Amelia Earhart Expedition Heads To Pacific Atoll In Search Of Missing Plane

NBC News

Amelia Earhart and her plane before starting her journey.

A US-based team of marine archaeologists has set sail for a remote atoll in the western Pacific, hoping to investigate a new clue in one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries: the disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart in 1937.

According to an article published by Purdue University, the Taraia Object expedition team began the next leg of its journey — and its first seaborne one — departing Tarawa, Kiribati, on 7 October aboard a Kiribati National Shipping Line vessel en route to Nikumaroro, the remote Pacific atoll where the team will search for evidence of Amelia Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10-E.

The article said that the 17-person expedition team includes representatives from the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), Purdue Research Foundation, Purdue University, RECON Offshore and the Republic of Kiribati. The Purdue Research Foundation originally funded the Lockheed Electra “Flying Laboratory” through the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research as part of Purdue’s pioneering efforts in aviation.

Such ‌a finding would conclusively prove the hypothesis of some scholars that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crash-landed on or near the coral-ringed atoll and perished as castaways there, hundreds of miles from their intended refueling stop.

After embarking from Los Angeles earlier this month, the group is expected to arrive on Tuesday, 13 October, local time at Nikumaroro, an uninhabited speck of land in the remote Phoenix Islands, part of the archipelago nation of the Kiribati Republic.

Earhart was attempting to become the first person to circumnavigate the globe at the equator. She had completed 22,000 miles of a 29,000-mile route in July 1937 when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished en route to Howland Island, about 400 miles north of Nikumaroro.

"Finding Amelia Earhart's Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime," Richard Pettigrew, head of the Archaeological Legacy Institute in Eugene, Oregon, who is leading the effort in conjunction with Purdue, said in press materials for the mission, according to Reuters.



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