Nearly 90 years after celebrated American aviator Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific, a veteran pilot believes he may have located her Lockheed 10-E Electra on satellite imagery.
Captain Justin Myers, a commercial airline captain with nearly 25 years of flying experience (since around 2000, including holiday package tours), made the discovery on Nikumaroro, a remote coral atoll in Kiribati located between Hawaii and Fiji.
The uninhabited island has come up in theories before as a possible spot where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan went down.
But Myers wasn’t hunting for clues or deliberately seeking out the plane to begin with. After watching a documentary about their failed 1937 round-the-world flight, curiosity about Nikumaroro led him to Google Earth.
Taking a pilot’s perspective, he tried to imagine their situation: “As a pilot, I thought to myself, if I was in Amelia’s position trying to find a needle in a hay stack low on fuel and to be honest if we were in her position no doubt using some choice language, where would I force land my Lockheed Electra 10E?” Myers wrote in a blog post.
On a flat stretch of the island, he spotted a dark object measuring 39 feet long, the same length as Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. He continued to scan the area and identified what appeared to be more debris, including what looked like the engine.
Myers is careful not to overstate his discovery: “The bottom line is from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft. What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra,” Myers told Popular Mechanics.
Other people have flagged Nikumaroro too. Purdue researchers said last year that a 1938 aerial photo was “very strong” evidence a different object on the island, the “Taraia Object,” could be her plane. It sits underwater in a lagoon. The photo was taken about a year after she vanished.
Whatever the case may be, only an actual investigation into the spot and the object in question would prove how much of this tracks.
Sources: aircrashsites, Popular Mechanics, GlobeNewswire, New York Post