Purdue University is sending a new expedition this week to survey an area around Nikumaroro Island in the long search for Amelia Earhart’s missing plane. The move adds a fresh field test to a mystery that has held for 87 years, even as researchers keep returning to the same unanswered question: where did Earhart and Fred Noonan go after they vanished?
Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, while trying to become the first woman to fly around the world. By the time she and Noonan left Lae, New Guinea, her Lockheed 10E Electra had already covered 22,000 miles, and she had about 7,000 miles left to go before completing the flight. The next leg was expected to take 18 hours to Howland Island, a strip of land just 2 miles long and less than 2 miles across, with the US Coast Guard vessel Itasca waiting offshore with fuel.
What made that final approach so difficult is now part of the legend. Earhart’s Electra was carrying the maximum 1,150 gallons of fuel, and the passenger seats had been removed to make room for the extra tanks. Radio messages from the plane showed the crew struggling to find the island, with Earhart reporting, “We must be on you, but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.” In a later transmission, she said, “We are on the line of position 157-337. Will repeat message. We will repeat this message on 6210 kilocycles. Wait. Listening on 6210 kilocycles. We are running north and south.”
The new Purdue University effort matters because it is trying to answer a question that has resisted a dozen different answers. The United States staged an unprecedented search for the crew and the plane, covering an area around the size of Texas, and still the location of Earhart’s lost aircraft remains unknown. That is why every new expedition carries weight: not because the mystery has changed, but because the evidence has never fully gone away.
One reason the latest search has drawn attention is a satellite image that appears to show an unusual object in the survey area, enough to make researchers wonder whether it could be tied to her plane. But a shape in an image is not a conclusion, and the expedition this week is meant to do the hard work that pixels cannot: look at the ground, measure what is there and see whether the object is something ordinary or something that belongs to Earhart’s last flight.
If the survey finds nothing, it will join the long list of searches that came up short. If it finds something that fits, it could shift one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries toward an answer. For now, the story is still where it has been since 1937, waiting on the ground, waiting in the water and waiting for someone to prove that the plane was really there.
