Purdue University has organized what it calls its most ambitious search yet for Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E. A 15-member team from the university and the Archeological Legacy Institute plans to leave Honolulu on 4 November, spend more than two weeks on Nikumaroro Atoll, and return on 21 November. The target is the “Taria Object,” a shape noticed in 2015 satellite images that resembles an aircraft fuselage and tail; divers and sub-surface scanners will probe the lagoon for metallic debris.
Interest intensified after 1938 aerial photos showed an anomaly on the atoll and Purdue researchers reviewed underwater footage indicating what they called very strong evidence of wreckage, reported the New York Post.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” said Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archeological Legacy Institute, according to the Mirror. He maintains that Nikumaroro, once known as Gardner Island, was the last stop for Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan, a position supported by data from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.
Steve Schultz, Purdue’s senior vice president and general counsel, said the university felt compelled to pursue the lead. “We feel we owe it to her legacy, which remains so strong at Purdue, to try to find a way to bring it home,” he told the Mirror.
The team noted earlier letdowns. A sonar image released in early 2024 by deep-sea explorer Tony Romero seemed to outline a plane 5,000 m down but proved to be a rock formation, and a previous sonar contact near Nikumaroro was only reef.
Earhart vanished on 2 July 1937 after departing Lae, Papua New Guinea, for Howland Island. Despite a 16-day U.S. Navy and Coast Guard search, no trace emerged, and she was declared dead on 5 January 1939. The Kansas-born aviator had already become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. She joined Purdue in 1935 as an adviser on aeronautics and careers for women, and the university helped fund the Electra used in her world-flight attempt.
Competing theories persist. Some researchers believe the Electra ran out of fuel and plunged into the ocean; others cite letters from Earhart’s mother suggesting a landing on Nikumaroro. Pettigrew points to shoe fragments and reported post-loss radio signals as evidence favoring the atoll.
Last month former U.S. president Donald Trump pledged to declassify any remaining government files on Earhart’s flight, the New York Post said.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.