

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Is Amelia Earhart's disappearance solved? (Original Post) The Straight Story May 2013 OP

I hope the plane is found, and the mystery solved. HooptieWagon May 2013 #1

HooptieWagon

(17,064 posts)

1. I hope the plane is found, and the mystery solved.

Reply to The Straight Story (Original post)

Tue May 28, 2013, 12:54 PM

May 2013

However, TIGHAR.s track record isn't so good...an announcement of " tantalizing evidence" precedes a huge fund-raising drive, and the "evidence" turns out to be sheer speculation, ie: "human bones" that turn out to be turtle bones, etc.

There are other groups, with other theories just as valid, that simply don't have the PT Barnum PR talent that TIGHAR has...I hope its one of them that discovers the plane. One of the more interesting is an Australian(?) group that discovered WW2 records from a scouting patrol in jungle on New Guinea...the patrol discovered a crashed twin-engine aircraft that had been there a while (not a recent war crash). The site was over-grown, preventing a positive ID, but an engine model number was recorded that was not used for any military or cargo planes during the war. It corresponded to the engines used on Earhardt's plane, but no Electras were in commercial service in the area at the time. The group is still seeking funding to re-locate the crash site, which is in dense jungle.

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