New expedition to the Pacific to find Amelia Earhart's missing plane

A team of researchers is traveling to a remote, uninhabited island to inspect what they believe may be the wreckage of aviator Amelia Earhart's famous plane and solve the mystery of her disappearance. The group, from the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University, is expected to arrive at Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean by tomorrow.

The American pioneer disappeared in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, giving rise to decades of speculation about her fate. The team, writes the BBC online, is looking for what has been called the 'Taraia Object' (the wreck of the Earhart twin-engine plane), spotted for the first time in 2020 on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro through satellite images.

The researchers, who set off from Kiribati's capital on Wednesday, are currently about halfway through their journey to the remote atoll. Once they reach their destination, they will have to navigate through a narrow gap created in the atoll's coral reef by the British in 1963, the last time the island was inhabited. “Finding Amelia Earhart's Electra plane would be the discovery of a lifetime,” said Richard Pettigrew, expedition leader.

Earhart had already flown successfully from California through South America, Africa, and Asia aboard her twin-engine Electra when she arrived in Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 2, 1937. From there, she and her navigator Fred Noonan planned to head to Hawaii and eventually return to California. But his plane disappeared without a trace as he tried to reach Howland Island, a remote, uninhabited coral island near Nikumaroro, to refuel. Earhart's disappearance has given rise to numerous theories. The official explanation is that the plane had communication problems as the two desperately tried to find the island and that Earhart ultimately crashed into the ocean due to lack of fuel. One theory holds that Earhart unintentionally ended up on Nikumaroro, where she ditched her plane and died as a shipwreck.