Researchers Identify Fragment of Amelia Earhart’s Plane
History.Com - In June 1937, Amelia Earhart departed from Miami, Florida, on her second attempt to circumnavigate the globe along the equator. In a Miami Herald photograph of her twin-engined Lockheed Electra taking off for San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the morning of June 1, a shiny metal patch covers one of the back windows of the plane. By linking that metal patch to a scrap of aluminum found on the remote Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, researchers have provided a tantalizing new clue in the enduring mystery of Earhart’s disappearance.
After departing from Miami on June 1, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, completed nearly 22,000 miles of their attempted circumnavigation of the globe, making stops in South America, Africa, India and Lae, New Guinea. On July 2, they took off from Lae for their next target destination, tiny Howland Island in the Pacific. The distance from Lae to Howland Island was about the same as a transcontinental flight across the United States. Somewhere during the journey over the vast Pacific Ocean, the Lockheed Electra plane disappeared. A massive land, air and sea search failed to turn up evidence of Earhart, Noonan or the plane, and their fate remains a subject of endless speculation.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has spent the last 25 years investigating Earhart’s ill-fated final voyage, recently focused its attention on a scrap of aluminum recovered in 1991 from the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro, located some 350 miles southeast of Howland Island. To them, it appeared as if the metal sheet could be the same patch of metal that appears in the Miami Herald photograph of Earhart’s Electra, covering one of the rear navigational windows.
