New information gives a clearer picture of what happened 75 years ago to Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan, where they came down and how they likely survived – for a while, at least – as castaways on a remote island.
For decades, pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart was said to have
“disappeared” over the Pacific on her quest to circle the globe along a
29,000-mile equatorial route.
Now, new information gives a clearer picture
of what happened 75 years ago to Ms. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan,
where they came down and how they likely survived – for a while, at least – as
castaways on a remote island, catching rainwater and eating fish, shellfish,
and turtles to survive.
The tale hints at lost opportunities to locate and rescue the pair in the first crucial days after they went down, vital information dismissed as inconsequentia or a hoax, the failure to connect important dots regarding physical evidence.
The International Group for
Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), a non-profit foundation promoting aviation
archaeology and historic aircraft preservation, reported new details Friday
leading researchers to this conclusion: Earhart and Noonan, low on fuel and
unable to find their next scheduled stopping point – Howland Island – radioed
their position, then landed on a reef at uninhabited Gardner Island, a small
coral atoll now known as Nikumaroro Island.
Using what fuel remained to turn up the engines to
recharge the batteries, they continued to radio distress signals for several
days until Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra aircraft was swept off the reef
by rising tides and surf. Using equipment not available in 1937 – digitized
information management systems, antenna modeling software, and radio wave
propagation analysis programs, TIGHAR concluded that 57 of the 120 signals
reported at the time are credible, triangulating Earhart’s position to have
been Nikumaroro Island.
"Amelia Earhart did not simply vanish on July 2,
1937,” Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News.
“Radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane
dominated the headlines and drove much of the US Coast Guard and Navy search.”
"When the search failed, all of the reported
post-loss radio signals were categorically dismissed as bogus and have been
largely ignored ever since," Mr. Gillespie said. But the results of the
study, he said, “suggest that the aircraft was on land and on its wheels for
several days following the disappearance.”
In addition, several artifacts found years ago – some
of it discovered by Pacific islanders who later inhabited the island – seem to
confirm TIGHAR’s conclusion.
These include broken glass artifacts showing evidence
of secondary use as tools for cutting or scraping; large numbers of fish and
bird bones collected in, or associated with, ash and charcoal deposits; several
hundred mollusk shells, as well as bones from at least one turtle; bone
fragments and dried fecal matter that might be of human origin.
A photo taken three months after Earhart’s flight
shows what could be the landing gear of her aircraft in the waters off the
atoll.
“Analyses of the artifacts, faunals and data collected
during the expedition are on-going but, at this point, everything supports the
hypothesis that the remains found at the site in 1940 were those of Amelia
Earhart,” according to TIGHAR.
Other artifacts (some of them reported in 1940 but
then lost) include a bone-handled pocket knife of the type known to have been
carried by Earhart, part of a man’s shoe, part of a woman’s shoe, a zipper of
the kind manufactured in the 1930s, a woman’s compact, and broken pieces of a
jar appearing to be the same size and unusual shape as one holding “Dr. Berry's
Freckle Ointment.” (Earhart was known to dislike her freckles.)
In July, TIGHAR researchers will return to the area
where Earhart and Noonan are thought to have spent their last days, using
submersibles to try and detect the famous aircraft they believe to have been
swept off a Pacific reef in 1937.
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