Where's Amelia Earhart's Plane?

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (or TIGHAR) suspects that Earhart's Lockheed Electra landed on a reef off the uninhabited coral atoll formerly known as Gardner Island and stayed there for several days before waves washed the aircraft over the reef's edge -- perhaps enough time for the aviator and her navigator to have sent out radio distress calls.

The expedition plans to deploy ship sonar and two robot submersibles to search the slope of the underwater reef for any aircraft parts.

"We will not be recovering anything on this trip," said Richard Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR. "The objective is to get imagery and photographs of what's there."

The expedition is scheduled to set out aboard the Hawaiian research vessel "Ka'Imikai-o-Kanaloa" from Honolulu on July 2 -- the 75th anniversary of Earhart's disappearance. Its underwater robots are capable of searching with sonar and taking black-and-white photos down to a depth of almost 5,000 feet, as well as checking out sonar targets with high-definition video down to a depth of 3,300 feet.

Related at Discovery News: Photos of Amelia Earhart

An underwater search

An eight-day journey to Nikumaroro (the former Gardner Island) will allow TIGHAR to search the underwater reef slope for approximately 10 days between July 9 and July 19. Success could pave the way for a later expedition to actually recover pieces of Earhart's aircraft.

"If there's wreckage there that can be recovered, we need to know what it is, how big it is, what it looks like, and what it's made of so we can prepare a recovery expedition that has equipment to raise whatever's there," Gillespie told InnovationNewsDaily. "And, equally as important, to conserve it."

The first step in the search relies upon the surface ship's multi-beam sonar -- a device capable of mapping the seafloor at depths of almost seven miles. An autonomous underwater vehicle called Bluefin-21 made by Bluefin Robotics -- operated by Phoenix International Holdings Inc. -- can roam the shallows of the underwater reef slope as a programmed drone to help with the sonar mapping.

Related at Discovery News: Jars Hint at Amelia Earhart as Castaway

A second step would rely more upon the torpedo-shaped Bluefin-21 made by Bluefin Robotics to do a more focused search with its side-scan sonar while taking black-and-white pictures. The crew could recover the collected data, swap out the batteries and reprogram the robot between each six-hour search session.

The third step would try to take an up-close look at suspected aircraft parts with a high-definition video camera -- a job for the remote operated vehicle  tethered to the surface ship and controlled by a human operator. The TRV 005 robot made by Submersible Systems Inc. even has manipulator arms to move objects around.

Following Earhart's trail

But all the high-tech sonar and robots will only succeed if TIGHAR's hypothesis about Earhart's location proves correct. The group has launched nine expeditions in search of Earhart's lost trail over the past 24 years.

TIGHAR analyzed old radio transmissions originally followed by U.S. Navy and Coast Guard searchers in 1937 to help narrow down the search to Nikumaroro. It also dug up old paperwork from a British colonial physician who described human bones recovered from the island -- bones that belonged to a woman fitting Amelia Earhart's profile, according to modern analysis.

Several expeditions uncovered items that could have belonged to Earhart, along with signs of survival living. Such items include a jar that likely contained Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment (Earhart was known for disliking her freckles), a hand lotion bottle marketed to women in the 1930s, and a bone-handled knife matching the description of a knife listed in Earhart's aircraft inventory.

Related at Discovery News: Earhart's Anti-Freckle Cream Possibly Found

The expeditions also found airplane parts in the ghost village left behind by Pacific Islanders who temporarily settled on Nikumaroro several years after Earhart's disappearance. An old woman living in Fiji -- who lived as a young girl on the island -- pointed to parts of the island where people had found airplane parts.

One of those locations matched a big clue -- an object sticking out of the water in a British expedition photograph taken just months after Earhart's disappearance. Analysis by both TIGHAR and U.S. State Department experts suggested that the object fit the profile of Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft landing gear.

Related at Discovery News: Credible Earhart Signals Were Ignored

Making it all possible

Turning decades of sleuthing into a history-making payoff has required lots of outside help from the U.S. State Department and private companies. For instance, global delivery company FedEx has helped move 27,500 pounds of the expedition's robots and equipment by truck, ship and plane from the continental U.S. to Hawaii.

The robots and equipment will have moved about 22,000 miles by the end of the round trip -- just shy of the distance covered by Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan before they vanished in their attempt to fly around the world.

TIGHAR has raised almost all of the $2.2 million needed to make the expedition possible, but Gillespie vowed to go ahead with the full mission regardless. 

He pointed to Earhart as his inspiration -- the aviator had to scramble for funding to repair her aircraft after it crashed during a first attempt to fly around the world.

"Future is mortgaged, but what else are futures for?" Earhart wired in a telegraph message.

For photos and explanations of evidence found so far, keep clicking.

This broken green glass bottle has a melted bottom and was found in a fire feature. It matches a three-ounce container of "St. Joseph Nerve and Bone Family Liniment." The bottle design was patented on May 30, 1933.

Coding embossed into the bottom of this three-ounce bottle reveals that it was made by Owens Illinois Glass. Co. at their Bridgeton, NJ plant in 1933.

Laboratory analysis of remnants of the contents show a close match to Campana Italian Balm, a hand lotion made in Batavia, Ill. that was popular with American women in the 1930s.

These are three of five fragments that form a small jar of an "ointment pot." It is among the most intriguing finds at the island site.

When reassembled, the fragments make up a nearly complete jar identical to the style used by Dr. C. H Berry's Freckle Ointment, a concoction marketed in the early 20th century that was supposed to make freckles fade (it was 11 percent mercury). 

Earhart is known to have been concerned about her freckles.

Although the style of the jar is the same used by Dr. Berry's ointment, the artifact found is clear glass while all of the examples of freckle cream the TIGHAR researchers have been able to find are milky white or opal glass. They have also been unable to match the exact size of the artifact jar to a known jar of Dr. Berry's product. 

The reassembled artifact jar does, however, fit nicely in a box in which anti-freckle cream was marketed. The known Dr. Berry jars do not.

"So we know there was a jar of Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment of the same size as the artifact jar, but we don't know whether it was clear glass," Ric Gillespie, TIGHAR's executive director, told Discovery News.