Are scientists on the cusp of solving one of the great mysteries of the 20th Century? The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) is reporting that the grainy image above may in fact be Amelia Earhart’s lost plane, a Lockheed Model 10 Electra.
On July 2nd, 1937, with 7,000 miles remaining in her round-the-world-flight, Earhart and Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea intending to land on Howland Island. But, Earhart and Noonan never made it. The plane’s last known position was near the Nukumanu Island about 800 miles into the flight. Her plane was never found.
Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR is hopeful that Earhart’s plane may be recovered. “When you are looking for man-made object as in a natural environment, it is important to look for things that are different, and this is different. It is an anomaly unlike anything else in that underwater environment,” The object is resting in about 600 feet of water about 350 miles from Howland Island.
Gillespie understands that if this is the lost Electra there’s a lot more work to be done. “Let’s say we get back out there and we get down to 600-feet with a remote operated vehicle and we send a vehicle out there with cameras and, son of a gun, that’s really the wreckage… then what? We certainly want to recover it but recovering aircraft aluminum is really dicey because the aluminum becomes unstable,”
TIGHAR hopes to launch a two-ship expedition to the possible wreckage so the mystery can finally be solved.