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I don't think that song is based on any physical resemblance, but on the compare/contrast of their lives - two famous pilots, one disappeared into legend; one lived, settled down, had it all and lost it when some bozo broke into his house, snatched his baby, and dropped the kid on his head. He prefers Amelia's tragedy-on-the-job to the domestic-tragedy-and-fading-away that Lindbergh got.
 
Bone found on Pacific island 'could belong to Amelia Earhart'
A tiny sliver of bone found on a remote Pacific atoll may finally solve the riddle of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot who vanished 73 years ago while attempting to circumnavigate the world close to the equator.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 8:00AM GMT 14 Dec 2010

Researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) found the bone at the site of a castaway's encampment on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro, a former British colony that is today part of the republic of Kiribati.

The bone, which may be a phalanx from a human finger, was located along with several other tantalising clues about the fate of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, during TIGHAR's tenth expedition to the island this summer.

The search turned up the remains of a 1930s woman's compact - complete with residue of the makeup - a small bottle made in New Jersey in 1933 with the remnants of what appears to be hand lotion, a zip made in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s and of a design that was never exported, and a broken pocket knife of the same brand that was listed in an inventory of Earhart's aircraft.

"The bone is being tested at the University of Oklahoma's Molecular Anthropology Laboratories to see if they contain human DNA," Ric Gillespie, executive director of the group, told The Daily Telegraph.

"We should have the results in a few weeks, but if the results are positive we won't announce anything until the test is duplicated by another lab," he said. "If human DNA is extracted, it will be sequenced to Earhart's DNA."

Scientists have cautioned that the bone could be from the flipper of a turtle.
But that does not dissuade TIGHAR from its basic theory that Earhart died on Nikumaroro.

For many years, the accepted wisdom was that Earhart's Lockheed Model 10E Special "Electra" had simply run out of fuel and crashed into the ocean on July 2, 1937, as she searched for Howland Island, the final refuelling stop before flying on to Honolulu and completing the journey by touching down in Oakland, California.

TIGHAR believes that the aircraft had sufficient fuel to reach Nikumaroro, where it landed on reef flats. Earhart and Noonan could have survived on the island for a time, but eventually succumbed to injury or infection, food poisoning or thirst.

The theory is supported by British colonial records lodged in Fiji reporting the discovery of the partial skeleton of a castaway who perished shortly before the island was settled in 1938.

The bones were found in the shade of a tree in a part of the island that fits the description of the encampment that TIGHAR has been excavating.

The site is dotted with the remains of small fires on which meals of birds, fish, turtle and even rat were cooked.

Gillespie said the recent discoveries "support and reinforce our theory" and the next expedition to the island will use remote-operated submersibles to search the deep water off the western end of the atoll for heavier parts of the aircraft - such as the engines - that would not have been washed further out to sea.

"It is our hope and intention to do the underwater search on or before July 2012, the 75th anniversary of Earhart's disappearance," he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... rhart.html
 
Ooh, intriguing. I hope they find something conclusive, but tbh, the hope of getting uncontaminated viable DNA out of that fragment is awful small. Still, the other physical evidence is quite persuasive isn't it .And, together with the radio communications heard by the teens it powerfully suggests AE and Noonan did end up stranded on Gardner Island a while. Much more tragic to think of them radioing in vain for hours or days, than just dropping into the sea somehow.

Couple of things I'm wondering about.

1. if those teenagers could hear her distress call and location, why the hell couldn't any of the would-be rescuers.

2. why did she take out the portion of her radio that allowed her plane to be tracked? Was it really heavy? Just sounds suicidal and pointless.
 
Experts off mark in search for Earhart's plane, psychic says
 
 
BY CINDY E. HARNETT, POSTMEDIA NEWS DECEMBER 29, 2010
 
 
STORYPHOTOS ( 1 )
 

 
Spaceimaging.com / Psychic Gabrielle Giet marked an X on a map of Nikumaroro, where she says the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane rest.
Photograph by: Reuters, Postmedia News
The wingless fuselage of the plane flown by aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart is resting underwater on a coral reef in the western Pacific Ocean, but is outside the search area to be examined by aviation experts next year, according to a Vancouver Island psychic.

On Tuesday, Gabrielle Giet, 37, a former cook, marked an X on a map of Nikumaroro-- formerly Gardner Island -- in the Phoenix Islands, Republic of Kiribati, where the "sausage-looking" part of the plane "will be found," she said, on a reef slope.

The location Giet pinpointed is "significantly" outside the area experts plan to search with a submersible remote-operated vehicle on or before July 2012 -- the 75th anniversary of Earhart's disappearance.

U.S.-born Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan attempted to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Model 10 Electra -- officially leaving from Florida on June 1. They went missing over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island on July 2, 1937. Their disappearance is an unsolved mystery.

Giet did not see any bodies in the wreckage or on the uninhabited island, she said.

The fuselage will be on its side, with some windows intact, wedged into a dark corner of the rock shelf, Giet said.

A piece or pieces of a brown leather diary-type book that had a strap around it, believed to be Noonan's, will also be found on the island, Giet told Richard Gillespie Tuesday.

Gillespie, 63, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), and author of the book Finding Amelia, has been looking for Earhart for 22 years.

Although skeptical of clairvoyants, Gillespie was otherwise convinced Tuesday to allow Giet to read his so-called "blueprint" by phone.

At 11 a.m. Giet, who said her lifelong psychic ability was enhanced when she nearly died giving birth to her daughter seven years ago, surveyed a basic aerial map of Nikumaroro and the proposed underwater search area.

Within minutes, using her four celestial "guides" -- three on the left and one on the right -- she marked her X on the map and said, "That's where the plane is."

The plane will be found, without a doubt, said Giet.

"There's no wings on it, though, it's just a piece of it with the front, and it's on its side," Giet said. "It looks like it's ... on an edge of a cliff underwater and rolled very slowly down ... and stuck."

Unimpressed, Gillespie said: "You are predicting we are going to find what we expect to find."

Giet then explained the plane is outside the proposed search area.

Ten expeditions over the past 25 years have led to the general notion that Earhart and Noonan died as castaways on Nikumaroro. The plane's centre section is believed to be at the reef base.

Next year's search will follow "where empirical evidence leads us," Gillespie told the Times Colonist.

"We will search where we most likely think it is, first," Gillespie said. "If it's not there, naturally we will expand our search area and if we have the time and ability we will include the area where [Giet] is talking about."

As for the diary, "there's no way" searchers will be scanning 10 miles of shoreline for it, said Gillespie, a former aviation accident investigator.

"I don't base our work on paranormal input, but there are some interesting predictions here," Gillespie said.

Giet was equally skeptical Gillespie will search the spot she suggested.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
 
Another search for Amelia Earhart. Article mentions inconclusive test results on bones previously found.

Amelia Earhart: New Kiribati hunt for lost Lockheed
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17452875

Earhart "embodied the spirit of an America coming of age", Hillary Clinton said

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Explorers are to begin a new push to find the remains of famed aviator Amelia Earhart's long-lost plane.

Analysts say an old photo shows part of her doomed Lockheed Electra, and a July search is set for Nikumaroro island, part of Kiribati in the Pacific.

The search will be privately funded, but the US state department helped negotiate with Kiribati.

Earhart attempted to circumnavigate the globe along the equator in 1937, but disappeared in July of that year.

She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left Papua New Guinea on a flight to Howland Island and were never seen again.

Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar), which will be organising the search, said the new evidence was "circumstantial" but "strong".

Previous searches for remains of the plane - and for Earhart and Noonan - have returned empty-handed, and many historians believe the plane crashed into the ocean.

'Unlikely heroine'

Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic and the Bismarck, is advising the Kiribati search.

He told the Associated Press that the photo allowed the search area to be narrowed from tens of thousands of square miles down to a small area.

Tighar - which has mounted several expeditions to the island in recent year - found bones on Nikumaroro during an earlier search, but lab tests were inconclusive on whether they were human bones.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was among those showing their support at the official announcement of the new bid.


Amelia Earhart

Born in Kansas in 1897
First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean
Helped form the Ninety-Nines, a professional aviation group for women, and became their first president
Held multiple speed records

"Amelia Earhart may have been an unlikely heroine for a nation down on its luck, but she embodied the spirit of an America coming of age and increasingly confident, ready to lead in a quite uncertain and dangerous world," Mrs Clinton said.

"She gave people hope and she inspired them to dream bigger and bolder."

While the Obama administration takes no position on the evidence, Mrs Clinton noted that her department and other federal agencies had actively supported Earhart's quest.

"Even if you do not find what you seek, there is great honour and possibility in the search itself," she said.

Kurt Campbell, an assistant secretary of state for the region, took interest in the Kiribati search after his own trip there.

He said the department was optimistic but was not betting on finding the remains.

The United States is "encouraging, hoping, but frankly we don't know," Mr Campbell said.
 
I've just had a look at Nikumaroro island on googlemaps.
If you zoom in a notch, look at the left hand side of the island (just below the label for 'nonti'), there is an unusual 'scar' on the coastline. Zoom in as much as you can and you can see it stops short of the beach.
It is, i guess, more suggestive of a ship having run aground there, but is it actually near any shipping lanes? Could it be the site of an emergency landing? The Lockheed Electra had an all-metal construction and was not a small plane (pic below). Also it had a recommended 'fully-laden' weight limit of 10,500lb, but Amelia Earhart was known to have had her model 10-E highly modified, which most likely included heavy long-range fuel tanks. It would've made a substantial, long impact mark, assuming it was a controlled, level, approach.

c1a0b9b9e6c710bb840ec50c71d6853b.jpg
 
trevp66 said:
I've just had a look at Nikumaroro island on googlemaps.
If you zoom in a notch, look at the left hand side of the island (just below the label for 'nonti'), there is an unusual 'scar' on the coastline. Zoom in as much as you can and you can see it stops short of the beach.
It is, i guess, more suggestive of a ship having run aground there, but is it actually near any shipping lanes? Could it be the site of an emergency landing? The Lockheed Electra had an all-metal construction and was not a small plane (pic below). Also it had a recommended 'fully-laden' weight limit of 10,500lb, but Amelia Earhart was known to have had her model 10-E highly modified, which most likely included heavy long-range fuel tanks. It would've made a substantial, long impact mark, assuming it was a controlled, level, approach.

It's an interesting idea you propose, but so many years have passed that the coral may well have grown back.
I think this scar is more recent - either a ship that ran aground, or perhaps a lane that has been deliberately cleared in the coral so a boat can land.
 
Some tantalising hints.

Mystery of fabled female aviator who disappeared still soars
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/wor ... 10450.html
LARA MARLOWE

Sat, Jun 23, 2012

AMERICA: Amelia Earhart caught the imagination of millions. A new attempt to locate her missing plane is under way

DID AMELIA Earhart, the pioneering aviatrix who disappeared with her navigator, Fred Noonan, 75 years ago on July 2nd, on the final leg of their circumnavigation of the globe, crash and sink with her Lockheed Electra 10E aircraft? Some fantastists believe Earhart was captured while spying on the Japanese in the Pacific for her friend President Roosevelt, as suggested in a 1943 Hollywood movie and at least two books.

Earhart’s legend might not be so powerful if the five ships that mounted the costliest, most intensive rescue mission in US history up to 1937 had found her and Noonan. She became a mythical figure, America’s “favourite missing person” in the words of Tom Crouch, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum.

There was something almost mystical about Earhart’s disappearance, like an Old Testament prophet being translated into the heavens. “A ghost of aviation/She was swallowed by the sky/Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly,” Joni Mitchell sang in her 1976 classic Amelia.

Now another theory has moved to the fore, and there’s a tiny chance the mystery will be resolved next month, when a $2 million expedition by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known by the acronym Tighar, sets out from Honolulu in a ship equipped with small robotic submarines to search for Earhart’s plane.

When she launched the expedition in the Benjamin Franklin room of the state department earlier this year, secretary of state Hillary Clinton said admiration for Earhart made her want to become an astronaut when she was a child. Earhart “gave people hope and she inspired them to dream bigger and bolder,” Clinton said.

Richard Gillespie, the director of Tighar, believes Earhart and Noonan landed on the reef at Nikumaroro, a tiny atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, 350 miles southeast of Howland, where they had intended to refuel. So many ships, aircraft and radio operators fed the jumble of signals in the days following the disappearance that all were until recently discounted. Using digitised equipment, Tighar concluded that 57 of 120 recorded signals may have come from Earhart.

Tighar has also re-examined an aerial photograph of Nikumaroro taken three months after Earhart’s disappearance, and believes a blurry object in the water might be the landing gear of the Lockheed Electra. According to this theory, the plane was blown off the reef and Earhart and Noonan survived for a time drinking rain water and eating fish, shell fish and turtles.

David Jourdan, a former submarine officer and ocean engineer, spent $4.5 million on two fruitless deep sea missions to the north and west of Howland in 2002 and 2006. Next month’s expedition will be Tighar’s seventh since 1988.

Just a week after Earhart’s disappearance, a naval aircraft from the battleship Colorado flew low over several islands, including Nikumaroro, which was then called Gardner Island. The crew reported that “signs of recent habitation were clearly visible but repeated circling and zooming failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants and it was finally taken for granted that none were there”. Three years later, in 1940, a British pilot sent a radio message saying he had discovered “a skeleton . . . possibly that of a woman” and a sextant box under a tree on the southeast corner of the island. The remains were sent to Fiji where experts said they appeared to be the bones of a 5’5” tall male. But in 1998, forensic scientists concluded the same remains belonged to a “tall white female of northern European ancestry”. The bones were subsequently lost.

Earlier missions to Nikumaroro found a bone-handled knife like the one Earhart carried, parts of a man’s and a woman’s shoes, a zipper pull from the 1930s, an aluminium panel and a piece of curved plexiglas that appeared to be part of an aircraft window. Researchers recently established that a broken jar found on the atoll was the same unusual size and shape as 1930s “Dr Berry’s Freckle Ointment”. Earhart disliked her freckles and used cream to make them fade.

When Earhart first started flying, she slept in her leather jacket to make it look worn, and cropped her hair short to resemble other women flyers. On the day of her marriage to George Putnam, a publicist and publisher who helped make her famous, she sent Putnam a note saying, “I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly.”

The thought of this brave, modern woman dying of thirst, hunger and exposure on a desert island fills me with sadness. I prefer to imagine her landing in an Irish pasture at Culmore, north of Derry, on a site now marked by the Amelia Earhart Centre. It was May 21st, 1932, and Earhart had battled strong northerly winds, ice and mechanical problems to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone. “Have you flown far?” a farmer asked her. “From America,” she replied.
 
The remains were sent to Fiji where experts said they appeared to be the bones of a 5’5” tall male. But in 1998, forensic scientists concluded the same remains belonged to a “tall white female of northern European ancestry”.

How on earth could they make a mistake like that?

The bones were subsequently lost.

This kind of thing keeps happening. It's infuriating that researchers are so careless.
 
Mythopoeika said:
The remains were sent to Fiji where experts said they appeared to be the bones of a 5’5” tall male. But in 1998, forensic scientists concluded the same remains belonged to a “tall white female of northern European ancestry”.

How on earth could they make a mistake like that?

The bones were subsequently lost.

This kind of thing keeps happening. It's infuriating that researchers are so careless.

No disrespect to Fiji but in 1940 it would hardly have had World class pathologists or anatomists.

The post 1998 disappearance of the bones is more than a bit odd. At that stage it would have been obvious that the bones might well have beem Earharts remains. She was 5'7"-5'8" . Were they stolen? Sold to a mad collector?
 
Kondoru said:
Is Aviatrix a real word?

Yes - at least in American English. It is listed in both the Merriam Webster and American Heritage dictionaries. The Merriam Webster version dates it back to circa 1910.

Like many feminized variants, it's faded from usage for the sake of gender neutrality.
 
Seems rather a nice word. Certainly not suggesting of female weakness.

I've been interested in this disappearance for a long tiime - used to have an album I think called 'In search of Amelia' by Plainsong (Ian Matthews)? Which had a number of songs about it. Like all unsoved things of this kind it has an impenetrable fog of rumour and mistakes around it, like the loss of the skeleton and numerous mutually exclusive unconfirmed witness statements.
 
Yes, with regulations on dealing with stiffs, how can you just lose a skeleton?
 
Vid at link.

Amelia Earhart: New expedition seeks answers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18670292

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic

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New hunt for Amelia Earhart plane
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An expedition to find out what happened to celebrated US woman pilot Amelia Earhart is setting out from Hawaii on Monday, 75 years to the day since she took off on her last flight.

Researchers will dive around the uninhabited Pacific island of Nikumaroro looking for clues.

Their theory is that Earhart crashed there in 1937, surviving for days.

Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat she performed in 1932.

On 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from Papua New Guinea in their Electra 10E aircraft, en route to Howland Island.

Many experts think a navigational error caused the pair to run out of fuel over the sea. They were never seen again.

They were three-quarters of the way through an unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe around the Equator.

The expedition, which is costing more than $2m (£1.3m), is being led by Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar).

Continue reading the main story
Amelia Earhart

Born in Kansas in 1897
First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean
Helped form the Ninety-Nines, a professional aviation group for women, and became their first president
Held multiple speed records
He has spent almost a quarter of a century advancing an alternative hypothesis, correspondents say.

He believes Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on the uninhabited Pacific island of Nikumaroro, where they survived for a time before finally succumbing to hunger, thirst or injury.

Over the next three weeks, Mr Gillespie and his team will deploy robots equipped with sonar and high-definition video cameras to search the waters off the island for clues.

"What we're hoping for is to come back with good imagery, photographs, of wreckage that's conclusively, unquestionably pieces, at least, of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft; that's the goal," he told the BBC.

Tighar has mounted several expeditions to the island in recent year - finding bones on Nikumaroro during an earlier search, but lab tests were inconclusive on whether they were human bones.

Many historians argue there is only circumstantial evidence to support the Nikumaroro island theory.

This is Tighar's 10th expedition to Nikumaroro.

"We have continued the investigation because we have been successful in finding evidence that supports the hypothesis we are testing," Mr Gillespie told the BBC.

If identifiable wreckage is found, Tighar will return with the equipment needed to recover and conserve it, he says.
 
No luck so far but theres a lot of video and sonar material to be processed.

Amelia Earhart: Searchers fail to find evidence of aviator's fate
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ju ... t-evidence
Tough terrain and misbehaving equipment prevent American expedition to Pacific finding signs of female pilot who vanished in 1937

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 July 2012 10.25 BST

Ric Gillespie, founder of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, took part in the unsuccessful Pacific expedition. Photograph: Reuters
A $2.2m (£1.4m) expedition seeking wreckage from aviator Amelia Earhart's final flight has failed to find the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping for.

But the group leading the search, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar), still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed on to a reef off a remote island in the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago this month.

"This is just sort of the way things are in this world," Tighar president Pat Thrasher said on Monday.

"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 this week 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 is believed Earhart survived a short while after the crash, Thrasher said.

The search 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 unmanned underwater vehicle 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," Tighar founder Ric Gillespie wrote in an email 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 expected.

The US state department had encouraged the privately-funded voyage, which launched earlier this month from Honolulu using 13,600kg in specialised 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, more than 2,000 miles from Hawaii, then survived a short time.

Previous visits to the island have recovered artefacts 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 the Kiribati government to sign a contract with the group to work together if anything is found, Gillespie said.

A separate group working under a different theory plans its third voyage later this year near Howland Island, hundreds of miles further north than Nikumaroro.

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


The search for Amelia Earhart's long-lost aircraft will resume next year in the waters off Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati where the legendary pilot may have died as a castaway.

Starting about the middle of August 2014, the 30-day expedition will be carried out by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 76 years ago.

Called Niku VIII, the new expedition is expected to cost as much as $3 million. It will rely on two Hawaiian Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) manned submersibles, Pisces IV and Pisces V, each carrying a pilot and two TIGHAR observers.

TIGHAR is testing the hypothesis that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan made an emergency landing on the flat coral reef at the western end of Nikumaroro, some 350 miles southeast of their target destination. There, they survived as castaways "for a matter of weeks, possibly more," said Gillespie.

“She and her navigator Fred Noonan sent radio distress calls from the aircraft for the next five nights before the Electra was washed over the reef edge by rising tides and surf,” Gillespie said.

The best evidence for where the plane went into the water is a grainy photograph of the island's western shoreline taken by British Colonial Service officer Eric Bevington three months after Amelia's disappearance.

“The picture appears to show the wreckage of one of the aircraft’s main land gear assemblies on the reef edge,” Gillespie said.

http://news.discovery.com/history/us-hi ... 131011.htm
 
Amelia Earhart mystery – 1937 photograph could be clue to fate of aviator who disappeared on round-the-world flight
Forensic imaging specialists are studying long-forgotten picture for proof that she landed on remote atoll and did not crash into Pacific
By Philip Sherwell, New York
10:00AM BST 03 Jul 2014
A long-forgotten photograph could solve the mystery of the final resting place of Amelia Earhart after her plane vanished over the Pacific as she tried to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.

Forensic imaging specialists are poring over a high-resolution computer enhancement of the 1937 picture of Earhart’s plane to try to establish whether a distinctive repair of metal sheeting matches a piece of wreckage recovered from an uninhabited atoll in Micronesia.

A leading Earhart researcher believes that a match of the rivet patterns would provide “conclusive proof” that the aviator was not, as has been widely believed, lost at sea, but instead landed on Gardner island, now Nikumaroro in the archipelago of Kiribati.

That forensic breakthrough would in turn indicate the the aviator died of starvation, illness or thirst, and was not killed when her plane crashed into the ocean as she and her navigator Fred Noonan desperately searched for land.

The picture of Earhart’s Electra aircraft was taken by a Miami Herald photographer on June 1, 1937, as she prepared to take off en route for Puerto Rico during her second attempt to fly around the world.

Earhart had spent eight days in Miami while the plane underwent repairs and the photograph shows a distinctive shiny rectangular patch towards the back of the plane that clearly stands out from the rest of the fuselage.
Ric Gillespie, director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, hopes the photograph can now be linked to a sheet of aluminium that his group recovered in 1991 from Gardner Island, which is in the swath of ocean where Earhart disappeared and has been the focus of previous search operations.

“If the enhancement of the photograph is good enough to establish that the rivet patterns on the repair match those on the wreckage, then that is conclusive proof that she ended on the island and was not lost at sea,” he told The Telegraph.

The breakthrough would help solve the greatest and most disputed mystery in aviation before the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 this year.

Earhart disappeared in early July 1937 after a radio antenna ripped away from the Electra as she took off from Papau New Guinea en route for Howland island south of Hawaii more than 2,500 miles away.

US Coast Guard crew heard her issued a series of distress messages 19 hours later as he she flew over water, apparently lost and desperately searching for land. Nothing more was heard.

Gardner island had been the focus of attention in 1960 when an ex-marine told a San Diego newspaper about his trip there with US forces in 1946. A tribesman told him that when Micronesians moved on to the island in 1938, they founded a human skeleton and a woman’s shoe – the locals do not wear footwear – near a fire pit with the charred remains of bird and fish.

The tribesman said the remains were passed to British colonial administrators, a detail referred to in British military records, but the bones subsequently disappeared.

In 1991, Mr Gillespie’s team found a scrap of metal on the island that subsequent tests showed was a type of aluminium used in the manufacture of American aircraft in the 1930s. But rivet patterns on the metal were clearly different from those on her plane.

He is now awaiting the conclusions of the forensic imaging specialist. “It’s a very exciting prospect as I hope we can establish for sure what happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan,” he said.

Other Earhart investigators dispute his conclusions and remain convinced that the Electra was lost at sea.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/28/4 ... -clue.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... light.html
 
Get a lot of bones together, and they are easy to lose.

The Cairo museum has lost any number of royal mummies and other remains over the years. One skeleton looks a lot like another, and down in the lower regions of the museum, well, there are a lot of ways to lose track of a given set of bones.

In a big ossuary, like Sedlac, nobody even tries to keep bones sorted out-they got used for handicrafts, over the years. Until recently, many cadavers and anatomical specimens were tossed out with the trash. At Verdun, unknown skeletons go into the bone pits, those with indentification get a grave and full military honors.

And there are still plenty of skeletons in the ground there. Land mines and assorted UXB, too.

Once bones get seperated from their ID documents, it's usually Molly over the windmill, save there is some DNA to use. Military skeletons will get a coffin, a flag and a bugle call, civilians get the Potter's Field-where until recently, there was little attention paid.

We want to know what happened to the famed aviatrix-otherwise, what do remains matter?

Her legend goes on.
 
I think the rivet investigation makes good sense.

and it is, after all, very simple.
 
I haven't seen the pic (perhaps because my operating system is X-Pired) but is there any chance the light patch is just that - a patch of light (reflected from airport lights, perhaps, or an early glimpse of sun, maybe via a car windscreen or similar?)

And is the original negative available for 'enhancement'? If the original photographer is not now known, this seems unlikely.

This could be another piece of wishful thinking.
 
The relatively light / shiny patch in the _Miami Herald_ (Flash gallery) presentation from 28 June 2014 covers a special window originally installed on the Electra's starboard fuselage.

Earhart prescribed multiple modifications to the Electra 10-E Lockheed delivered for her world flight. The passenger compartment was filled with fuel tanks, and all but one of the usual passenger compartment windows on each side were deleted / omitted.

To the rear of the fuel tanks a 'navigation station' was installed. Noonan was an expert in maritime celestial navigation. A special window was prescribed in the rear to allow the navigator to make visual sightings.

This photo:

574x450xAmelia-Earharts-Lockheed-Electra-10E-NR16020-crashed-on-takeoff-at-NAS-Ford-Island-Pea...jpg

http://static.thisdayinaviation.com/wp- ... d7BanC.jpg

... shows the Electra after Amelia crashed trying to take off in Hawaii in March 1937. The special window is visible as the rearmost opening on the starboard side.

This photo:

1512x888xAmelia-Earharts-Lockheed-Electra-10E-NR16020-in-hangar-at-Wheeler-Field-Honolulu-Hawa...jpg

http://static.thisdayinaviation.com/wp- ... tXC-_V.jpg

... shows the Electra being repaired in Hawaii. The special / larger navigator's window is clearly visible.

I can't determine from either of these photos whether there was glass(?) in this special window. The second (in-hangar) photo seems to show no lighting glare, as if the window were open / uncovered.

A patch or cover is visible in photos of the plane on the later / second attempt to get the round-the-world flight underway. I say "or cover" because I've never found any definitive claim the navigator window was permanently sealed versus being fitted with a flush cover. The Miami Herald story is predicated on it having been permanently sealed with a riveted patch.

This patch is visible to the rear of the sole remaining starboard side window in this photo of the plane arriving in Miami (allegedly; see further comments below):

Electra_Arrives_Miami.jpg

http://www.specialbooks.com/images/Elec ... _Miami.jpg

(This photo is not the same one shown in the Miami Herald Flash presentation.)

These photos (location / date unknown) seems to show that the patch (cover?) was flush with the fuselage:

21a7737aa5cbb7e0caa45b56073e2233--amelia-earhart-electra.jpg

Amelia-Earharts-Lockheed-Electra-10E-NR16020-over-Java-Dutch-East-Indies-June-1937.jpg

This 1995 TIGHAR document:

http://tighar.org/Publications/TTracks/ ... dworld.pdf

... claims it was a permanently-installed patch, and that it was installed at Miami. This claim is supported by the original window being visible in the third photo on page 16, showing the Electra before departure from California for Miami.

This would mean that the third photo cited above shows the Electra _after_ the patch installation, and hence sometime after having arrived in Miami.
 
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Whoa!

The aircraft was modified and the main compartment filled with fuel tanks?

KABOOM!!!!!

What we have there is a flying bomb-yes, there were reports of radio messages, but that was a great age of hoaxing.

One stray spark, one small leak, some vapor....BANG!

If that happened over water(and remember, there was a big war fought thereabouts and bits of aircraft are not vanishing rare) chances of finding any identifiable trace of that one plane become small.

I'm sure others have thought of this.
 
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