A New Expedition to Find Amelia Earhart's Plane

In April 1936, the world-famous aviator Amelia Earhart received a gift: enough cash to buy her next airplane. Purdue University had announced the creation of the Amelia Earhart Fund, to “provide ways and means for pure and applied aeronautical research,” and Earhart put the $47,000 it provided toward purchasing a Lockheed Electra 10-E. She called it a “flying laboratory”: With its 55-foot wingspan, 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines, fuselage full of fuel tanks, and Bendix radio direction finder, the plane was equipped for long-haul flights. When she and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, she was flying the Electra.

Now, 90 years later, Purdue is supporting a new expedition to search for the Electra in conjunction with the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), a nonprofit media company. On October 13, if all goes as planned, a 17-person team will arrive on Nikumaroro Island in the South Pacific nation of Kiribati to plumb the depths of the lagoon where they believe the plane may lie submerged.

The Purdue/ALI team is building on the work of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has led or been associated with 14 expeditions to the Pacific atoll over the past three decades. None have found anything definitive, though they’ve unearthed a good deal of suggestive evidence, including signs of a castaway’s campsite and 1930s-era artifacts. The impetus for this project comes from satellite images of an intriguingly-shaped object in the lagoon.

When Earhart and Noonan disappeared, they were on the third-to-last leg of their round-the-world flight, the first aviators to make the attempt at the equator. But this leg was the toughest: It would take 18-plus hours to fly from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, where the crew of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was waiting. Covering just one square mile in the vast ocean, the island was, in Earhart’s words, “a fantastically tiny target.”

The fliers couldn’t find it. Earhart told the radio operators on Itasca, “We must be on you but cannot see you … gas is running low.” Then, an hour later, with her voice rushed and rising, she said, “We are on the line 157-337. … We are running north and south.” That was her last confirmed message.

TIGHAR has pursued the theory that the Electra followed the navigational line 157 degrees southeastward. If Earhart spied Nikumaroro, she might have landed the plane on the island’s broad reef flat. Eventually the tide may have lifted the plane off the reef and into the ocean, leaving Earhart and Noonan to die as castaways. Other theorists argue that the fliers were captured by the Japanese or ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean.

TIGHAR’s material evidence for the Nikumaroro theory includes handicrafts made from aircraft materials discovered on the island in the abandoned village of a British colony established between 1938-1963. Former residents also recounted seeing airplane wreckage on the reef and in the lagoon when they first settled the island.

Elsewhere on the island, TIGHAR members came across parts of male and female shoes—the woman’s shoe from the same brand of oxford that Earhart wore. They’ve also unearthed several 1930s-era artifacts: the remnants of cosmetic bottles, a zipper pull, a jackknife, and shards of a compact mirror with fragments of rouge at a known campsite.

Archival research uncovered records of four radio signals received by wireless operators on Wake, Guam, and Hawai’i shortly after Earhart’s disappearance that converged near Nikumaroro. More dramatically, 13 bones were found on the island in 1940 and measured by a doctor at colonial headquarters in Fiji. A modern analysis of the measurements suggests the bones belonged to a woman of European descent; the bones themselves have been lost. Forensic dogs brought to the island in 2017 indicated the presence of human remains at the campsite but an excavation of the area came up empty.

Then, in 2020, an amateur researcher named Michael Ashmore was browsing satellite images of Nikumaroro on Apple Maps. In the aquamarine waters off the lagoon’s Taraia Point, he spied an indistinct shape: a black circle with lines extending from it. To him, it resembled the outline of a plane.

Dubbing the image the Taraia Object, he brought it to the attention of Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director. Gillespie and his colleagues expressed skepticism. To them, it looked like a palm or pandanus tree and its root ball. Plus, they’d been over that area of the lagoon in 2001 and 2007 with divers in the water and metal detectors on land. “I have a hard time believing that if that object was there, we would not have seen it,” says Andrew McKenna, a veteran of six expeditions.

But Richard Pettigrew, the president of ALI, was more receptive. An archaeologist himself, he’d participated in a 2017 expedition to the island, an experience that hooked him on the Earhart mystery. When he organized a conference on the subject, he asked Ashmore to present his findings. “I was sufficiently impressed,” Pettigrew says, “that within a few days after that, I was already looking for ways to get back to Nikumaroro.”

Pettigrew and his colleagues at ALI gathered more satellite images, which showed that the object first became visible on April 27, 2015. Tropical Cyclone Pam had battered the island the previous month, and he theorized that the storm’s surge had dispersed the sediment on the object. Since then, its shape has again become obscured.

Other footage, including from his own drone in 2017 and a brief flash discernable in the video from a TIGHAR helicopter flyover in 2001, led Pettigrew to suspect that the object was metallic. He cites an indeterminant white smudge on photographs of the lagoon taken by a New Zealand survey team in 1938 as evidence that the object has been there since around the time Earhart disappeared.

Pettigrew suggests that, after the Electra was lifted off the reef by the tide, it was so battered by the waves and the reef that it lost its outer wing sections, engines, propellors, and landing gear. The fuselage, meanwhile, became light enough to float through the passage connecting the lagoon to the reef and settle near Taraia Point. And that, he argues, is where it remains.

The so-called “Taraia Object” has many detractors. McKenna, for one, doesn’t buy the hype. According to a scaling study he and other TIGHAR members conducted, he thinks the object is too small to be the Electra and the lagoon is too shallow to hide it. Plus, he says, it’s the wrong shape: A main spar connects the fuselage, the engines, and the inner wings. “You’re looking for a cruciform object that’s at least 22 feet wide,” he says. “It’s probably 30 feet long, and it’s nine or 10 feet tall.”

Meanwhile, Ashmore no longer supports his own theory. On his website, the original satellite image of the Taraia Object is stamped with a bright red label reading “Debunked.” Next to it is an earlier satellite image with a similarly shaped object on the lagoon’s beach. This one is labeled “2015 Tree.”

Undeterred, Pettigrew made a video outlining the evidence supporting his theory and his proposal for an expedition solely targeting the Taraia Object. That video ended up in the in-box of Steve Schultz, Purdue’s chief counsel. Over his 13 years on the job, Schultz had become very familiar with the university’s relationship with Earhart. She’d been recruited in 1935 by Purdue’s president to serve as a visiting professor guiding young women toward careers and advising on aeronautical issues. The school became a major repository of archival Earhart material after her husband donated her papers to the school.

Earhart’s influence continues to be felt at the university. “I still come across people who talk about their great-great-aunt or their great-grandmother who had the opportunity to meet Amelia and how she changed their lives and affected the course of their family,” says Schultz.

Still, Purdue has never before gotten involved in the search for Earhart, Noonan, and the Electra. But “this one’s a bit different,” he says. He found the evidence for the Nikumaroro theory compelling and ALI’s proposed expedition “a practical effort.” Mitch Daniels, board chair of the Purdue Research Foundation and current interim president of the university, was equally convinced.

Purdue offered ALI a $500,000 line of credit for expenses, which will have to be paid back no matter the outcome. The university is also providing in-kind support with media, government relations, and fundraising. And Schultz himself will be going, along with two Purdue alums, who both have served as astronauts with private companies. “Someone needs to look at [the object], and it might as well be us,” he says.

The rest of the crew includes two maritime archaeologists from Recon Offshore, three Kiribati government officials, and videographers to document the expedition. After a six-day sail from Tarawa, the ALI/Purdue team will spend five days on Nikumaroro. They’ll first examine the object with sonars and magnetometers, then they’ll use a hydro-probe. The probe—Pettigrew describes it as “a little pipe with water forcing through it to penetrate the sediment”—will allow the researchers to, in his words, “get some good hands-on information about what [the object] amounts to.” Then they’ll use hydraulic dredging to clear the sediment so they can actually take a look at it.

If the object turns out to be a plane, the team will come back next year to excavate it. And if it’s something else? “My definition of success,” says Pettigrew, “is that we correctly identify what the Taraia Object is.”